Metro Exodus PC Performance Review – RTX On!

Metro Exodus PC Performance Review - RTX On!

Introduction  

The Metro series has long been known for its graphical prowess, especially on PC. Every iteration of the series has been able to push the hardware of their time to their limits, offering graphical features that are designed for graphics cards from a future era. 

4A Games prides themselves on their game engine, 4A engine, which was built in-house by many of the minds that created S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s infamous X-Ray engine. Today, the engine offers spectacular visuals on both PC and console hardware, showcasing an incredible level of scalability, particularly on PC. 

Today, we will be talking about Metro Exodus, focusing on the game’s graphics, performance and the many technical achievements which underpin 4A’s latest game. 

On the technical side we have DirectX 12 support, DXR (DirectX Raytracing) powered Global Illumination, Nvidia’s AI-driven DLSS tech and a variety of graphical options that are sure to take even today’s highest-end gaming PCs to their knees. 

While this review is primarily about the PC performance of Metro Exodus, we will note that the game has taken the series in a whole new direction, bringing series protagonist Artyom out of the Metro and onto a journey that takes players across four seasons and a wide range of climates and locations.

Many mission areas also feature an incredibly open map design, providing a level of freedom that’s almost akin to the original Crysis, offering players more options when moving through the game’s story. Side missions and other objectives will give players more than enough reason to enjoy the game’s varied landscapes and the uniquely Metro atmosphere that every title in the series has offered in spades. 

In this Review

There is a lot of ground to cover with this review, but you can expect us to cover pretty much everything you need to know about Metro Exodus’ PC version.

On the CPU-side we will be testing the game on a variety of processors/core/thread counts, testing the game’s DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 modes, running through most of the game’s graphical options on both a graphical and performance level and benchmarking the game over a total of nine graphics cards. 

Thanks to the addition of Nvidia’s RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2060 graphics cards to our GPU lineup we also have the ability to test Metro Exodus’ implementation of Ray Traced Global Illumination and Nvidia’s DLSS technology. Will 4A’s use of Ray Tracing showcase the way forward for PC graphics, or will it be another performance hog?Â