GIGABYTE AERO 15 CLASSIC-XA Review
Metro: Exodus
“But can it run Crysis?” has largely been replaced by “but can it run Metro: Exodus?” thanks to the massive amount of resources used by the game. Exodus is an RTX-capable game that uses ray tracing for global illumination. This is extremely heavy on non-RTX cards, and a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti can see its frame rate drop by 75 % with ray tracing enabled. The GeForce RTX 2060 in the GIGABYTE AERO 15 CLASSIC-XA is therefore ideal for the game.
Three tests were run for Metro: Exodus in order to test both with and without RTX. All tests were run at 1920×1080, and the first was using the Ultra preset with motion blur set to high. The second was done using the RTX preset with motion blur once again set to high, and with DLSS enabled. Not everyone is a fan of the image quality, and it does also improve performance somewhat by having anti-aliasing performed by the otherwise idle Tensor cores As such, another RTX test was run with DLSS disabled, but again with motion blur set to high.
AC Power
Metro Exodus is incredibly tough on your hardware, and it shows. Using the Ultra preset the average frame rate was all the way down at 44 FPS, which is really too low to consider playable. You will definitely want to turn down a few settings here. With both RTX and DLSS enabled things remained about the same with an average of 46 FPS, but disabling DLSS took a drastic turn for the worse. With DLSS disabled, the average frame rate dropped to 36 FPS and spent quite a bit of time below 20 FPS. In a nutshell, if you want to use RTX you’ll need to use DLSS as well.
Battery Power
Unplugging the laptop resulted in the game being basically unplayable in any of the tests. With the Ultra preset we saw an average of 28 FPS with an increase to 29 FPS with RTX and DLSS enabled. With RTX enabled and DLSS disabled it was completely unplayable. The average frame rate fell to 23 FPS, but more so than that it dropped below 10 FPS many times. This is one game you’ll definitely want to play on AC power.
