Metro Exodus DLSS Post Patch Graphics Quality: Pass or Fail?

Metro Exodus launched with a slew of NVIDIA’s propitiatory technologies- hairworks, GPU accelerated PhysX and of course the much-purported raytracing (RTX) and DLSS scaling algorithm. However, the initial tests put DLSS in a bad light as it really took a toll on the image quality, degrading the textures and making them look subpar. Now, NVIDIA and 4A Games have released a 4GB patch that tries to improve DLSS quality and in this post, we see if it actually does that or not.

Pre and Post-Patch Performance

We also decided to check the pre and post-patch performance of Metro Exodus with DLSS enabled to note any changes in performance. And to be honest, it was a pleasant surprise. Although with raytracing turned off, DLSS performance remains the same as before the patch, with RTX on, it grants a performance boost of more than 10%. Our frame rates with a GeForce RTX 2080 jumped from 51 FPS to 58 FPS on applying the patch and that is a welcome increment in performance.

Metro Exodus Post-Patch DLSS Quality

Now, onto the real matter. Let’s compare the pre and post-patch screenshots with DLSS enabled and see what kind of improvements have been made:

Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 has quite a price tag

For more screenshot comparisons, click here.

These are all 4K shots and as you can see there’s a massive improvement in visual quality, so much so that in some scenes it’s hard to differentiate between the two. DLSS seems to be even more effective than TAA when implemented properly with little to no blurring and most of the textures retaining their sharpness.

To make it more dramatic, we won’t be telling you which ones are DLSS enabled and which ones aren’t. Go knock yourself out.

DLSS is a promising technology that is sure to allow raytracing at higher resolutions even with mid-range cards in the future. It is much better than Sony and AMD’s checkerbox rendering used in the current gen consoles and we’d love to see more developers leverage DLSS in their games.

PS: Click on the images for the uncompressed 4K version.

Further reading:

• Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics 940 iGPU Performance leaked, Faster than AMD Radeon Vega 10
• Intel Ice Lake leaked by Lenovo, Arriving June
• AMD Claims Support for Real-Time Ray Tracing on all of its DX12 GPUs