14 DAY TRIAL // Metro Redux, the bundle including the revamped versions of Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, manages to run at a steady 60 frames per second on next-gen consoles, without missing a beat.
The first-person shooter's visuals are outstanding, and any such game taxes both the CPU and GPU of any system it's being run on.
Considering that the recently released The Last of Us Remastered, offered by Naught Dog in a similarly spruced-up form for the PlayStation 4, registers some frame dropping from time to time, it makes Metro Redux's performance even more impressive.
The game runs in 1080p on the PS4, and in 912p on the Xbox One, and developer 4A Games' Chief Technical Officer Oles Shishkovstov talked about his experience working on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 systems, sharing how the team managed to make the game run this well on the hardware.
"I think what we achieved with the new consoles was a really good job. But the fact is we haven't begun to fully utilise all the computing power we have. For example we have not utilised parallel compute contexts due to the lack of time and the 'alpha' state of support on those consoles at that time."
"That means that there is a lot of untapped performance that should translate into better visuals and gameplay as we get more familiar with the hardware," Shishkovstov told Digital Foundry.
He expressed confidence in the fact that as time passed, development for both consoles would become more robust, and more of their challenges would eventually be tackled, resulting in better performance and visual fidelity.
"They are relatively well-balanced pieces of hardware that are well above what most people have right now, performance-wise. And let's not forget that programming close to the metal will usually mean that we can get 2x performance gain over the equivalent PC spec. Practically achieving that performance takes some time, though," the engineer explained.
He also pointed out that the secret to the team's success when pushing for 60 frames per second was adapting to the target hardware.
"GCN doesn't love interpolators? OK, ditch the per-vertex tangent space, switch to per-pixel one. That CPU task becomes too fast on an out-of-order CPU? Merge those tasks. Too slow task? Parallelize it. Maybe the GPU doesn't like high sqrt count in the loop? But it is good in integer math - so we'll use old integer tricks. And so on, and so on," Shishkovstov revealed.
Metro Redux was released on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in digital format, and will be released in physical retail form on August 29, worldwide.