Metro Next-Gen Update Sneaks in DLSS 5 — But the Patch Is a Mess

4A Games quietly added DLSS 5 to Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light, and while visuals improve, DSOGaming calls the update possibly the worst patch they've ever seen.

Well, this is a surprise. 4A Games dropped a next-gen update for Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light yesterday, and buried inside it is something NVIDIA never even announced: DLSS 5 support. That's right — nobody said these two Metro games would get it, but here we are.

DSOGaming spotted the option and decided to put it through its paces. Their test rig: an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5-6000, an RTX 5080 and an RTX 5090, running Windows 10 64-bit with NVIDIA Game Ready driver 621.01. The goal was simple — see what DLSS 5 actually does to these older titles.

Visually, the difference is noticeable. With DLSS 5 on, characters look markedly better. With it off, they look like plastic dolls — and the article gives one extreme example where hair and skin are especially rough without it. Flip DLSS 5 on and things improve, though the hair still looks pretty bad, which goes to show DLSS 5 isn't magic. Still, overall the image is far better than the original release. In these games, DLSS 5 mostly changes how characters look, with some minor tweaks to the world that you probably won't notice while actually playing.

Performance, though, takes a serious hit. At native 1440p with DLAA, DLSS 5 on delivers 220 to 250 FPS. Turn it off and you're looking at over 330 FPS with GPU usage sitting at just 70 percent. That's a massive gap for a feature that's mainly polishing faces.

But the real story here is the patch itself. According to the article, both games currently refuse to offer resolutions above 1440×1080. None of the fixes floating around the Steam forums worked — only reinstalling the graphics driver let them select 2560×1440, and then changing a single setting in the NVIDIA App locked it right back to 1440×1080. Metro: Last Light also suffers from severe stuttering that doesn't seem to be shader or scene-transition related. And V-Sync is broken too: on a 240Hz monitor, enabling it locks the game to 60 FPS.

The article asks the obvious question — if the developers can add native DLSS 5 support, why are basic settings like resolution and V-Sync falling apart? The patch notes even claim you need a 4K monitor to use 4K resolution, which, as the piece puts it, is simply not how that works. DSOGaming doesn't mince words, calling this possibly the worst patch they've ever seen — and they're not exaggerating. After grabbing comparison screenshots, they uninstalled both games.

So should you turn DLSS 5 on? Their advice: if your GPU is strong enough, go for it. But if you can't hit 40 to 50 FPS before enabling frame generation, you're better off skipping it. Have you tried the Metro next-gen update yet — and did it treat your rig any better?