Metro Redux Next-Gen Update Secretly Adds DLSS 5: How to Use It

Somebody at 4A Games buried the lede. The free Metro Redux Next-Gen Update hit PC on Thursday, October 22, and the patch notes just say "DLSS Support." Players digging through the menus found more than that: DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, NVIDIA's AI rendering tech, running in a twelve-year-old shooter. That makes Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux the first games to get it after NBA 2K27.

Metro Redux Next-Gen Update: release dates and price

• PC (Steam, Epic, GOG): out now since Thursday, October 22. Free for existing owners.
• PS5 and Xbox Series X|S: Thursday, October 29, along with the Windows Store version. Free for PS4 and Xbox One owners.
• Games covered: Metro 2033 Redux and Metro: Last Light Redux.
• What's in it: 4K textures, uncapped frame rates, DLSS, AMD FSR and 4A's own TSR upscaling, screen-space global illumination, plus better geometry, materials, animation and audio.
• Consoles: Deep Silver is targeting native 4K at 60fps or upscaled 4K at 120fps, with PS5 Pro PSSR, DualSense trigger support and Xbox Play Anywhere.
• Not included: ray tracing. Deep Silver calls this "not a full remaster or remake."

How to turn on DLSS 5 in Metro Redux

• You need an RTX 50 Series GPU (or an RTX Spark laptop). That's NVIDIA's requirement for DLSS 5. Older RTX cards still get regular DLSS upscaling.
• In Video settings, set the upscaler to DLSS. A new option, DLSS-NR (Neural Rendering), appears after that.
• It doesn't work with FSR or 4A's TSR, only with DLSS.

What it does: DLSS 5 adds an AI pass at the end of each frame that improves lighting and material detail while keeping the game's own geometry and textures. In Metro, the biggest change is in faces and skin. Testers say the environments look about the same.

The performance cost

It isn't free. TweakTown called it a "big performance hit," though its RTX 5090 stayed above 120fps on the Quality preset. Wccftech, citing DSOGaming captures, put it at roughly 220–240fps with DLSS 5 on, down from 250–330fps with it off. Wccftech also suspects Metro shipped with the older NBA 2K27 model rather than the faster one NVIDIA released this month, which it says roughly halves the overhead.

More is coming. NVIDIA has DLSS 5 arriving in Hogwarts Legacy on Thursday, November 5 and in Where Winds Meet in late November. It also added DLSS 5 to the RTX Remix modding toolkit on October 23, so modders remastering old PC games can use it too.

The 2nd Shift take

This is the best case for AI in games so far: it's optional, it's free, and it runs on your own GPU, not in some cloud service. But a hidden setting nobody put in the patch notes isn't a great look, and right now only RTX 50 owners get to try it. Old faces with modern AI skin can look a little uncanny, too. The free 4K update is the real win for most players. DLSS 5 is an interesting extra for 50-series owners, not a reason to upgrade.

If you make mods or content and want to figure out where AI tools fit your workflow, take the CRAFTR Quiz. Running it on a 50-series card? Post your before-and-after screenshots in the 2nd Shift Discord.

Keep reading: Xbox Labs Explained: Xbox Bets on AI-Era Ports and Remixes · Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.5 Patch Notes

Sources: tbreak, TweakTown, Wccftech, OC3D, Gematsu, Deep Silver, NVIDIA