Yeah lets sell up because of some crappy poorly optimized console port, and no the 480 won't play it much better than the 5870, and you can quote me on that when they come out.
Its a PC game isn't it, ported to consoles? Likewise, its not poorly coded, it looks basically entirely the same, I mean almost exactly in DX11 as dx10, and in dx11 with or without tesselation on.
Turn tesselation and DOF off, DOF is an awful effect anyway, its just not realistic, it started off, like motion blur, as a cheap way to reduce the load for consoles basically, but turned into a "so realistic lets make it a huge feature turd" thing that takes power. Unfortunately yes things on our periphery aren't in exact focus, but we as humans can move the direction of our gaze without moving your head. You can flick left/right without moving your head, DOF doesn't allow this, its a daft effect thats simply not compatible with "realism" in games.
Disable DOF and tesselation for no reduction in quality, actually an increase in quality without DOF(which does things like blur the mission goals because its on the edge of the screen, entirely stupidly) and a 5870 can easily give 40ish fps average, which like Crysis is pretty smooth in this game.
What has been poorly optimised, is the inclusion of tesselation, likely very specifically included in a manner that upsets ATi cards and makes the Fermi very happy, considering its a Fermi launch title. Unfortunately it really doesn't do anything at all except kill performance.
Its also a pretty damn good looking title and will probably be amongst the hardest to run titles in the next several months, and considering with no IQ loss you can run it at full settings with AA, max AF and looking great with more than smooth framerate, the card is not obsolete.
I'm very sure Fermi will have better framerates in Metro with DOF/Tesselation on, however, in doing so it won't offer superior IQ, just bragging rights, with those two options disabled, Fermi will be not much faster than a 5870.
Anyway, tesselation in this game is very much like HDR in Stalker, a new effect overused for very little useful increase in IQ< though it did increase IQ and wasn't as badly implemented as tess is in Metro. Metro's implementation seems to be nothing more than probably purposefully trying to criple AMD cards. You can normally quite easily add a level of anything in a game that can harm performance, the problem is, if its for a massive increase in IQ, thats one thing, it might even be worthwhile. Like some of Crysis's highest effects did improve IQ even if the best cards couldn't run it smoothly.
But when that performance destroying effect really doesn't improve IQ, well, some people would argue, rightly or wrongly, that its a stunt just to hurt a certain type of card, done by a company who has often been happy to do so.
But its easy, judge for yourself, play in dx11 with and without DOF/tesselation, draw your own conclusions, is it more than smooth enough without them and does it look almost identical? DOF really is a no brainer, its a stupid stupid effect that for me sucks, I mean really sucks, it decreases IQ trying to mimic peripheral vision, but theres limitations to what you can mimic in a game and until you have a screen with eye movement tracking that can adjust DOF on the fly so as you look left without moving the mouse/crosshair, and it will automatically bring the left area into focus, then its simply an effect that does not work, at all. That itself takes performance from a rather solid 45fps for me, to something like 25fps, add in tesselation and its down to lows of 12fps with an average somewhere around 15-20fps, its awful. Turn both off, fantastically smooth, one of the best looking games around, looks better than with DOF on, and looks no different without Tesselation.
EDIT:- BTW< DOF with eye movement tracking with focus changing across say eyefinity, 3 screens where focus follows your eye and not the crosshair, would be just about the single most awesome thing to happen in gaming
We're several years away from that kind of thing though.
