And yet, the bench says it is being run and they produce a number of FPS with it 'ON'.
Raja probably has a way to simulate some sort of CUDA. Makes some sense too. They don't need it at full performance/feature parity.
Unfortunately it's not simple to "simulate CUDA", there have been attempts but not very successful. It's a huge advantage for NVIDIA that made their near monopoly on certain sectors.
Intel has a different vision to those kinds of computational needs - oneAPI&co. However they are going the other way - you write your program in oneAPI tech and it then
gets compiled to CUDA in order to run on NVIDIA GPUs. Obviously it can target CPUs, AMD and Intel GPUs/accelerators as well.
Besides, have you seen how close to PhysX the stuff in, say, UE5 is? Physics calculations aren't rocket science, and they can emulate things.
Oh yes, from what I've read PhysX in UE5 is deprecated in favor of Unreal Chaos. Unity also supports Havok and Unity Physics together with PhysX (and Box2D for 2D simulations). I don't think it's an important competitive advantage to NVIDIA any more, its last big thing was open-sourcing the SDK. However NVIDIA is known for very good relations with developers, so maybe Metro is using something special.
Note also how other technologies, notably the ones that say 'I need a tensor/RT core' are still absent.
Intel Arc will have tensor computational capabilities with Matrix Engines and RT acceleration of some sort (it remains to be seen if they go with more specialized units like NVIDIA or more generic ones like AMD). But again, apart from common APIs like Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan I don't think they will provide support compatible with, for example, NVIDIA OptiX.
Another option is that what we're reading below is just utter bullshit. Or maybe that 9 FPS dip is a PhysX effect
That was my thought as well, it might be the game being confused somehow, or the screenshot is faked, we'll have to wait for official reviews