Visual Settings

Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light are both based of the 4A engine, which has many Visual Settings.

Metro 2033
DirectX: Can be set from 9 to 11. DirectX 10 enables per object motion blur when paired with the "Very High" quality option. DirectX 11 enables contact hardening shadows and allows the use of tessellation and advanced depth of field.

Resolution: Choose your maximum screen resolution. Only go lower if the extra frame rates are badly needed.

Quality: Can be set from Low to Very High.

Anti-aliasing: Can be set from AAA to 4xMSAA. Note that even on MSAA the game uses both MSAA and AAA anti-aliasing

Texture Filtering: Uses anisotropic filtering. Can be set from 4x to 16x. This option's effect on frame rates is relatively small.

PhysX: Enables PhysX. Works best with NVIDIA cards. Can cause lag on ATI/AMD cards.

Tessellation: Enables Object Tessellation. Improves some small objects and most character models.

Advanced DoF: Enables Advanced Depth of Field. Can cause major impact on performance.

Metro Last Light
DirectX: Automatically set to best available version. Supports only DirectX 10 and DirectX 11. Game performance and shadow quality are better in DirectX 11.

Resolution: Choose your maximum screen resolution. Only go lower if the extra frame rates are badly needed.

Quality: Can be set from Low to Very High.

Texture Filtering: Uses anisotropic filtering. Can be set from 4x to 16x. This option's effect on frame rates is relatively small.

Motion Blur: Can be set from Low to Normal. Difference is usually seen on High and Very High settings, where normal uses per object motion blur.

PhysX: Enables PhysX. Works best with NVIDIA cards. Can cause lag on ATI/AMD cards.

SSAA: Supersampling. Goes from 0.5x to off to 4x. Extreme performance hit from 2x to 4x. Improves frame rates but badly damages image quality if set to 0.5x. Game natively uses AAA and FXAA anti-aliasing anyway.

Tessellation: Goes from Off to Very High. On normal only characters and a few small objects get tessellated. On High, many items in game are tessellated at about 10 meters from the player. On Very High, the game begins tessellation from farther away (15 meters).