Metro Exodus RTX Settings Analyzed

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As Nvidia reiterated earlier today, Metro Exodus is launching on Feburary 15th, and will ship with a wide swath of Nvidia-specific features. Nvidia says they're debuting "real-time Ray-Traced Global Illumination" in Metro Exodus, and that the game will ship with support for DLSS on Turing GPUs, as well as HairWorks, PhysX, Ansel, and Highlights. But unlike Battlefield V, Metro Exodus only has 2 RTX presets: "high" and "ultra." Nvidia themselves say that "in motion, the difference [between high and ultra] is hard to discern," hence they recommend that most users stick to the high setting. Thanks to cageymaru for the tip.

Gamers Nexus decided to investigate the difference between high, ultra, an no raytracing in Metro Exodus, which you can see in the video here.

In Metro Exodus, real-time Ray-Traced Global Illumination is debuted, enabling scenes to be illuminated naturally by the sun and sky, and be realistically affected as the sun’s position changes during the day. This gives scenes realistic levels of brightness and darkness, greatly improving image quality, realism and immersion, bringing Metro Exodus closer to replicating the look and feel of the real-world than any other game to date. When it’s supposed to be dark, it will be, so be ready to make use of your in-game flashlight. Furthermore, Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is utilized for the first time in a game, enabling 4A to calculate and display AO’s contact shadowing based on the geometry of the scene. That ensures objects are grounded, and that shadows where two objects meet, or where detail is occluded, are more realistic.
 
For most of the scenes where GI makes a noticeable difference I prefer the version with GI on, at least for the video. I wonder if I'd end up preferring those darker scenes while playing or not. Parts of it definitely look more realistic with GI on, the big question is whether the better lighting will make the game more "immersive" or get in the way of trying to play those areas where it makes things much darker.
 
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Is it the Ray tracing itself or the poor implementation of it from the developer? I mean some of the scenes were poorly lit when RTX was on and some of it was poorly lit when it was off. It almost like the dev team didn't know how to use it.
 
Looking at the images they posted up on the TechPowerUp performance analysis of Metro, I must say that with ray tracing on it looks fantastic and brings to gaming something that's been missing. It almost makes me want to pick up an RTX card.

Thanks for calling that out. I just went through the performance analysis review there and the ray tracing examples were pretty stunning. I was less thrilled with the DLSS samples, but this really seems like a step in the right direction for RTX cards.
 
Is it the Ray tracing itself or the poor implementation of it from the developer? I mean some of the scenes were poorly lit when RTX was on and some of it was poorly lit when it was off. It almost like the dev team didn't know how to use it.

i'd say both, there's some things that make it seem like nvidia said "here we'll pay you some money, please include RTX support" then forgot to tell them how to implement it.. the character shadows are 100% broken, they never change when a character moves, and they didn't implement character animation with the character or the shadow properly. in the video if you see the scenes where the characters are talking on the sides of the train, they move their heads but the shadow stays exactly the same with or without GL enabled. some of the GL stuff looks good, some of it looks meh.

still has a long ways to go and honestly until a game is designed from the ground up to use RTX features i think there will continue to be issues trying to implement features after the fact.
 
i'd say both, there's some things that make it seem like nvidia said "here we'll pay you some money, please include RTX support" then forgot to tell them how to implement it.. the character shadows are 100% broken, they never change when a character moves, and they didn't implement character animation with the character or the shadow properly. in the video if you see the scenes where the characters are talking on the sides of the train, they move their heads but the shadow stays exactly the same with or without GL enabled. some of the GL stuff looks good, some of it looks meh.

I don't think the issues with the bad shadows are due to GI. Seems to just be a really bad job of implementing shadows in the game. Or maybe they forgot/didn't have time to fully animate them. Either way, its really distracting once you see it. Hopefully I'm wrong and it ends up just being a bug that they can fix with a patch.
 
I don't think the issues with the bad shadows are due to GI. Seems to just be a really bad job of implementing shadows in the game. Or maybe they forgot/didn't have time to fully animate them. Either way, its really distracting once you see it. Hopefully I'm wrong and it ends up just being a bug that they can fix with a patch.

Would be a real shame if that is the case as the first 2 Metro's had fantastic shadows and lighting. It was a big part of what made them so immersive.
 
I think for the dark scenes if a developer is testing the game with RTX during development then can move and adjust light sources as necessary to make them playable. Doing it after the fact results in things like the hidden stairs that will probably make the game harder to play. Still I watched the whole video and thought RTX often looked better on than off. There were definitely places and things that looked worse but again I suspect if they'd been testing with RTX the whole time they'd have seen and fixed those issues during development. I'd probably have a hotkey to turn rtx on/off as a developer to compare both quickly and easily.
 
awesome. the Techpowerup review shows promising performance too, all things considered. Definitely solidified my decision to get a 2070- off to Microcenter tomorrow morning :D

as a photographer/cinematographer that works with natural light a lot, i really appreciate the extra realism brought by the subtle differences between the raytraced GI and conventional GI. love it, even the scenes that are "too dark" - but then i was one of those people who played STALKER with the lighting mods to make nighttime and interiors xtra dark and creepy.

forget BFV, this is the killer game for RTX early adoption
 
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Thanks for the post.

Definitely a mixed bag for the implementation. Some parts better off, some better on. I guess we'll have to wait and see if it's possible to patch in corrections with this kind of stuff. For those scenes that are really dark HDR ought to help greatly.
 
how many bounces are calculated? it really looks like 1 or 2 at best, which if you know about ray tracing it's typically at 5-10 where things start to feel consistently realistic

if they worked on implementing better tone-mapping, or gamma correction, the RTX scenes would be better... it works nicely outdoors on characters but when in shadows it's almost like the automatic exposure should behave differently

as for the content, I'm sure the devs have trouble making textures that look good on both, like the trees near the end I'm sure they compensated the brightness so it didn't look completely dark for RTX off (in other words the materials themselves can be unrealistic and that fact will only be more noticable with RTX on)

overal it's better than the last game, so maybe the next game that uses this the devs/technology will be better
 
was Exodus released today as posted at Epic or no? They still show a pre-purchase button and nothing posted here at [H] 's Front Page News ...
 
Yep Friday and I desperately need a new GPU for this. My sons video card bought the dust and I have given him my RX480. I was going to grab the Radeon 7 for the weekend, but Brents review isn't quite hear yet. But from a gaming point of view so far I haven't been that impressed with all the other reviews. I haven't bought Nvidia for quite a while, and it's starting to look like my only option.
 
Bring it on. Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination in Metro... Reflections and lighting in atomic heart... And everything with DLSS so we can have RT on at a decent frame rate. Getting closer to being solid tech. Much closer.
 
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so when a game has a DLSS setting that means it won't have any other AA setting available?...so what happens in a game like Metro Exodus for people not playing with an RTX card, no AA options at all?
 
so when a game has a DLSS setting that means it won't have any other AA setting available?...so what happens in a game like Metro Exodus for people not playing with an RTX card, no AA options at all?

Not sure where your logic is coming from; nothing here should be incompatible with AA, and there's no reason for the non-DXR render path to have abandoned traditional AA methods.
 
Not sure where your logic is coming from; nothing here should be incompatible with AA, and there's no reason for the non-DXR render path to have abandoned traditional AA methods.

I didn't know if other AA methods would be supported along with DLSS...watching some gameplay videos I only saw a DLSS option so I wasn't sure if others forms of AA were available in the game...so a person can enable both DLSS and whatever other AA is being used in a game such as TAA or SMAA?
 
TPU did an update with limitations to the DXR + DLSS resolutions. It's a shame at the limitations, but it is at least a good start to figuring out something new with graphics settings. On a side note, I keep seeing people complain about DLSS quality and personally I find in the comparisons that DLSS looks much better in both quality of image and color; but that's just me.
 
so RTX ON + DLSS gives you higher fps but blurs the image noticeably...RTX On without DLS cripples performance...so you're screwed either way...best option seems to be to turn off both RTX and DLSS...but then what's the point of even having a 2000 series RTX card?
 
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Only problem here is there are no shadows and the bag under the table is lit?

I do like that the dead baby is a big more obscured
 
I think this is what the Quake2 vulkan path tracing has implemented

i believe Q2VPT traces everything- no raster-based shading at all. so global illumination, ambient occlusion, shadows, reflections, absolutely everything. going to be awhile before that's feasible for more graphically detailed titles naturally!
 
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Only problem here is there are no shadows and the bag under the table is lit?

I do like that the dead baby is a big more obscured

With RT light bounces off of objects. So the bag under the table may be slightly illuminated by the light that is reflecting off of the other objects around it that are in the direct path of the light source. The objects on the table seem a bit off though.
 
With RT light bounces off of objects. So the bag under the table may be slightly illuminated by the light that is reflecting off of the other objects around it that are in the direct path of the light source. The objects on the table seem a bit off though.
no shadows cast by the lamp on the table + no bounce light in this scene... I really don't see how this is "RTX On" it just looks like a shadowless omni light with a short fall off rate. It's better than the nearly full-bright "RTX Off" lighting for sure
 
not to say RTX (ray tracing) isnt .... the future, but is it worth the implementation?, i mean, is it saving time or resources for the dev?...because in that demo, with RTX off, the game looks worse than a lot of titles that don't even have RTX..
 
RTX *should* save time - Because devs don't have to spend as much time on doing a lot of lighting 'tricks' that make the game look better. With proper raytracing the game will look better by virtue of lights/shadows being rendered properly without having to do as many tricks.

The problem with RTX, however, is that it isn't full raytracing so they still have to spend a lot of time optimizing. However, I believe Nvidia staff do much of this work free of charge, like most gameworks features, so they can sell the technology.
 
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