ASUS ENGTX570 DirectCU II Video Card Review

For our maximum torture test we fired up Metro 2033 and started at the same checkpoint for all the cards. The scene has dozens of aliens running around and mauling you while using a multi-threated 4A DirectX 11 engine to make it look amazing. The game uses volumetric fog, film grain effects, object blur, sub-surface scattering, HDR tone mapping, and parallax mapping to provide amazing visuals . Even though this benchmark makes heavy use of tessellation for greater performance it really pushes even the top of the line graphic cards to achieve playable frame rates with all the eye candy turned up.

Of course for our testing we did turn up all the settings to see how the ASUS card would handle it at both 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1200 resolutions.

In this benchmark the ASUS GTX 570 DirectCU falls behind the ATI 6970 and Classified. We were surprised by the 44% and 20% delta between this card and the Classified and could have been the section we were playing. Of course 16 FPS is not playable and had noticeable lag at the highest resolution. You would have to consider either significant overclocking, SLI, or moving up to a GTX 580 or GTX 590 if you wanted to try and play at 2560 x 1600 and keep the setting this high.