Metro Exodus Ray Tracing Tested – A New ‘Can It Run Crysis’

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

Metro Exodus is available to pre-order on Epic Games Store. When this feature is published, the game should be available for pre-load too, but won’t be playable till Friday 15th February.  At the time of writing the Standard Edition was priced at £49.99 and the Gold Edition was £69.99. I would like to point out this article is not a paid promotion in any way, and prices are just being provided for your convenience.

Overview

So there we have it, the new GPU crushing render weapon that is Metro Exodus. Few games punish graphics cards quite as much as this game did. Keep in mind that maxing this game out on a flagship i9-9900K with a 2080 Ti with all the bells and whistles turned on resulted in around 30 FPS. People are going to be benchmarking this game for a few years under the phrase “Can It Run Exodus” and I don’t blame them. This is a tough game to max out, but do you really need to?

Ultra Vs Whatever

Well, when it comes to this game I would honestly say that “Medium” is or even “High” for fast PCs is the target you want to reach for right now. The graphics even at those settings are far superior to what you’ll see on the console releases of the game, that’s for sure. The graphics are up there with the best in terms of fidelity. As with any game these days, Ultra and even more so the Extreme setting offer diminishing returns. Minor improvements in fidelity at an exponentially higher rendering cost. Why did 4A Games bother then? Well, they’re future proofing their game for one thing. As GPUs improve over the next few years, their engine will come into its own and stay relevant. Just because you can’t really max it now, doesn’t mean it’s bad, or going to look bad, because it doesn’t.

Ray Tracing

I’m quite happy with the figures we got today, and the extensive graphics options this game provides means you can easily tailor the performance quite extensively. As we ran through various presets, I don’t think the visuals changed too drastically, despite the huge performance benefits/losses. I’d suggest sticking the game on Medium, turn on Ray Tracing, and then if you have frames to spare, start turning up the graphics options that matter to you most until you find a balance. This is often more productive than going to Ultra/Extreme and working backwards. At Ultra 1440p with Ultra RT we saw around 60 FPS from all three RTX cards, which is impressive.

Why Didn’t You Test DLSS?

Well, we both did and we didn’t. There’s a glitch in the benchmark that won’t trigger DLSS. However, it worked while playing the game. The figures we saw in the game were positive, but since we saw bugs in the benchmark, I’m hesitant to believe that things are working well elsewhere. DLSS has the power to practically double the frame rate at 4K. When we’re seeing 30 FPS at 4K Ultra with Ultra RT, then it doesn’t take a genius to see that could become 60 FPS. We’ve been told that a patch is on the way for this bug and that improvement updates for RT and DLSS are expected on the launch day. Either via a patch or straight out of the gate, we’re unsure, but release day is the mark either way. With DLSS hitting Battlefield V this week too, I think it’s safer we revisit both games together, and we’ll bring you a DLSS specific feature for both games by the end of the week. Stay tuned for that one, as if you have doubts about the performance today, this could and should be the thing that changes everything.

I’m sure 4A games and Nvidia would like to have seen these results from us today. However, we want our tests to be consistent, and not irrelevant within a few days. Let’s wait, and do this right.

The Future

When Battlefield V launched, RT performance sucked. Within a week or two, a patch was released that saw some benchmarks improve frame rates with RT by around 80%. I have every expectation we’ll see similar improvements from 4A Games and Nvidia with updated drivers. We’re on a pre-release game, beta drivers, and more here. Good things come to those who wait. Everyone ripped on RT with BFV it seemed, while we were rightfully hopefully for an update. I’ll stick to my guns this time too, Metro Exodus still has a lot more performance to give.

4K Video Testing