Metro Exodus on PC allows new Nvidia RTX laptops to train

The three Metro games, inspired by Russian sci-fi novels by Dmitry Glukhovsky, have long been favorites in the PC gaming world as they took advantage of the state-of-the-art graphics technology of the day.

Both Metro 2033 (2010) and Metro: Last Light (2013) have been used extensively to evaluate laptops and desktops (including CNET test labs). The same can happen with Metro Exodus, which has just come out, from the developer 4A Games and the publisher Deep Silver, which is one of the first games to take advantage of the features supported by The new RTX GPUs from Nvidiasuch as real-time ray tracing, which better simulates light reflections, and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), which uses cloud-based artificial intelligence to simulate games at incredibly high resolutions and teaches your GPU how to reproduce this level of detail.

But to play Metro Exodus on your new (or not so new) gaming PC, you need to have a few more jumps than expected. The biggest controversy about the game is how its publisher extracted the PC version of Steam, where it was available for pre-ordering for months. said the little used Epic game store as its exclusive place to buy the PC version of the game. (Yes, you can download the game on your Xbox or PlayStation, but, in reality, it's a PC game with keyboard and mouse in the heart.)

Players waiting to return to the ruins of the Moscow metro shouted scandal, not only because of the lack of consumer choice, but also because the online game shop of Epic was used until the end of the day. now for much more than Fortnite, and it shows. The Epic platform does not have most of the social features of Steam and, even worse, it does not support cloud backups. So you have to go back to looking for a saved game file and load it on a USB drive if you want to boot on one PC, then select later on another.

Of course, none of that mattered to me when, as the protagonist of the series, Artyom, I calmly swept my boat down a man through a canal until a giant monster of mutated shrimps jump from the water and land at my feet. If I had not been a vegetarian for more than 20 years, my classmates and I would have enjoyed shrimp-based cocktails of uncultivated land all night long.

And that's how play is at least the first hours of the game. Explorations across a seemingly desolate country, punctuated with sudden attacks of dozens of mutants, animals, monsters or d & # 39; 39, other survivors. In a way, it is familiar, in other respects, with a clear break with the claustrophobic atmosphere of the first two games, which were largely confined to subway tunnels underground and short trips to the twisted ruins of Moscow, where the poisoned air limited exploration.

Not surprising anyone, the game was launched for PCs in a buggy and unoptimized state. Probably because we tested it on new high-end notebooks with new Nvidia RTX graphics, we encountered relatively few problems besides occasional stuttering and freezing. The multiple fixes and patches released in the last week alone show just how important the extra work this game required after publishing was important. The publisher Deep Silver believes that the latest PC patch should be better optimized for low-end computers and improve overall stability. We will soon be testing it on older gaming laptops, but in the meantime, performance has at least become more predictable since the last fix (provided automatically via the Epic Games App Store).

In our first attempts to compare the game, scores were everywhere, changing dramatically between points. Since Thursday, the landmarks have been much more stable, with three points at a particular setting spaced a few frames per second from each other. Our most recent tests used the Asus Zephyrus GX 701 ($ 3,299), a 17-inch thin gaming laptop with a RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU, and the Razer Blade Advanced ($ 2,349), a 15-inch laptop with the RTX 2060. We have planned many more executions on different classes of laptops, but we'll throw out all the results before the latest fix. These are the first two laptops we tested.

Metro Exodus: Ultra settings

• Razer Blade Advanced (RTX 2060) – 41 fps
• Asus Zephyrus (RTX 2080 Max-Q) – 61fps

Metro Exodus: average settings

• Razer Blade Advanced (RTX 2060) – 67 frames per second
• Asus Zephyrus (RTX 2080 Max-Q) – 97 fps

Metro Exodus: RTX Settings

• Razer Blade Advanced (RTX 2060) – 43 frames per second
• Asus Zephyrus (RTX 2080 Max-Q) – 51 fps

The RTX version does not show much difference at this point, because DLSS really only comes into play if you play 4K, and anecdotally, I suspect that the gray and faded exteriors of the Russian wasteland do not lend. themselves to a lot of brilliant reflections in real time.

We continue to test Metro Exodus on more systems and will provide more complete scores, if any. Meanwhile, while I was as pissed off as everyone by the last-minute jump to the Epic Games platform, and especially by the lack of cloud backups, I take enough of the game to forget about all this , At least for the moment. . The final proof? Last week, I started in the Sneaker-net style, walking around with a USB key in my pocket containing my precious game saves.