In Metro 2033, DirectX 11 has a real impact on gameplay. Thanks to hardware Tessellation, the characters look great, and it is more easily noticeable than the lack of benefits we saw with Aliens vs. Predator. However, it still isn’t perfect, and we think a lot of gamers will still be hard pressed to tell differences during fast gameplay action. The effects are more noticeable than AvP, but Tessellation is still very much a subtle visual effect in this game since it is limited to just one object, characters. We still haven’t been "Wowed" by Tesellation in any game yet. Thankfully, in terms of performance, Tessellation is not overly degrading to performance. There is a hit, but it isn’t huge.

Advanced Depth of Field on the other hand is the exact opposite on the performance front. We feel that Advanced Depth of Field looks absolutely fantastic, but for the performance hit it takes, we expected a lot more. In many cases, Advanced DoF cut our framerate in half, and the graphical payoff was simply not there on a lot of closer objects. We would definitely recommend enabling Tessellation if your hardware supports it, but leave Advanced DoF turned off. By disabling Advanced DoF you will be able to increase other in-game settings that will affect the gameplay experience more.

We were somewhat underwhelmed by DX11’s graphical contribution to Aliens vs. Predator, but we certainly appreciated the performance boost we got with the new API’s performance optimizations. In Metro 2033, we experienced slightly diminished performance compared to DX9 when running in DX10 and DX11, and this was consistent on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. However, we did find that on AMD GPUs, enabling DX11 provided higher framerates than DX10. On the NVIDIA side, we saw narrow scaling between APIs, indicating possibly better optimizations there. As time progresses, perhaps AMD will better optimize performance in this game with future driver updates.

Metro 2033 is a competent survival shooter with some stout hardware requirements. With all of the high-end graphics features enabled, you will need a seriously powerful video card to play at a high resolution. The Radeon HD 5870 can do it right now, and when NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 hit the shelves those cards will be better equipped for Metro 2033. Perhaps unsurprisingly, NVIDIA’s new DirectX 11 GPUs will give you the best performance and gameplay experience in Metro 2033.