GeForce RTX Performance And IQ In Metro Exodus Explored Post Patch
by
Shannon Robb
—
Tuesday, March 05, 2019, 01:31 PM EDT
Metro Exodus - 4K Performance With RTX And DLSS
We have seen the difference RTX and DLSS make as far as image quality, or more aptly immersion perhaps, now lets see how RTX impacts performance.
First up is the highest quality setting with Extreme. Here we see as would be expected, at 4K resolution that the 2080 Ti rules the roost. The fact that you can enable DLSS without RTX means you can get a bump in frame rate compared to standard fully-rasterized output. The 2080 Ti, 2080 and 2070 all allow DLSS without RTX enabled at 4K but for some reason the RTX 2060 does not. As we discussed in the previous section, NVIDIA offers DLSS in areas where the GPU is under heavy load and thus lower frame rates, which the 2060 definitely is. However, there is a caveat in that NVIDIA enables DLSS when performance can improve and not be a detriment. We can only assume that since the GeForce RTX 2060 was never destined to be a 4K GPU, it simply might not have the Tensor core muscle to push the extra DLSS loads when driving 4K resolution.
On the highest settings, we see that Metro Exodus indeed could be the new Crysis, since even the mighty GeForce RTX 2080 Ti cannot deliver 60 FPS with RTX disabled and DLSS at play. Here NVIDIA's top consumer GPU runs at almost 50 FPS on average. Now do keep in mind that the 1% lows sit at 32.5 FPS, which is quite good and means that you should not observe significant rendering issues. Indeed the game was found to be readily playable at this setting. Do keep in mind we are running on an overclocked Intel Core i9-9900K, so a lower clock or spec CPU may bottleneck a high-end GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPU, therefore again, your mileage may vary.
Moving down to 4K with Ultra quality settings, we see that across the board the numbers jump up a bit. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti without RTX and with DLSS enabled offers the best performance approaching 60fps on average. One thing to note here is that RTX High settings actually give you a positive performance bump over RTX off, when DLSS is enabled. Being that you do get a tangible benefit in the lighting, shading and overall atmosphere, we could see RTX High and DLSS working together to deliver an excellent experience. Once again the GeForce RTX 2060 is simply not even in the ballpark at 4K, and well truth be told, the 2060 and 2070 should really not be used for 4K in this game title and are a much better fit for 1440p or 1080p gaming.
Lastly, we have the High quality tests at 4K and we see the GeForce RTX 2080 start to approach the higher frame rate territory with the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Here, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 perform similarly at the top of the chart, possibly due to some other type of overhead in the game or general lack of optimization. Finally, GeForce RTX 2070 approaches playable frame rates (barely) with RTX and DLSS off and RTX 2060 users still need not apply, unfortunately.
Now we know how the upper echelon performs at ultra high resolution, let's explore the more mainstream settings and resolutions.
