Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition with ray tracing as minimum requirements is tested

The first graphics cards with support for ray tracing was released with Nvidia’s Geforce RTX 2000 series in 2018. Depending on who is asked, it has been either quite good or too slow for the industry to embrace the new technology, and a recurring question is when the first games with ray tracing as minimum requirements arrive.

Play with ray tracing as minimum requirements are already available with special versions RTX version of Minecraft and Quake II, but these are both old games. Now 4A Games takes it a step further with a more modern game, in the form of a special version of the 2019 Metro Exodus – Enhanced Edition. With this version becomes just ray tracing a minimum requirement or more specifically a mandatory element.

To really take advantage of the new technology, the game’s lighting has been redesigned from the ground up. Gone are traditional rasterization techniques for light that all games otherwise have as a base, instead all lights and shadows are created exclusively with the help of ray tracing. Digital Foundry goes through the details and shows comparisons to the old version of the game, and has also gained access to developer tools where they can manually adjust, among other things, light sources.

Beyond ray tracing 4A Games has taken the opportunity to upgrade the DLSS implementation to version 2.1 for better scaling. In order to maximize performance, they have implemented so-called variable rate shading (VRS). Of course, they also take care to evaluate the performance with graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, and give recommendations on which settings are best suited to each product.

Enhanced Edition of Metro Exodus will be available for free to anyone who owns Metro Exodus on PC, but requires a separate installation of the game. The game will be released on May 6.

Are you going to try Enhanced Edition and what did you think of the differences in the video?