Metro Awakening gameplay serves as an interesting graphics comparison between standalone and console VR.
David Heaney
If you missed it, on Friday Vertigo Games and Deep Silver shared six minutes of Metro Awakening gameplay running standalone on Quest 3, a day after sharing similar gameplay on PlayStation VR2.
To help you see the difference in graphical fidelity, UploadVR's Don Hopper composited the most similar sequences from the gameplay side by side.
The comparison shows Quest 3's 15-watt XR2 Gen 2 mobile chipset holds up remarkably well to the 4kg console drawing 200 watts of mains power, though there are of course significant differences.
Lighting is by far the biggest improvement on the PlayStation version. From the metal magazines to the skin of mutants, materials reflect light instead of just being illuminated by it, and the environmental lighting is richer too, interacting with effects like smoke. Dynamic sources such as the player's weapon firing even light up nearby objects, something sorely missing on the Quest version.
That said, geometry and textures look to be very similar between the platforms, and in general it looks like the same game on a different graphics setting, not a fundamentally different look as we often saw in the Quest 2 era.
Metro Awakening is coming to Quest 2 and Quest Pro too, but we haven't yet seen what it looks like on those older headsets, which have less than half the GPU performance of Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Henry Stockdale
Another major difference between the platforms will be the display type you're viewing it on. On PlayStation VR2's OLED panels you'll see true blacks and better detail in the darkness of the Moscow Metro, as well as punchier colors, but at the cost of mura, a non-uniform fixed pattern noise across the image.
As for the gameplay of Metro Awakening, UploadVR's Henry Stockdale recently played a 45-minute demo of the game on PlayStation VR2. While he's reserving full judgement for the final release, his initial impressions are that it "adapts the flatscreen series well with strong atmospheric design and good physicality".
Metro Awakening will arrive on November 7 on Meta Quest headsets, PlayStation VR2, Steam, and Viveport PC.
