The impact the ray-traced lighting has on the experience can be dramatic, especially in the darkest confines of the game. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition improves on the original visuals on all counts. The new 'Normal' setting is your best bet for a low-end RTX 20-series card as that renders the ray-traced lighting effects at a much lower resolution than your standard game res, and as such will gift you a decent chunk of extra performance if you're struggling at either the 'High' or 'Ultra' ray tracing settings. If you're not getting the fps numbers you deserve after playing with the DLSS settings, then your next port of call should be the ray tracing settings themselves. The 'Ultra Performance' mode gives the biggest increase, but if you're playing at 1080p then give that a miss as it really muddies the visuals, and I personally don't think it's worth the sacrifice on such a good-looking game as Metro Exodus is now. Even the top-end 'Quality' setting will deliver higher frame rates than the DLSS 1.0 implementation of the original game, and going for 'Performance' will make a huge difference to your overall frame rate without hugely impacting fidelity. If you're rocking an Nvidia GPU then absolutely your first recourse to discovering extra frame rate performance should be the DLSS options. We were quite happily playing on 'Ultra' at 4K with an RTX 3060 Ti on our mid-range rig with the 'Performance' DLSS setting, and that claims to need an RTX 3080 for 4K at 30 fps. The base Quality setting is a good starting point for straight performance, but the magic DLSS bullet can make a big difference if you're on the green team. At 1080p you're rendering at such a low resolution the AI upsampling doesn't have as much to work with and you do get some noise in the most detailed areas of a scene, and shimmering around fine lines, such as the trees. Though, if I'm honest, I'd probably steer clear of the 'Ultra performance' mode at the lower resolutions. Use that as a jumping off point and you can pick up anywhere from 20 to nearly 50 fps higher performance with the different DLSS settings. Even at the least aggressive, most aesthetically pleasing end of the preset spectrum-'DLSS Quality'-you're still getting higher frame rates than the original version could offer, and with a far higher fidelity too.

The main takeaway of our testing is that regardless of what else you do with the in-game settings you absolutely have to enable DLSS if your GPU is capable. The original game employed DLSS 1.0 to give RT gamers a bump on their frame rates, but as a first-gen implementation of the tech it sometimes delivered a rather muddy, blurry image.ĭLSS 2.0 is a whole new game of balls, however, works even at 1080p, and now comes with four different presets as opposed to just on/off. (Image credit: 4A Games) Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition DLSS performanceĪs a card carrying member of the DLSS 2.0 club, the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition gets access to the latest and greatest version of Nvidia's ever-impressive super sampling feature. So it's down to the MSI RTX 3060 Ti Ventus 2x and MSI RTX 3080 Gaming X Trio to give us a proper bead on Metro's new gaming chops. That's because our representative budget machine, the Arctic Stealth (it's white and eschews RGB), is only running an MSI GTX 1650 Super Gaming X, and with the best will in the world that's no ray tracing GPU. We've only tested Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition on the new mid-range and high-end PC Gamer test rigs, that's Mellow Yellow and Hot Pink, to give them their full titles. But how does this enhanced edition perform compared with the original incarnation, and what are the best settings to tweak if you want to boost performance? The original was, which is why we still use it to test the latest GPUs. As our partner for these detailed performance analyses, MSI provided the hardware we needed to test Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition on different PC gaming hardware.Īs one of the first big names to release with ray tracing capable hardware as a minimum requirement-even though it's essentially a free upgrade for a two year-old game-Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is going to be demanding on your hardware.

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