Gadgetory

welcome back to Hard Rock's today's video it's a pretty simple one I'll be going through every graphics quality setting in Metro Exodus to show you how they compare in terms of both visuals and performance we've already explored how rate racing looks in this game in a separate video so the focus here is on the other graphical effects if you're interested in rate racing go back and check that video Steve has also already covered how Metro Exodus performs across a wide variety of GPUs so we know it's a pretty demanding game though it does deliver fantastic visuals that make it easy to see why you need a powerful GPU for ultra settings at 1080p for example you will need something like a gtx 1070 for 60 FPS gaming with cards we usually see doing well at this resolution like the rx 580 only delivering a 40 FPS experience hopefully we can improve the performance for owners of mid-range GPS without too much impact of visuals with our recommendations in this video and for those interested at 1440p you'll need something like a GTX 1080 while at 4k the only option is the r-tx 2080 ti coincidentally all of the footage you see in this video was captured at 4k using the r-tx 20 TI with our core i $9.99 hundred kg rig used for testing as always our performance numbers here are an average of results across several GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD both mid-range and high-end and the footage you see captured with the 2080 ti doesn't always align with where we benchmark that's because we use a single benchmark run for all the performance data which encompasses many of the visual effects used in the game while the visual comparisons focus in on the differences in quality this allows us to show you how each setting looks without resorting to single scene FPS spot checks that may not be reflective of a settings typical impact in the game by using the single benchmark pilots who get a general idea of how setting can impact typical gameplay rather than only in specific scenes and you're watching the benchmark pass here so I've used an in-game run rather than the benchmark tool which is more intensive in the sections of the game I've played so fast that's why we decided to go in game here the one difference I've made here compared to our other optimization guides is to split out the performance impact for AMD and NVIDIA GPUs for some said Metro Exodus includes Nvidia's hair works and physics implementations with a heavy tessellation option which have noticeably different performance impacts depending on which brand of GPU you have but we'll get to that later Metro Exodus actually doesn't have that many tweakable settings my previous metro games a lot of the options you'd normally see are all bundled into the generic quality setting this acts as a sort of a preset but without the option for any further customization to things like shadow quality textures or lighting but it's not a full preset either because several other settings like motion blur tessellation and texture filtering are left to their own options this makes the quality option the key thing to look at here to be honest it is a bit frustrating we can't tweak elements individually because I feel that would have given the best scope optimization but it is what it is instead I'll just have to show a bunch of scenes so that you can see how each of them compare one of the key differences between the five available modes is the lighting quality in fact the differences are similar to what ray-traced global illumination provides in this game the ultra and extreme modes have the darkest presentation with the highest quality shadowing and best ambient occlusion the atmosphere when using either of these quality modes is in my opinion better than the brighter and less shadowed high mode and it really adds to the game overall the ultra and extreme modes have I guess a more accurate reflection of how the lighting should be interacting with the environment while this change in lighting is most noticeable in lit indoor sense it's also visible outdoors though to a lesser extent for some people whether to use the high or ultra modes will come down to a personal preference if you prefer brightest shadows unless ambient occlusion hi is the way to go if you want a darker more atmospheric experience you'll need to use at least the ultra preset as I mentioned my r-tx video I feel the duiker presentation is more accurate and looks better so my choice would be ultra though I understand why some people may not like this and go with high instead medium and low are also options of course though they bring an even brighter presentation again it seems that with medium ambient occlusion is largely disabled which flattens out the image there are differences between all five modes in terms of shadow quality extreme has the sharpest shadows it's one of the very few differences I spotted between the extreme and ultra modes and even then it's pretty subtle as you step down through ultra to medium shadows become less sharp when you switch to the low mode dynamic shadow rendering is disabled entirely and you just get fixed baked in shadows which looks a bit crap so ideally you'd want to use at least medium for this setting between the Ultron higher modes a lot of differences in geometry level and draw distance which also roll away further when switching down to medium or low it's a subtle change but if you want the best draw distances again Ultra is what you'll need to choose screen space reflections use for water surfaces but only on the high modes and above with medium and low water looks flat and boring without any reflections in terms of texture quality ideas about any significant difference between the upper 4 modes at 4k it's only when switching to low that the texture quality drops away noticeably giving the game a blurry look I also swallowed some minor improvements to skin rendering and higher quality setting levels I'm sure there's a few more things are missing but those seem to be the key differences in the quality setting we're looking at the performance difference it's no surprise to see such a large jump in performance between each of the modes because many of the graphical elements are changing with h1 going from ultra to extreme sees a 16% average performance reduction which considering the very minor visual difference really isn't worth it going from Ultra to high sees things swing the other way a 17% performance improvement I feel these are the two key options because there are visual differences between the two and I feel a 17% difference is pretty reasonable considering the changes as I said earlier the ultra mode has darker better shadowed lighting that looks more realistic while the high mode is brighter which some people may prefer I think that which presentation you personally prefer should dictate this choice if you want the dark atmospheric look with improvements to several other errors then ultras for you but if you prefer a brighter look then hive will improve your performance medium with it's disabled screen space reflections lower resolution shadows and significantly toned down a beam occlusion is something I'd reserved purely for mid-range cards despite the near 50% performance uplift over ultra the difference between medium and ultra is significant so I feel gamers with more powerful systems we appreciate the better visuals of ultra or even the high mode despite the fact you will get lower performance however I still feel this single quality setting reel should be split into several options to allow further tweaking for example those who prefer the bright to look at the high mode aren't able to get the sharpest shadows and better draw distances of the ultra mode the more we can tweak the more you can optimize the visual quality and performance a metro really doesn't allow much in this regard there are a small collection of settings not bundled into the quality mode motion blur is the first one and again a bit of a personal preference thing here having to do all three modes the high setting applies a pretty heavy and noticeable motion blur it's not something I liked a whole lot I reckon the high mode was designed with consoles in mind which tend to make heavy use of blur for 30 FPS gaming one of the many benefits of having a PC not having to game at 30 FPS anyway normal sees a much more subtle use of motion blur while low largely disables the effect looking at the performance differences turning the setting down from the console like high mode to either normal or low so our one percent performance improvement so not a big change this makes the choice of settings a personal preference thing I suspect most people want normal or low here DL SS I covered briefly in my RT X video this is a feature exclusive to Nvidia stirring r-tx GPUs in my opinion it doesn't work very well at all it blurs the image noticeably as if the game was using a really bad anti-aliasing technique switching it on gave a 23% performance improvement at 4k using a twenty atti without ray-tracing though this improvement can vary a lot depending on the GPU resolution and settings you're using I wouldn't consider using DL SS if you need more performance and don't mind a slight reduction to sharpness stick to the much better scaling factor setting in the game how it works is where you can start to see some pre significant performance improvements however there's also a sizeable difference in visuals monsters with the fur covering look much better with hair works enables not only is the hair completely different color it also covers more of the body it ripples in the air and it can be colored by blood and grime monsters without hair works have static boring pretty crappy looking hair similar to all of other games while the visual difference is massive and makes hair works on look much better than hair works off I can't help but wonder if the hair works off version of the creatures was downgraded deliberately to make hair works look especially good not even having the same hair color or positioning with hair works disabled is a bit suspicious to me the developers really should have been able to get both modes looking a lot closer the performance is also quite drastic you might expect only a small section of our benchmark run included hair work scriptures so the 1% lows are key the work out here disabling hair works saw a 13% improvement to 1% lows within video cards but a huge 28% improvement for AMD cards which once again show us how game works punishes AMD hardware although really in this case it's punishing both GPU brands because even a 13% hit is quite high if for a games were serious about delivering high quality hair effects in this game they would have used tress-fx instead of hair works because every trace effects implementation I've seen is significantly less demanding than hair works on both AMD and NVIDIA cards it also doesn't favor either brand so let's hope for our games put that game works cash from Nvidia to good use the good news is there doesn't appear to be any performance difference between physics on and off whether you have an NVIDIA GPU or AMD GPU even in the benchmark tool there is no difference and I couldn't spot any visual changes either so yeah really not sure what this setting does moving on we have tessellation one of the most intensive effects in the game across outdoor environments in particular there's a reasonable change in depth between the on and off modes for tessellation so a massive change but turning tessellation off does lead to flatter surfaces however the tessellation is also still active in indoor scenes where I couldn't really spot any visual changes aside from a reduced framerate the big issue with tessellation in metro Exodus is the performance in from video cards you'll key at a 17 percent heat through our benchmark run but with AMD cards that jumps up to a 27 percent hit on average and nearly 50% for 1% lows 50 percent that's pretty crazy clearly something about test fashion in this game is over utilizing the effect which is putting unnecessary strain on AMD Hardware AMD cards can handle a bit of white tessellation it's a feature used in a lot of titles but when you start to ramp it up to crazy levels it can seriously stress out an AMD GPU relative to an NVIDIA GPU considering even NVIDIA GPUs hit to the tune of nearly 20% as only game is significantly over using tessellation given the visual differences I spotted with such a huge performance hit my recommendation is to disable tessellation on both Nvidia and especially AMD GPUs I'd like to think this effect is broken in its current state given the massive performance impact it has but again as this is a game works title I wouldn't rule out a bit of foul play here that's ended up hurting everyone also note that the impact of tessellation in the actual game is much higher than the benchmark tool shows the final setting in the game is texture filtering in the scenes I tested I found it pretty hard to spot a difference between the two offered modes f-16 X and a of 4x there's no difference between either mode in terms of performance so I suspect for air games included this option purely for ultra low energy use which can struggle with higher anisotropic filtering modes it's also worth mentioning there is a shading rate option in the game this is like a render scale option for super sampling or subsampling except it only modifies the shading rate rather than the overall resolution most people should leave this setting on the default 1.0 x option so if metro exorcists there really isn't a lot of settings you can twink basically everything is bundled into the quality setting and then most of the other settings are things related to game works and RT x so overall it's a very simple affair my recommendation for most people is to still use the ultra quality setting extreme comes with a sizable performance hit despite only small changes to visuals those who prefer a brighter game should up to the high mode but there is a noticeable difference overall between high and ultra that sees me favor ultra in most instances while mid-range gamers can gain a lot of performance with the medium mode at a reasonably big loss to visual quality for the other settings I recommend motion blur on either normal or low depending on your preference and leave all of invidious features disabled so that's a DL SS off ray tracing off hair works off and tessellation off with physics really doing nothing so settings up to you DL SS blows the image so it isn't worth using I don't mind ray tracing in this game but the performance cost of 30 to 40 percent is still too high while hey works and tessellation are also far too intensive for the visual improvement you get and then I'd recommend texture filtering at the maximum AF 16x and the default rating read option of 1 x with those settings in play NVIDIA GPU owners will see a rounded 20% performance improvement compared to having every setting except in videos RT X features enabled so ultra selling gamers will see a 20% improvement high selling gamers 20% as well are the two modes have a 17 percent gap between them and again the choice between ultra and high is actually down to which visual star you prefer that's why I'm recommending either option with the personal preference for ultra AMD GPU owners will see larger gains up around 30% on average and even higher for 1% lows this twenty to thirty percent improvement does come with some reductions to visual quality from canning tessellation and hair works however the best part is all the other excellent visual features are retained why do think both features and even rate racing have their benefits the game still looks spectacular with those things disabled while running a lot better and more consistently however I do wish that for a games had opened up the quarry options a bit more rather than bundling everything together into really basic presets I feel we probably could have achieved more than a twenty to thirty percent performance uplift for similar visual quality if we had access to other options I also suspect a lot of people were already playing with hair works disabled so the performance gains drop even further when you take that out of calculations finally I really wish this wasn't a game works title because I feel both hair simulations and tessellation could have been integrated at much lower performance costs than what this game currently offers which would benefit both Nvidia and AMD GPU owners that's it for this one so far I'm having a blast playing Metro Exodus so I can't wait to stop benchmarking and actually just get into playing the game through it seems like a lot of fun if you missed either our rate racing or general benchmark coverage that's already up on the channel and of course subscribe for more optimization guys for upcoming games because they're supporting us on patreon as well as it you know takes a bit of time to put these sorts of videos together and we appreciate the support from you guys that makes it possible and I'll catch you in the next one