Metro: Last Light we improve performance and FPS, improve graphics. Metro Last Light hangs. The game freezes and freezes. Solving the problem Increasing fps in metro last light

The ancestor of the Metro gaming series, released in 2010, was remembered by gamers not only for its merits gameplay, but also an outstanding graphical shell. Conditionally domestic developers from the Ukrainian startup 4A Games, having a relatively small budget, they created their own 4A Engine, which had remarkable technical capabilities for its time. Owners of hardware with support for DirectX 11, running Metro 2033, could take advantage of all the charms of this API - first of all, hardware tessellation. As a result, Metro 2033, like such long-livers as Crysis Warhead, staked out a place among the benchmarks for all new video adapters that have been born since the game itself was released. However, as in the case of Crysis, the reason for longevity lies not only and not so much in the beauties of Metro 2033, but in the fact that even on 2013 graphics cards with maximum settings, the game desperately slows down. Such a rigorous performance yardstick perfectly demonstrates the power of extreme multi-GPU configurations that finally allow Metro 2033 to achieve acceptable frame rates. Well, in the reviews of single-processor, albeit the most top-end, video adapters, Metro 2033 shows that chip manufacturers still have room to grow.

In general, the optimization of the graphics engine was one of the main requirements for the sequel to Metro 2033. As a result, in the face of Metro: Last Light, we got a game that both surpasses its predecessor in visual merits and more efficiently uses the computing power of the GPU. Although the updated 4A Engine still has an option in its arsenal that can bring the most powerful of GPUs to their knees, which will be discussed later.

We do not have complete list those changes in the code that Metro: Last Light owes increased performance, but some interesting features of the engine are known, one of which is streaming textures (Streaming Textures). Due to the fact that textures are loaded into the frame buffer of the video card on demand, we managed to reduce the requirements for its volume. The game, even at maximum settings and a resolution of 2560x1440, is content with 2 GB of video memory. Another detail about the Metro: LL engine is that the tasks of actually rendering graphics, applying physical effects, and processing sound are dynamically assigned to free CPU threads, instead of always giving graphics the first thread, physics the second, sound the third.

⇡ Metro: Last Light graphics settings

Graphic options Metro: LL are not rich. The developers have saved the gamer from choosing between DirectX versions: by default, the game runs in DirectX 11, but is ready to roll back to DX10 or even DX9 if DX11 support is not found in the hardware. The most notable difference is that DirectX 10 doesn't have tessellation and DX9 doesn't have Object Motion Blur. In addition, the game is simply faster in DirectX 11 than in its predecessors.

Let's take a look at the few settings that need to be changed.

⇡Super-Sampling Anti-Aliasing

The original Metro 2033 used full-screen multisampling anti-aliasing (MSAA). Originally introduced as an alternative to resource-intensive supersampling (SSAA), MSAA gained popularity in the DirectX 8 and DX9 era, but when combined with modern Deferred Rendering engines, it causes a much larger performance hit than before. Therefore, as an alternative, Metro 2033 uses the so-called Adaptive Anti-Aliasing (AAA) - a kind of FXAA technology, which is a fast post-processing filter that smoothes "ladders" at the boundaries of polygons.

But MSAA as a full-fledged anti-aliasing method in Metro: LL was rejected in favor of an old friend - SSAA. The essence of supersampling is that the image is rendered in more high resolution(e.g. twice the size on both sides at SSAA 4x) and then scaled to screen resolution. As a result, we get the highest quality result from all options smoothing. The performance hit is huge, but with how MSAA is combined with deferred rendering, there is nothing to lose. SSAA modes are available from 2x to 4x. And regardless of whether supersampling is enabled, Metro: LL always has the AAA method. Only in combination with SSAA, the disadvantage of the latter is less pronounced - a slight blur of the entire image, since AAA is applied even before scaling the high-resolution image.

⇡ Tessellation

Tessellation is used everywhere in Metro: Last Light, increasing the detail of the geometry of natural objects, interior items and characters. Three tessellation modes are available: Normal, High and Very High. High compared to Normal adds more detail, Very High increases the distance from the viewpoint at which tessellation is turned off from ten to fifteen meters, and the distance at which detail falls off from seven to ten.

Functions similar to tessellation are performed by Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) - a technology that does not generate additional geometry, but instead forms the illusion of relief on walls and other suitable surfaces, which is strongly pronounced at a direct viewing angle, but is lost when considering the surface under a sharp angle. In addition, the virtual geometry created by POM, unlike the real geometry obtained by tessellation, does not interact with lights and dynamic shadows. Although in favor of the POM method used in Metro: LL, it must be said that it supports self-shadowing (Self-Shadowing) of displaced sections of the texture, which contributes to the fact that on those objects where tessellation would not lead to a jump in visual quality, the relief looks very authentic .

⇡ Advanced PhysX

Like Metro 2033, its sequel in creating physical effects relies on NVIDIA PhysX technology. The Advanced PhysX option enables the hardware processing of PhysX calls on the GPU, without which the game loses some impressive features. The most noticeable effect of hardware PhysX is on the visualization of destruction. Pieces of broken objects scatter more realistically and then fully interact with the surrounding world: they stay in place after falling and move when a new force is applied. Without hardware PhysX, destruction is pre-determined, and fragments gradually disappear.

Explosions also look more realistic thanks to Advanced PhysX. Depending on the distance to the center of the explosion, its power and properties of materials, objects experience more or less strong destruction and movement. Large volumes of particles such as smoke and fog behave realistically and interact interactively with explosions or simply player movement. PhysX hardware support also enables character or wind manipulation of cloth geometry.

⇡ Preset modes

Metro: Last Light combines a ton of graphics settings under a single "quality" setting that ranges from Low to Very High. The screenshots show the cumulative effect of changing the modes, and then we will look at individually what effect each of the settings has.

ambient occlusion

Ambient Occlusion - an effect that creates additional shadows at the junction of polygons: all kinds of corners, niches, etc. On the lowest quality settings, Metro: LL uses a fast "approximate" AO algorithm, which, admittedly, makes the game look too dark. A more advanced version combines pre-rendered shadows with an interactive dynamic component.

ambient occlusion

bump mapping

Good old Bump Mapping has been supported by video cards since the days of DirectX 6 and Metro: LL is still used to create imaginary terrain in places where more realistic technologies are not justified. A "basic" and "exact" version of the algorithm is available.

Detail Texturing

Textures in Metro: LL have a resolution of 2048x2048. And when the Detail Texturing option is enabled, an additional, more detailed texture of the same resolution is superimposed on objects near the point of view.

Geometric detail

This parameter does not need a detailed comment. The higher it is, the more detailed game objects look.

Image Post Processing

Metro: LL contains a huge amount of post-processing effects, at high quality presets they are fully activated.. The most notable ones are HDR, Bloom and, of course, Depth of Field. The latter no longer causes such a dramatic drop in performance as in the first game in the series.

Night light effect (Blue Shift) and Bloom from the lunar disk

Light Interaction

As the name of the option suggests, it controls the shaders that are associated with the lighting of surfaces made from materials of various properties. Accordingly, at the Full Interaction level, the play of light on objects looks more believable.

motion blur

At low graphics quality settings, blurring of moving objects is completely disabled. With a quality value of High, the entire image is blurred, while at Very High, objects are blurred depending on what exactly in the frame is moving relative to the viewpoint and at what speed. For example, the walls of the tunnel flying past are blurred, and the handcar, which is motionless relative to the protagonist, looks clear.

Differentiated motion blur application

Parallax Mapping

Even with tessellation enabled, some surfaces use the Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) described above.

Shadow Filtering

The setting that manages the processing of shadows: softening, removing artifacts. Allows three positions: "fast", "normal" and "high quality" filtering.

Shadow Resolution

Depending on the state of this setting, light maps of different detail are applied. In practice, this manifests itself in how much the shadow cast by the object is similar to its outlines. But regardless of the resolution of the maps, the engine always creates shadows with a complex structure (the sharpest part and penumbra).

Skin Shading

On the highest level quality, a well-known technique called Subsurface Scattering is used, which treats the skin of the characters as a translucent object, through which light penetrates to some extent. At low settings, simple shaders are applied to the skin or any additional processing is completely turned off.

Soft Particles

In the absence of hardware PhysX, instead of real particles in three-dimensional space, the engine often generates fire and smoke effects from numerous rasters superimposed on the screen. With the soft particles feature, overlaying raster effects on 3D geometry looks more natural.

Volumetric Texturing

For some particle arrays that the player will observe at close range, the 4A Engine uses volumetric textures. In the same way, the sun's rays visible in the dusty air are formed.

Volumetric Texturing

"Optimization and picture"

Creators Metro: Last Light talked about the performance of the game on consoles and PC

« The guys from 4A are weird, techno-mages, and we're very intrigued by their work.».

Beynon also talked about the console versions of the game.

« The engine was created to create a cross-platform game" he says. " Therefore, every time the consoles go on an equal footing at each individual stage. We're very proud of what we've been able to get out of the 360 ​​and PS3. We think both of them will be great. Destruction, lighting, it all looks great on consoles too.».

« This time you will be able to see even more destruction and even more spectacular lighting effects than before. And in last game there were destructions, but they were not used much in the gameplay Beynon continues. " Now the game will have a lot more destruction, physics and environmental objects».

But the magical powers of THQ and 4A are not unlimited. They did admit that PC owners would benefit from console users.

« Obviously, if you have a latest PC at home, it will perform better than consoles.", - admitted Beynon.

NVIDIA GeForce Driver 320.14 beta: driver specifically for Metro: Last Light

4. Using SweetFX

SweetFX refers to utilities called shader injector (shader injector), and allows you to add new functions to the d3d.dll library. First of all, they are used to implement new methods of FXAA and SMAA anti-aliasing in games (in fact, one of them, injectSMAA, is what SweetFX "grew" from). However, it is not for nothing that the name of SweetFX contains the phrase Shader Suite - this utility can do much more than just add a new type of anti-aliasing to the game (those who are interested in the technical details of Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing, or SMAA, and its advantages over other types of antialiasing can be recommended to refer to).

I recommend putting latest version SweetFX 1.4.
The unpacked archive must be placed in the root folder of the game. On/Off done with the F12 key.
The picture is clearer and more saturated, while fps only grows.

After you download and install SweetFX recalibrate your monitor

And set these settings:

When using SweetFX, set SSAA anti-aliasing as in the screenshot, or it is recommended to turn it off, because. these things may not be compatible.

DX10

Metro - Last Light.rar 199.33K standard preset
Metro - Last Light (Vibrant).rar 199.33Kbright, rich presset

There are many ways to improve the performance of games on the weak computer. Next, we'll look at them in order from easy to hard, and tell you what to do if Metro: Last Light slows down.

A simple solution to the brakes in Metro: Ray of Hope

1. Download and run the world famous CCleaner(download from a direct link) is a program that will clean your computer of unnecessary garbage, as a result of which the system will work faster after the first reboot;
2. Update all drivers in the system using the program Driver Updater(download via direct link) - it will scan your computer and update all drivers to the latest version in 5 minutes;
3. Install the program WinOptimizer(download from a direct link) and turn on the game mode in it, which will end useless background processes during game launch and increase performance in the game.

Free up disk space

Before proceeding to active actions, you need to make sure that there is at least 10-15 GB on the computer free space on the hard drive on which operating system.

This is usually the "C" drive. This minimum margin is necessary so that the system can create Metro: Last Light temporary file stores, caches, and so on without any problems.

And make sure you have enough space on your hard drive for the game to work properly.

Disable unnecessary programs

Each program that is running in the OS takes up a certain percentage random access memory and loads the processor. It is easy to verify this, just open the task manager using the Ctrl + Alt + Del keyboard shortcut:

If the computer does not have the most powerful processor installed, and the RAM is less than 8-16 GB, then before starting Metro: Last Light, you need to disable unnecessary programs. For example, Skype, Discord, Telegram, Google Chrome and so on.

Disable overlays

It's about about those programs that are able to display their interface on top of the game. Often there are such on the computer - Fraps, Steam, Origin and so on. Even when the overlay is hidden, it is processed by the computer, reducing FPS in Metro: Last Light.

Therefore, all overlays must be disabled. Almost always, this can be done in the program settings without having to uninstall it. For example, the Steam overlay is easily disabled through the menu:

Update video card drivers, download drivers for Metro: Last Light

Regardless of which video card is in the system unit, its drivers must be kept up to date. Therefore, before starting Metro: Ray of Hope, you should go to the manufacturer's website and check if new drivers are out:

After installing the driver, you should restart your computer to eliminate the possibility of failures. It is also worth considering that for many older video cards, new drivers are no longer available.

For some games, video card manufacturers release specially optimized drivers. Look for those in the news section about Metro: Last Light - we usually write about them. You can also look at the website of video card manufacturers.

Change power options

By default, the computer is set to a balanced power mode, which, and in some laptops, in order to increase the operating time, is even set to save energy.

This prevents the computer from achieving its full potential in Metro: Ray of Hope, so the first step is to open the control panel, which can be found using the search. After you need to do the following:

• Select the view mode "Small Icons";
• Click on "Power";
• On the screen, find the option "Setting the power plan", click on it;
• Click on "Change advanced power settings";
• In the window that opens, find the drop-down list;
• Select "High performance" from the list;
• Click the "Apply" button, then click "OK".

Enable Nvidia performance mode

After installing the Nvidia graphics card driver, you can speed up Metro: Last Light using performance mode. This will slightly simplify the graphics in the game, but increase the FPS. Please note that this method is only available if you have a graphics card with an Nvidia chip. Here's how to do it:

• In the lower right corner of the screen, in the tray, right-click on the NVIDIA Settings icon;
• In the window that opens on the right, select the "3D Settings" tab;
• Click on the option "Adjust image settings with preview";
• On the right, check the box next to "Custom settings with an emphasis on:";
• Move the "slider", which is below, to the leftmost position "Performance";
• Click the "Apply" button below.

Next, you need to run Metro: Ray of Hope and make sure everything is displayed correctly. If there are problems, then instead of "Custom settings with an emphasis on:" select "Settings according to 3D application".

Disable Windows Effects

If Metro: Last Light does not work in full screen mode, but in a window, including without a border, then you can increase FPS by turning off Windows effects. To do this, you need to do the following:

• Open "Explorer";
• In the window that opens, go to the "Visual Effects" tab;
• Check the box next to the "Ensure the best performance" option.

If necessary, for last step you can select the "Special Effects" option. In this case, you can independently choose which effects to leave and which ones to turn off.

Increase paging file if there is not enough RAM for Metro: Ray of Hope

To compensate for the lack of RAM, you can increase the paging file. This will allow the system to store some of the required Metro: Last Light data directly on the hard drive. Here's what to do:

• Open "Explorer";
• Right click click on "This PC" (or "My Computer");
• In the context menu, click on "Properties";
• In the window that opens, on the left, click on "Advanced system settings";
• In the window that opens, go to the "Advanced" tab;
• In the "Performance" section, click on the "Settings ..." button;
• In the window that opens, go to the "Advanced" tab;
• Uncheck the option "Automatically choose the size of the paging file" (if any);
• Check the box next to the "Specify size" option;
• In the text fields "Initial size (MB):" and "Maximum size (MB):" specify in megabytes a value equal to half the amount of RAM.

For example, if a 4 GB “stick” is installed in the system unit, that is, 4192 MB, you need to enter the number 2048 in the fields above. You can make the swap file larger, but this will not give any increase.

It should be understood that the swap file is effective only when the system does not have enough RAM. If the computer has 8-16 GB, then the paging file is practically not used. And when using an SSD drive as a system drive, the presence of a paging file can completely slow down the performance of Metro: Last Light, so you should not thoughtlessly set a large paging file value.

Degrade the graphics even more in Metro: Last Light (potato mode) - turn off anti-aliasing, etc.

If Metro: Ray of Hope starts, but slows down a lot, then before starting all the procedures, you should reduce the graphics to a minimum through the game settings. If this does not help, then you will have to resort to help third party programs to set up a video card:

• for video cards from Nvidia;
• for AMD video cards.

After downloading the program, run it. In the case of NVIDIA Inspector, you need to run nvidiaProfileInspector.exe, not nvidiaInspector.exe. At the top, in the "Profiles:" line, you can select any game that is supported by Nvidia drivers.

All available settings are listed below. There are a lot of them, but in order to worsen the graphics in the game to "potato", just a few, which are in the "Antialiasing" section, are quite enough.

The biggest performance gain comes from changing these two parameters:

• Texture filtering - LOD bias;
• Antialiasing - Transparency Supersampling.

Each of these settings has different meanings. Some of them can make the picture in Metro: Last Light indigestible, so you should try different combinations of values ​​that give a more or less tolerable playable picture.

In the case of RadeonMod, everything is the same: you need to find the settings responsible for displaying textures and reduce them until the FPS in the game becomes high enough.

How to overclock the video card for Metro: Ray of Hope

Everything related to "overclocking" is aimed at increasing performance, but these are quite extensive topics, which are difficult to describe in a nutshell. Plus, it's always a risky business. If so, we have warned you.

To get higher FPS in Metro: Last Light, you can first try to overclock your graphics card. The easiest way to do this is to use the built-in software features from the graphics card manufacturer.

For example, some GIGABYTE video cards come with the Graphics Engine program, which has several ready-made overclocking profiles. This allows you to squeeze out 5-10 additional frames per second from the video card.

If there is no program from the manufacturer, then you can always use one-stop solution- . This is one of the best programs for overclocking, it has many different settings.

But here you have to configure everything manually. First of all, you should increase the frequency of the video chip itself (“Core Clock”) and the frequency of the video card memory (“Memory Clock”). On the left are the base values ​​of these parameters. Temperature and voltage increase are displayed on the right - these characteristics allow you to monitor the "health" of the video card.

As the frequency increases, the video card heats up. If the temperature goes over 85 degrees, then you should increase the fan speed (“Fan Speed”). If the temperature rises to 100 degrees, then overclocking should be stopped immediately, otherwise the chip may melt. Powerful "overclocking" requires water cooling, so you should not increase the frequency by more than 10%.

overclock processor

While "overclocking" the video card is quite feasible right in Windows, in order to improve the performance of the processor and thereby increase the speed of Metro: Ray of Hope, you will have to go into the BIOS.

Gamer "overclocking" of the processor usually involves increasing the processor multiplier (Core Ratio). This can be done not on every processor, but only on where this multiplier is unlocked. Typically, such processors are marked in a special way. For example, Intel uses the 'K' and 'X' markings. That is, for example, the i7-4790 cannot be overclocked using a multiplier, but the i7-4790K can.

But how to find out the exact name of the processor model? The easiest way is to use the program. Having launched it, you need to open the "CPU" tab and look at the very first line - "Name". This is the name of the processor. By the way, in the same place you can see from the multiplier itself. It's in the "Clocks" section, in the "Multiplier" line. If the processor supports "overclocking", then this multiplier can be changed.

To change the Core Ratio, you must first get into the BIOS shell. To do this, you need to press a special key combination during computer startup (before the windows screen).

The combination may vary depending on the motherboard. Often the BIOS can be called up using the "F8" or "Del" key. On the BIOS screen, you need to find the section dedicated to the processor. Here, too, everything is complicated, since the BIOS has a lot of shells. Almost every motherboard manufacturer uses their own, so without knowing of English language finding the right place is not easy.

You need to change the multiplier gradually, increasing it by 2. After each change, you should restart the computer and carefully check the performance and temperature of the processor. If it gets above 80 degrees during the game, then you should immediately turn off Metro: Last Light, restart the computer, go into the BIOS and lower the Core Ratio value. Otherwise, the processor may burn out.