XFX HD 6850 Black Edition Review

Testing:

Part first person shooter, part survival horror, Metro 2033 is based on the novel of the same name, written by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. You play as Artyom in a post-apocalyptic Moscow, where you'll spend most of your time traversing the metro system, with occasional trips to the surface. Despite the dark atmosphere and bleak future for mankind, the visuals are anything but bleak. Powered by the 4A Engine, with support for DirectX 11, NVIDIA Physx and NVIDIA 3D Vision, the tunnels are extremely varied - in your travels, you'll come across human outposts, bandit settlements, and even half-eaten corpses. Ensuring you feel all the tension, there is no map and no health meter. Get lost without enough gas mask filters and adrenaline shots and you may soon wind up as one of those half-eaten corpses - chewed up by some horrifying manner of irradiated beast that hides in the shadows just waiting for some hapless soul to wander by.

Settings:

• DX 11
• AAA
• 16xAF
• Global settings = High
• Physx = off

Higher = Better

The Black Edition 6850 makes a strong showing in Metro 2033 with playable frame rates all the way up to 1920x1200. If depth of field is turned off in the DX 11 settings, the level of performance rises dramatically for all of the comparison cards tested. These results are pretty impressive for a $210 video card.