Metro Exodus Launches For Linux But Off To Bumpy Start

As scheduled, Metro Exodus saw its native Linux port debut today. This first person shooter from 4A Games launched on Windows and consoles in 2019 while the 4A Engine powered game only debuted today for macOS and Linux. Previously it would work with Steam Play but now there is a native Linux port albeit with some kinks still to work out.

Metro Exodus is available natively on Linux via Steam for $39.99 USD as the newest title in the Metro series.

It's been bumpy so far though for Metro Exodus on Linux. At first, there was a Steam depot snafu leading to the game not downloading on Linux... Hours later, that was resolved.

When it came to trying first with Radeon graphics (using Mesa 21.1-devel and Linux 5.12) and various RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs, the game crashed each time immediately with no helpful information logged. But I see other Linux gamers have been encountering this too with Radeon graphics. So I installed the latest NVIDIA proprietary driver and popped in various GeForce RTX 30 graphics cards... smooth! No issues like were encountered with RADV. So hopefully whatever Radeon issue is worked out soon in Mesa or by the game itself. With NVIDIA, even RTX ray-tracing support is exposed in Metro Exodus settings on Linux.

But the latest issue comes down to the benchmarking mode not working... There are benchmark command-line options present in the Metro Exodus binary similar to Metro Last Light Redux, but they appear broken at the moment. Launching the game with "-benchmark" and the related arguments leads to... just a blank screen.

Thus no benchmarks yet of Metro Exodus on Linux but hopefully that problem as well will be resolved quickly as I looked quite forward to this native Linux game port for benchmarking purposes. If the benchmarking mode is fixed up, there will be many driver/GPU benchmarks moving forward with this game on Linux.