Metro Exodus and Battlefield V DLSS – A Performance Boost With Compromises

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

Metro Exodus is available now on the Epic Game Store for £49.99. Battlefield V is available on the Origin Store for £54.99 or on Original Access Premier for £14.99 a month.

Overview

The results of DLSS are a double-edged sword for me, and I’m not alone, judging what I’ve seen from other tech media around the web. While it does indeed improve performance, it does come at a cost to the visual quality of the game. Now, for me personally, I think it’s a little too blurry on Battlefield V, even at 4K. Furthermore, while others report that 4K DLSS on Metro is too blurry, I find it tolerable and I suspect there may be other factors giving varying results for others. You monitor configuration, other graphics settings, and even your own eyesight could all contribute here.

Would I Use DLSS?

Well if I’m completely honest, no I wouldn’t. It’s a great feature that works well for what it is, but it needs some more updates before it really comes into its own and so far, those updates are rolling out steadily too. Right now, I am playing Battlefield V and Metro Exodus on the RTX 2080. Rather than enable DLSS I find it’s easier to just dial back the graphics settings. I’m playing Metro at 4K with mostly high settings, and high RT and getting around 45 FPS most of the time, with dips to 30 FPS. I’m not a competitive gamer, and for the single player experience, I’d rather have the fancy visuals than drop to 1440p to get 60 FPS.

For Battlefield V I do play at 1440p with Ultra graphics and Ultra RT, and I find the performance to be good enough for me. I don’t really play online much, and when I do, it’s casually not competitively. Turning DLSS on does give me higher performance, but at a reduced visual quality that just doesn’t suit my needs, at least not just yet.

Should I Use DLSS?

Well, that’s very subjective, and again it does improve performance. However, you can get similar performance boosting results by dropping a games resolution or rendering scale by about 30%. Furthermore, you’ll often find the visuals to be sharper than they are with DLSS enabled.

The Future?

DLSS is a learning technology, and Nvidia are always improving it. There’s no reason to see why they can’t improve on the technology greatly in the coming weeks and months and I’m sure we’ll have updates soon. Just look at Battlefield V, when we first tested DXR, performance sucked pretty bad. With the first round of updates, some Ray Tracing scenes FPS improved by up to 80%. We expect to see big updates for both games, both for RT performance and DLSS. I know some (or many) are a bit torn up about the performance, but I’m going to put my bet on things getting a lot better very soon.