The sequel to Metro: 2033, Metro: Last Light, continues the story in the personality of Artyom once more. Using the built-in heavily modified 4A Engine, the developer was able to render breathtaking visuals and include additional in-game enhancements like Nvidia Physx and Supersampling Anti-aliasing. But with these visual enhancements, does this mean a higher system is required? Metro: 2033 offered great visuals at its time but cripples almost every system. We are hopeful that Last Light is now optimized and scales down to low-end systems. We will see.
Test System and Minimum Requirements
| Test System | Metro: Last Light Minimum | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Celeron G550 2.6 GHz Dual-core | 2.2 GHz dual-core |
| Memory | 4GB DDR3 1600MHz | 2GB |
| Video Card | AMD Radeon HD 7750 1GB DDR5, nVidia GeForce 9600GT 512MB DDR3 | AMD HD Radeon 4000 Series, nVidia GTS 250 |
| Driver / Patch version | AMD Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2, nVidia Forceware 320.49 | 1.0.0.3 |
| Operating System / DirectX | Windows 8 64-bit, Windows 7 SP1 64-bit / DX 11 | Windows XP 32-Bit DirectX 9 |
Our test system is slightly higher than the minimum requirements, but we will also test the game with Geforce 9600GT which is way lower than the required GTS 250, to see how the game will perform on lower systems.
Methodology
All tests were done with the following components and settings
-
- Intel Celeron G550 2.6 GHz Dual-core
- 4GB DDR3 1600MHz
- AMD Radeon HD 7750 1GB DDR5
- Windows 7 SP1 64-bit
- Fraps 3.5.9 for recording average and minimum frames per second.
Built-In Benchmarking Tool vs Actual Gameplay
The game came with a benchmarking tool located at the game’s installation folder. The benchmarking tool is a fly-over type where the camera is hovering around the scene with intense gunfights and explosions. I imitated the benchmarking scene to find out if it truly represents the game’s performance. The benchmarking scene is 120 seconds long at the D6 level.
Updated Game Performance
There were reports that the game has some bugs, frequent crashes, and performs too slow – especially on AMD cards. Then 4A Games released a couple of patches to resolve these issues.
I was greatly impressed when I played and saw the result of updating the game. The performance is doubled from 25fps to 50fps, so if you are experiencing slowdowns during the game I strongly recommend you update the game.
Image Comparison
Quality
The “Quality” setting is actually the combination of several settings. This setting affects the quality of almost everything in the game – occlusion, shadows, lighting, texturing, geometry, and others. There are visual changes between Low and Normal but no performance impact. High is still playable and Very High quality is slower but tolerable with 42fps on average and 27fps minimum.
Supersampling Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing improves the quality of edges. In our screenshot, the fence and the rails on the train looked smoother and smoother with higher anti-aliasing values. However, a higher anti-aliasing value will result in slower performance, even at 0.5x. I recommend 2x value since it improves the image quality while the performance is not greatly diminished.
Texture Filtering
There is no visible enhancement between 4x and 16x. The performance is also unaffected.
Motion Blur
Motion blur setting is also affected by the quality setting. When quality is set to low or normal, motion blur has no effect whether you set it to low or normal. You will start seeing the blurring effect when you set the quality to high or very high. But then, low and normal motion blur still look very similar, and the performance is unaffected.
Tessellation
Tessellation makes the sandbags more rounds and adds more detail to ground rocks. Steel bars on the left side are slightly affected. The performance difference across the tessellation levels are minimal on the average fps, but the minimum fps is greatly diminished by up to 9 to 10 fps. This makes the gameplay less smooth – and expect slowdowns in highly tessellated areas.
Advanced Physx
Physx adds permanent debris, explosion and smoke effects, but notice the cloth is not affected by gunshots. I can’t recommend to turn this “On” on lower-end budget systems as the performance will be greatly decreased to an unplayable level. 4A Games recommends Geforce GTX cards if you want to turn on the Physx.
Presets
4A Games didn’t put preset settings to set the values automatically for every single setting. I decided to make my own presets. The custom preset is based on the recommendations for the individual settings.
| Low | High | Maximum | Custom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quality | Low | Very High | Very High | High |
| SSAA | Off | Off | 4x | Off |
| Texture Filtering | 4x | 16x | 16x | 16x |
| Motion Blur | Low | Normal | Normal | Off |
| Tessellation | Off | Very High | Very High | Normal |
| Advanced Physx | Off | Off | Off | Off |
Our custom preset stands between low and high, with better texture, shadows, and lighting. We start seeing occlusions on high preset. The maximum preset has smoother edges due to the applied SSAA. Both and our custom presets are playable while the high preset is slower but tolerable with an average of 35 and 25fps minimum. Playing at Maximum preset is too demanding for our system with only 11fps average and 8fps minimum.
Tweaking
Field of View
The field of view can only be changed in “user.cfg” file found in “%LOCALAPPDATA%\4A Games\Metro LL\” (C:\Users\PCNAME\AppData\Local\4A Games\Metro LL) after updating the game. Look for “r_base_fov” to change the value. The default FOV value is 50.625. I tried lower value and higher than 89 but it sets back to the default.
When setting a higher field of view value, the view becomes wider and the objects in front look farther. The performance is slightly affected by this setting and you can set this according to your preference.
DirectX Mode
You can also change the Direct X mode in “user.cfg”. Look for the “r_api” and set it to “0” for DirectX 9, “1” for DirectX 10, and “2” for DirectX 11. You won’t have access to tessellation when you set it to DirectX 9 and 10.
There is no visible change between modes but switching to DirectX 9 the performance will be greatly diminished. DirectX 10 and 11 perform just fine.
Skip Intro Videos
This is a non-performance tweak, but in case you don’t want to wait by watching the videos, here is the trick. Go to “steam\steamapps\common\Metro Last Light\” or to the installation folder, look for “legal.ogv” and rename it to “legal.ogv.bak”.
Graphics Card Performance
Having 512MB of video memory is enough for all levels of quality (low, normal, high, very high). Low and normal quality will utilize the GPU from moderate to high while high and very high quality will definitely use all the processing power of the GPU.
The 9600 GT is playable on low and normal quality with 48 and 45fps. At high quality, performance dropped to 25 and went much lower on very high with 15fps. The HD 7750 is slightly affected only dropping from 50fps to 42fps at very high quality.
When playing on low and normal with 9600GT, circular patterns appear and there are visible tearing on some animation. These distortions are removed when played on high and very high, but the performance will be diminished so much that you’ll likely have to deal with these distortions if you want to have a playable experience with 9600 GT.
CPU Performance
The game uses the two available cores at roughly 90-95%, it doesn’t matter if it is clocked at 2.6, 2.1, or 1.6 GHz. Using a single core the usage goes up to 95-100%.
The minimum CPU requirement is a 2.2 GHz dual-core processor, but a slightly lower-clocked 2.1 GHz processor is still capable of delivering playable frame rates at a 42fps average and 29fps minimum. Though the 1.6 GHz offered an average of 39fps, the minimum is too low with only 8fps, enough to feel the slowdowns throughout the game, and expect a worse experience with single-core processors even clocked at a higher frequency.
Memory Performance
The minimum requirement is 2 GB, which is enough to have a playable experience. Having 4 GB of memory doesn’t change the result but having 6 GB improved the result, adding 3fps on the average and 1fps to the minimum.
Performance on Windows 8
This game performed better in Windows 7 than in Windows 8 but the gap is too low to feel much difference.
Summary
I am glad to see that the 9600GT can still perform fairly with normal quality in this visually stunning game while the HD 7750 performed far better even with very high quality, but turning all settings on gives the card a tough challenge. Luckily our custom preset gave us a playable result without losing many visual qualities. The Celeron, maybe the cheapest dual-core around, also put a nice performance at 2.6 GHz – that means dual-core CPUs are still capable of gaming. We didn’t squeeze much fps on tweaking, but updating the game doubled the performance, from 25fps to 50fps – I’ve never seen anything such improvement before. I hope that current games can and will do the same. But I still have one question left – haven’t the developers tested their game with a wide range of video cards before releasing the game?
Video Update – Developer Pack
this article is very helpful
Thank you author
Thank you.