Metro Exodus Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks
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While Metro Exodus has been well received by the press and has scored highly in reviews, the gaming community has been more divided. In addition to its release on the Epic Games Launcher rather than on Steam as was originally planned, the engine underpinning the game has drawn criticism for its high system requirements. Our test and benchmark tables below confirm the latter, and Metro Exodus is currently only truly playable on gaming or high-end GPUs. By contrast, games such as Far Cry New Dawn have more frugal system requirements despite having large open areas in which to explore.
In general, Metro Exodus struggles with fluctuating framerates, which is especially noticeable with GPUs that have less than 6 GB of VRAM. Moreover, the game crashed on several of our test systems, for some reason. This only happened occasionally, but it is still a frustrating experience, nonetheless. 4A Games, which also developed Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, could do with improving loading times too as they are comparatively slow currently.
Metro Exodus looks great though. While there are a few muddy textures now and then, the graphics are impressive overall. The developers have done a great job of not only including a tremendous amount of detail in indoor and outdoor environments but also for the lighting, which adds an eerie atmosphere to the game. The first-person point of view is impersive too thanks to Artyom’s animated arms and legs along with your impaired view through his gas mask.
Unfortunately, Metro Exodus has only a few graphics settings, which take a while to scroll through, because of the game’s huge font. We also did not like the lack of explanatory notes for each setting, as it is not necessarily obvious what each setting does.
The game has five graphics presets instead of detailed options as we have seen with Far Cry New Dawn. We would advise against setting the game to the Extreme preset though as the performance loss is much greater than the graphical improvements. There are also options for DirectX, gamma, motion blur, tessellation, texture filtering, and V-Sync among others. Altering the DirectX mode hardly had any influence on framerates in our experience.
It is also worth noting that we set the shading rate to the base value of 1.0 for our tests. The NVIDIA Hairworks and advanced PhysX are designed to work with NVIDIA GPUs but enabling them should provide some benefits to AMD GPUs too. However, DLSS and Raytracing will currently only work on GeForce RTX 20 series cards.
Frustratingly, Metro Exodus must be restarted to apply some settings changes. Incidentally, the game needs just under 50 GB of storage.
Benchmarks
The developers deserve praise for the built-in benchmark though, although we are not fans of it having a dedicated launcher that is only accessible within the game folder. The benchmark lasts around 1:45 minutes and shows a tracking shot through indoor and outdoor areas. The sequence is more demanding than real gameplay, so your system should achieve higher framerates in-game than it does during the benchmark. The developers have included a detailed breakdown too that contains minimum, average and maximum framerates, which appears after the benchmark is finished.
If your system averages 45 FPS during the benchmark, then the game should generally run smoothly. You can also follow our customised presets too, which differ slightly from the default presets, to achieve more stable framerates.
Results
HD (1,280x720)
Metro Exodus is power hungry even at minimum graphics in 720p. The game is playable on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050, but older cards such as the GeForce GTX 960M will only average around 35.1 FPS, which is not a pleasant gaming experience in our opinion.
Metro Exodus | |
1280x720 Low Quality AF:4x | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
AMD Radeon VII, R7 2700X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile, i7-7820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile, 6820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA Titan RTX, TR 2920X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile, 6820HK | |
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 6700HQ | |
AMD Radeon RX 460 (Desktop), 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 940M, 5700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 920M, 2970M |
FHD (1,920x1,080)
Likewise, you will need at least a GeForce GTX 1060 to play the game in 1080p. We would recommend stepping up to GeForce GTX 1070 if you want to play the game at high settings on a laptop and its desktop counterpart for the ultra-high preset. Likewise, you will need a GeForce GTX 1080 to play the game at the latter preset on a laptop.
Metro Exodus | |
1920x1080 Medium Quality AF:4x 1920x1080 High Quality AF:16x 1920x1080 Ultra Quality AF:16x | |
NVIDIA Titan RTX, TR 2920X | |
AMD Radeon VII, R7 2700X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile, i7-7820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile, 6820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile, 6820HK | |
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 6700HQ | |
AMD Radeon RX 460 (Desktop), 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 940M, 5700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 920M, 2970M |
QHD (2,560x1,440) & UHD (3,840x2,160)
Playing Metro Exodus in QHD or UHD at the ultra-high preset is a struggle for even the most powerful of consumer GPUs. We would recommend using at least a GeForce GTX 1080 for playing in UHD, while QHD will push even the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 to its limits. Even the Titan RTX is unable to average 60 FPS.
Metro Exodus | |
2560x1440 Ultra Quality AF:16x 3840x2160 Ultra Quality AF:16x | |
NVIDIA Titan RTX, TR 2920X | |
AMD Radeon VII, R7 2700X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Mobile, i7-7820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile, 6820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop), i9-9900K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile, 6820HK | |
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Desktop), i7-7740X | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile, i7-7700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile, i7-7700HQ |
Raytracing (1,920x1,080)
Unfortunately, we were unable to test Raytracing in Metro Exodus, but it will put your system under even more strain than it did in our benchmark results. We shall include a corresponding RTX table when we have tested Metro Exodus on our RTX 20 series test systems.
Metro Exodus | |
1920x1080 Metro Exodus DXR AF:16x |
Please Note
Gaming tests are often time-consuming and are hampered by activation or installation limits. Hence, we can currently only provide some of the benchmarks for Metro Exodus. We shall update this article with more GPUs in the coming days and weeks.
Overview
Test Systems
Device | Graphics Card | Processor | RAM | OS |
---|---|---|---|---|
Desktop-PC I | MSI GeForce GTX 1080 (8 GB GDDR5X) MSI GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB GDDR5) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB GDDR5) |
Intel Core i9-9900K | 4 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
Desktop-PC II | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (11 GB GDDR5X) ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6 GB GDDR5) XFX Radeon R9 Fury (4 GB HBM) Sapphire Radeon R9 290X (4 GB GDDR5) Sapphire Radeon R9 280X (3 GB GDDR5) MSI Radeon R7 370 (2 GB GDDR5) |
Intel Core i7-7740X | 2 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
Alienware 17 R4 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (8 GB GDDR5X) | Intel Core i7-7820HK | 2 x 16 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
Acer Triton 700 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Max-Q (8 GB GDDR5X) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ | 2 x 16 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
ASUS G752VS | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6820HK | 2 x 16 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GT62VR | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6820HK | 2 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GE72 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ | 2 x 4 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
ASUS GL753VD | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (4 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ | 1 x 16 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GL62 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ | 2 x 4 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
ASUS G752VY | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M (4 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ | 2 x 16 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GS60 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M (3 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ | 2 x 4 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GE72 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ | 1 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GL72 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-7700HQ | 1 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI PE60 | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ | 2 x 4 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI CX72 | NVIDIA GeForce 940MX (2 GB DDR3) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ | 2 x 8 GB DDR4 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI GP62 | NVIDIA GeForce 940M (2 GB DDR3) | Intel Core i7-5700HQ | 1 x 8 GB DDR3 | Windows 10 64-bit |
MSI CX61 | NVIDIA GeForce 920M (2 GB DDR3) | Intel Celeron 2970M | 1 x 8 GB DDR3 | Windows 10 64-bit |
ASUS N551ZU | AMD Radeon R9 M280X (4 GB GDDR5) | AMD FX-7600P | 2 x 4 GB DDR3 | Windows 10 64-bit |
4K Monitor | NVIDIA driver | AMD driver |
---|---|---|
2 x ASUS PB287Q, Philips 328P6VJEB | ForceWare 419.17 | Adrenalin 19.2.3 |