Deep Silver has just released its new adrenaline-rush sci-fi FPS, METAL EDEN. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on PC.

For our benchmarks, I used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, RX 9070XT, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090. I also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 581.15, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.8.1 drivers.

Reikon Games has included a few graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Textures, Global Illumination, Shadows, and more. There is also support for NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0, and Intel XeSS 2.0. And although there is support for Frame Gen with AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, there is no support for DLSS 3 Frame Gen.

METAL EDEN does not have a built-in benchmark tool. So, for our benchmark, I used the following area. This area appeared to be more demanding than all the others you will encounter early in the game. As such, it should give us a pretty good idea of how the rest of it runs.

At Native 1080p/Ultra Settings, most of our GPUs were able to provide framerates higher than 60FPS. The only GPU that is unable to provide a 60FPS experience is the NVIDIA RTX 2080Ti. The AMD Radeon RX 6900XT manages to compete with the NVIDIA RTX 3080. The AMD Radeon RX 9070XT is also able to match the performance of the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.

At Native 1440p/Ultra Settings, our top four GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience. As for Native 4K/Ultra Settings, the only GPU that was able to run it with over 60FPS at all times was the NVIDIA RTX 5090.

METAL EDEN also appears to scale well with its in-game settings. By dropping to High settings, we were able to get over 100FPS at all times at Native 4K on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Medium Settings appeared to run similarly to High. But then we have the Low Settings. These completely strip the game of its lighting. As such, we get a massive performance boost. Below you can find a comparison between Ultra and Low settings.

Graphics-wise, METAL EDEN looks great. It has some visual issues, like the really noisy Lumen reflections. Moreover, a lot of reflections are using SSR and not Lumen. You’ll also notice some lighting artifacts due to the low quality of Lumen. This is one of the main reasons this game runs better than other UE5 games. Yes, you get a better performance. But that comes at the cost of visual quality.

It’s worth noting that I did not experience any major stutters in METAL EDEN. This is something that will please a lot of PC gamers. I perhaps got one or two stutters during my tests. Thankfully, there are no shader compilation stutters.

All in all, METAL EDEN is another UE5 game that performs great on PC. However, that comes at a cost. There are noticeable visual issues with it. So, it will be ironic to see those who complain about the DLSS artifacts praise this game’s performance. You’ll still get visual artifacts, only this time they are due to the low quality of Lumen and not due to DLSS. Earlier today, we reported on Hell is Us. Hell is Us is more demanding than METAL EDEN and has a more stable image than it does. Both of them run better than the vast majority of UE5 games, though.

Enjoy!