Hey gurus. Been playing metro. Using the DX10 settings, everything basically on highest settings. Playing at 1920x1200 res. The game is definately playable but just not smooth. I'm using rivatuner to monitor. FPS seem to be fine. Usually at ~45, never dipping below ~35, and often reaching 60-70. My physical mem usage doesn't exceed 2 Gb outta my total 4Gb. Pagefile also doesn't reach my 4 Gb set on my system HDD. CPU: one core is 80-90% and the other is 50-60%. So neither core is maxing out. Is it odd, though, that one is stressed so much more than the other? Couldn't monitor my Vid memory with riva tuner but as I have 1Gb x2 I would imagine that it's not that. I have the feeling that smokey scenes are present when I feel the most straining. If I'm not maxing out anything, why aren't I experiencing smooth gameplay? Could anyone offer a solution or advice? BTW, windows 7 64bit. Using the 10.3a drivers withe the profile application installed. (drivers were installed after having swept and removed all remnants of previous ones). In CCC I have everything set to appplications settings, AI is on advanced, V-sync is off, mipmap is on high quality. I don't have SDK stream installed. THX
FPS is fine, it's SP game so ping cant be the problem... It does sound like microstuttering problem, which it caused by using 2 or more gpu's. Cant be fixed (if it's microtuttering). You can check if this is the reason, drop settings down a bit so you get better fps all the time and see if it helps. About vram, you have 1gb/each gpu. Both gpu's need to have same data in both vram's, so it works the same with single 1gb gpu.
even though it runs perfect here and smooth as butter, no stutter or microstutters, no lag, no problems.
As I know it's sort of like this. This will use a few fancier graphic effects and at that resolution you'll hit a GPU limitation, add to that that there is no proper driver optimizations for this title which is especially important for Crossfire (Scaling across both GPU's.) and you have a little issue, hopefully a later hotfix, Catalyst Profile Application update or maybe the full 10.4 drivers will improve this. (Also the 4870 X2 uses 2GB RAM but it's mirrored and it's at 1 GB per GPU.) This is framerate fluctuation, a constant 30 is normally seen as smoother than 40 - 60 up and down by the human eye or mind or how to describe it. (Also Metro is a 32-bit application so it can only use 2GB of RAM, bit more if it was to be unlocked but it's normally not required unless it actually hits this limit as it will move to the swap-file which will bottleneck - as it's called - the hard driver instead and increase stuttering and further framerate fluctuation.) Metro is said to scale well across several GPU's as a dual GPU the primary core will try to handle everything and depending on how it's threaded the secondary core will be given data to offload the other, this also goes for multi-GPU solutions and systems like "hyper threading" which returns in the i5/i7 CPU models. (You might get some stuttering depending on how much the processor has to handle, probably only during really heavy scenes however, it's mostly about the GPU for this game as the environments and areas in general are fairly small but larger fights and other cpu calculation tasks like physics could be a limitation.) I'd recommend the 10.3b drivers just to be up to date but there's no specific tweaks for any newer games than what's in the display drivers, might have a few generic improvements to performance though but you won't get any larger gains, Stream SDK is for OpenCL acceleration and at the moment that's only for applications like say movie encoding or file compression and so on, might be used in games as well like say a generic physics acceleration but it would have to be developed and supported by say Havok or PhysX/CUDA first. AI on advanced will try to force AFR crossfire rendering and this might improve performance (But maybe a drop in visual quality for advanced app profile tweaks being in effect.), app controlled AF and AA will help as well as brute forcing will "sample" the entire scene and not just what the game defines though it might look a bit worse. (Metro uses it's own AA shader method and also has a AAA mode on higher settings to use a form of software based light AA sampler, unsure how AF is used.) I hope this helps expain it somewhat, the game is very demanding and a 4870 even in Crossfire (X2 or similar.) won't be able to handle all of it, CPU and RAM is probably doing alright however a quad core or similar might even it out a bit but don't expect any major improvements in this game from it. I suppose as a comparison a 5890 won't always hit 60 FPS in this game based on what I've seen taking that resolution as the base even without using AA. (Sort of a 5850 Crossfire card but with some specs from the faster 5870 variation for various reasons, that and Crossfire scaling could be improved a bit more.)
Runs very well on the 4890 with a quad core CPU at 1680x1050. Maybe try dropping the resolution and see how it runs set to Very High, DX10 and 1680x1050. I also heard that enabling Vsnyc and Triple Buffering improves the frame rate, but the game is D3D so you will need to use something like Tray Tools or Rivatuner to enable Triple Buffering.
Dont wanna lower res on my 26" screen. Well, I dropped settings to high and medium and there is some improvement albeit at the expence of eye candy. There is still stutter. So this def is not only graphic settings. Maybe mutli GPU core issues. Guess I'll have to wait for a patch or driver optmization. Hopefully I'll still have some of the game left to play cuz once started, it's hard to put down.
I'm finding Metro not to be too smooth either, even when fps are in the 40's, although in the places it gets over 60fps it smooths out a lot. I'm hoping new drivers will help.
