There are two major questions in the minds of everyone looking to pick up the PC version of Metro 2033.  The first being what kind of CPU power you need and the second involving the class of GPU needed to see all the bells, whistles and sparkles.  Thankfully there are sites devoted to answering just those questions, saving you from having to buy numerous CPUs and GPUs just to find out yourself; feel free to do so if you wish however.

From Legion Hardware you can see the performance of an AMD Phenom II X4 and X2 models clocked to the same speed as well as seeing an Intel Core-i7 980XE and a Phenom II X4 965 at various clock speeds.  The performance difference is underwhelming, even if it is amusing seeing an older AMD part beat Intel’s newest.  They also show the performance of a wide variety of GPUs.

If that fails to completely convince you then visit X-bit Labs for a second opinion as they’ve run the game through a huge variety of GPUs as well as looking at performance differences as some graphics features are lowered or removed.




“Metro 2033 is a tall order for any system and we see no easy way to optimize your computer for this title. Those with mid-range graphics cards will find that DirectX 9 is not going to help improve performance and therefore might as well stick with DX10. Overclocking your processor is not likely to improve performance either, as we found when testing at frequencies from 2.0GHz through to 3.60GHz.”

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