Metro Exodus RTX on/off comparisons

Techpowerup released they performance review with a lot of great comparison screenshot of Exodus with RTX lighting on vs off. The game looks great with ray tracing but could use a couple extra bounces of light for interiors as they look darker than they should at the moment.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Metro_Exodus/4.html

Enable DLSS if you want that fancy 720p cinematic look, lol.

Sometimes it looks brighter. Sometimes it looks darker. Sometimes colors change. Don't see it.

it looks slightly different, don't see how it looks better

maybe in motion it'd be more obvious

Looking great, but I am still not sure about the RTX performance hit. Hard for me to justify giving up that much performance for more accurate lighting. Especially since I have a 120hz display.

ray tracing is not my thing after all

Realistic lighting on everything is a really big deal.

Not something you'd get from seeing a compressed image or a compressed video.

No use having more accurate lighting on PC when there's no virtually no HDR monitors.

Well there are, just super duper expensive. There also simulated ones though, I have actually tried Dells S2719DM, it'a pretty good considering the price.

Even if there are not that many HDR monitors, you can just hook up your PC to an HDR TV.

Or.............you could just get an HDR TV.

I have the Samsung KS8000 since it is rated to be used as a PC monitor with accurate colors and low latency.

From reading the article, it seems like Ray Traced lighting is a lot less expensive than RT Reflections, which is to be expected.

RT lighting looks SOOOO much better and more realistic.

I would MUCH prefer devs use RT cores for accurate lighting and shadows rather than reflections.

Cube map + Screen space reflections are good enough, lighting and shadows are far more important imo

Seems to me what RTX does is darken the whole room. I mean dev could do that themselves without this RTX crap.

I think RTX does have benefits same with HDR but its very situational. For example I play MHW on a 4K HDR panel and everything is bright and colorful. About near 1000hours later I turn off the HDR and realized the world is more natural and shadows is darker with HDR off. I think RTX does the same.

Which so little people do it's not even worth talking about.......

I'd gladly jump on the RTX train when I don't have to pay a shitload of money for something I probably wont even notice unless I try to. I'm thinking 2024-2025 maybe. Paying extra for RTX sounds insane to me.

I only jumped on RTX 2080 Ti due to being similar Vega II compute features with better raster hardware. Tensor and RTX features are secondary.

It just doesn't make sense with so few bounces and so few light sources. When the games are designed with static lighting models in mind they have to be willing to change the lighting to make scenes playable with rtx

You can always buy RTX 2060 for only $350. Anything GTX 1080 or more, forget about the 2060.

Performance drop is insane because they're not culling the distance at which RTX is being used, Gamers Nexus video on YouTube showed that when in the train interior it was still casting rays outside the train way off in to the distance then then culling it back and keeping it to areas the players can see.

@scatteh316: That might be optimized with further game/driver patches like it was done with BFV (reflections were rendering on the other side of the map), though I doubt if it's possible to "turn off" ray tracing at certain distances (would just result in no lighting at all), most likely they will just drastically lower the number of samples for distant objects.

@Yams1980: DLSS =/= RTX

I'm using 32 inch LG 4K HDR monitor with Free-Sync display port. It works pretty good with GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080 Ti.

The GI implementation is... Hmm. Subpar I guess? Can't expect too much from early tech, tho. Plus, the light bounce could use a little more samples for better effect.

You're not going to see it on those tiny photos. Also, it's a must in motion. It looks freakin' beautiful. Easily graphics king.

@DragonfireXZ95: RTX or not, Exodus is really a looker. Shame I didn't preorder on Steam. I ain't buying it on Epic 'cos they don't have regional pricing :P

I notice pc gamers are praising visuals are not gameplay, no surprise there.

Obviously it looks more realistic and accurate with RTX.

If you mix it with Deep Learning Super Smearing you can pretend to have a brain injury during play.

Ugh, this obsession with ray-tracing is killing me. There are far far better techniques to use real-time than pure ray-tracing..

I'm interested in using it for sound.

Pure ray tracing as a whole puts too much load on the client rendering the scene in my opinion. I'm much more excited for path tracing even for sound. It would make more sense to have online games on servers fully path traced and then have the client end de-noise and the render on the client side. Ray-tracing was always a stop gap technology that was never really truly feasible for home users at the rate cloud computing is expanding.

RTX enabled, RTX 2080 Ti is fine for 4K 60 fps with Freesync fall back.

It's still significantly better than what consoles can produce, so I fail to see your point. We have to start somewhere.

@michaelmikado: Right now, Ray Tracing isn't that good. But it would be easier to develop games with RT tech in mind in the future compared to usual rasterization methods.

The sheer ignorance about Ray Tracing in this thread is angering.

Ray tracing is merely a technique, and does not apply to 1 specific application.

Doing it in REAL TIME is a generational leap over traditional rasterization.

It doesnt "only darken" a scene and it isnt a performance hog overall, it depends on HOW it is implemented.

Ray traced reflections will always be harder on the system and FPS because it uses a lot more rays to reflect the scene, often multiple times.

When used like in metro for global illumination, the performance hit is MUCH less.

Ray Tracing is a gamer changer for lighting and shadows, AI, sound and more.

One thing Ive remembered...... Why cant non RTX gpus do this type of GL.... or something close. Does anyone remember NVIDIA's VXGI real-time global illumination with Maxwell with Apollo 11 landing Demo? There was the ability to bounce multiple light sources the similar way as seen with the train ride.

I have mostly been playing the game with RTX off because I prefer the higher frame rate. I did play for about an hour with RTX on and the lighting is noticeably more natural. It's a shame that the game uses TAA (Terrible Anti Aliasing) that blurs the image so much. They also do not include a sharpening option. So, I have resorted to playing in DX11 where I can apply the adaptive sharpening of ReShade.

Even if RTX did not have a big performance hit, I would probably still play in DX11 with no RTX because I hate blurry visuals. I hope they figure out how to get shader injectors working in DX12 soon because many developers can not be trusted on making the right choices for visual quality. If a game is DX12 only and blurry, you can not correct the developer's mistakes.

It looks like they are going to fix it. 4A devs are aware and are fixing bugs. I think they're going to introduce an option to turn TAA off.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/412020/discussions/0/3658515990045811621/

"21. No option to turn off TAA. At 4k resolution where anti aliasing is not necessary being unable to turn off TAA is a logical flaw."

@DragonfireXZ95: I hope they fix it. I am disappointed in the lack of options and oversights by 4A games. They are supposed to be a good PC developer, but yet they made a lot of avoidable mistakes with the PC release.

Did you try editing the cfg file? I finally found it. It's in the users\username\saved games\metro exodus folder.

There's an option to turn TAA off here: r_taa_enabled 0

You can also adjust FOV here. I made mine 65. r_base_fov 65.

I adjusted the FOV, but I was told that disabling TAA breaks the game and I did not mess with it.

Because the focus on ray-tracing hardware is Marketing BS for a stopgap solution. Its a selling point from GPU manufacturers that's not realistically effective for most home GPU solutions. I'm a firm believer in Path-tracing and cloud solutions for ray and path-tracing. Convincing home users they need to invest in "ray-tracing" GPUs even in the interim is a marketing scam in my opinion.

Absolutely, I'm not against ray-tracing per se. It's that its current pure ray-tracing and the focus on "ray-tracing" hardware being pushed to consumers is rather annoying. It's interesting because I stumbled across a blog about ray-tracing vs path-tracing which really makes me look forward to cloud-based solutions which I think is more realistic than getting ray-tracing hardware in every home. Yes, right now path-tracing isn't real-time solution, but in a short while we would be able to use path-tracing to make decent approximations real-time and get even better fidelity via cloud resources.

https://www.dusterwald.com/2016/07/path-tracing-vs-ray-tracing/

Also interesting enough the same guy recently wrote about his thoughts on RTX which I generally agree with. https://www.dusterwald.com/2019/02/a-graphics-programmers-thoughts-on-rtx/

My personal take away is that by the time devs actually start using ray-tracing real-time path-tracing will be gearing up making the hardware currently being marketed both obsolete and pointless.

I'm a console user but it seems to me like there's a lot of gamers that are somewhat butthurt because they don't have access to the technology. The game looks freaking stunning with rtx. And I imagine things will only get better as developers get more familiar with the tech.

Pretty sure you'll find plenty of other threads praising the Metro series' gameplay. This thread is about the tech aspect, which is no small feat, given how consoles are dragging their feet in that arena and slowing it down for everyone.

PC version uses NVIDIA's bloated Hairworks while devs didn't use AMD's TressFX.

Bloated or not, Hairworks is pretty cool...

TressFX from China's NetEase.

The new Digital Foundry video makes an excellent case for metro's implementation of ray tracing, and the better part is that performance cost is quantifiable, having ray tracing with a bit lower settings looks better than without. What I noticed though, is that while ray-tracing is well implemented here, traditional rendering was lacking. And this is compared to even previous Metros, but curiously only in specific areas.

Anyways, BF5 slightly impress me, but Metro Exodus makes a much better use of current ray-tracing capability, in my opinion. ("Can it run Metro Exodus" could be the new meme so bye bye Crysis) Ray-tracing is used in Hollywood in every big movie and this will become the new standard for PC gaming. I don't expect next-gen PS5 and Xbox Scarlet to use RT due to the tech isn't advanced enough for consoles yet, but I can suspect RT will be implanted for PS6/Xbox 5.

I will be moving to RTX 2080Ti at the end of the year and will buy Metro Exodus when it comes to Steam in Feb. 2020.

The difference is RTX uses actual geometry for the ray-tracing while VXGI and other SVOGI techniques like ELemental demo and Cryengine's SVOTI uses voxel representation of scene, it's less accurate and couldn't practically be used for everything like ray-tracing against triangles can be.