GeForce RTX Performance And IQ In Metro Exodus Explored Post Patch
Metro Exodus: The Next GeForce RTX-Enabled Game Is Now Ready For Prime Time
The next installment in the Metro game series is here and for those not familiar, this game franchise is based on author Dmitry Glukhovsky's series of Metro novels that started with Metro 2033 back in 2005. As far as the written lore of the game is concerned, the first installment in the genre was Metro 2033, which was then followed by Metro Last Light (and Last Light Redux) and today we'll be looking at the latest release, Metro Exodus.
Like other releases in the Metro series, Metro Exodus follows a post-apocalyptic story line that takes place in the former Russian Federation, where the world has mostly been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. Your character is Artyom, a young man working with other survivors in the subterranean metro train stations of Russia.
Metro Exodus: Showcasing GeForce RTX Features
Metro Exodus was also a popular launch title for NVIDIA during its GeForce RTX unveil all the way back in August, over 6 months ago. It took this long to get Metro Exodus out the door, with a few hiccups along the way, but now NVIDIA RTX-powered features like real-time ray tracing and DLSS are finally ready to go.
Much like we saw with the launch of Battlefield V, Metro Exodus had its own share of issues with regards to RTX implementation and performance trade-offs. The difference is that, unlike Battlefield V where we saw the use of RTX for ray-traced, screen-space reflections, Metro uses RTX for global illumination and also enables DLSS. DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, employs the onboard Tensor cores in all GeForce RTX cards to do complex calculations that are generated by NVIDIA's deep learning supercomputers. The algorithm compares its rendered output against extremely high quality super-sampled anti-aliased (AA) images as its final render goal. The end result gives you much better performance by enabling your GPU to produce a high quality image without the need for traditional AA workloads. NVIDIA's DLSS-rendered game engine frames are targeted to look as good as a high quality, traditional AA-rendered image.
A Bumpy Start For Metro Exodus With RTX But A Patch Saves The Day
Unfortunately with Metro Exodus, it has been a struggle to say the least, as the internet already had pitchforks out upon launch of the game. Metro Exodus was picked apart by pretty much everyone for poor image quality with its DLSS implementation. Also, there were major issues with the performance hit levied in the game when RTX features were enabled. The game's developer 4A Games and NVIDIA obviously have been hard at work, however. Within a very short time, the team was able to release a massive patch that greatly improves DLSS render quality, along with other various performance tweaks.
Can Metro Exodus let you explore the benefits of RTX in ways Battlefield V hasn't?
Now that you have a brief overview of how the launch of Metro Exodus has evolved, here's what we'll look at on the pages ahead. Today we are looking at Metro Exodus post-patch, examining what RTX brings to the table as far as "IQ" or image quality is concerned, along with looking at performance with various in-game settings. We hope this will be a comprehensive enough demonstration to help illustrate what kind of relative performance you can expect from each RTX card in the stack while playing Metro Exodus on a typical high-end gaming PC.
Will Metro Exodus be the next "but can it play Crysis" ?
Follow along as we test out this new game and game engine with GeForce RTX features both on and off, to determine what's in store for early adopters of NVIDIA's new cutting-edge graphics technology...
