Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition im Test : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition supports significantly more ray tracing effects and is free for owners of the original. In the test, the update, which only runs on ray tracing GPUs, knows how to please. The lighting is actually a real eye-catcher. Benchmarks show that the version runs surprisingly well.

Ray tracing in Metro Exodus is set to get even better

Metro Exodus (technology review) was a real eye-catcher when it was released in early 2019. The optics could be increased again with ray tracing, which the title supported at the time as the second at all and very much to the optical advantage. Even today, many games still make less good use of real-time ray tracing than they did in Metro Exodus.

Apparently that wasn’t enough for the developer 4A Games and with Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition for PC they are launching a variant with improved graphics, while the game itself including the DLCs has remained the same. The extended version only runs on GPUs that support ray tracing (GeForce RTX and Radeon RX 6000). Many old graphics cards are thus inevitably left out.

Owners of the original get the upgrade for free, which deserves extra credit so long after release.

ComputerBase clarifies how well the undertaking worked and how much better the revised Metro Exodus actually looks, including numerous benchmarks in this test.

DirectX 12 Ultimate, much more ray tracing, FP16 and more

The feature list of the Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition is long and impressive to read. DirectX 12 Ultimate is now supported and the game’s ray tracing properties have been significantly expanded. Raytracing now relies on the DXR 1.1 API.

In the Enhanced Edition, however, ray tracing is no longer available as an alternative calculation method for various effects, but as an exclusive one. This means that the developers have removed all the classic rasterizer tricks for effects that were also implemented with ray tracing. As a result, the graphics card must support ray tracing, which is only the case with AMD’s RDNA 2 (Radeon RX 6000) and Nvidia’s Turing (GeForce RTX 2000) and Ampere (GeForce RTX 3000). 4A Games emphasizes that some of the deleted tricks were also very complex to calculate in themselves, and the RT approach can sometimes even be faster here with better image quality.

Ray Traced Global Illumination in deutlich komplexerer Form

4A Games had opted for RTGI (“Ray Traced Global Illumination”) for Metro Exodus and thus for the same technology that Resident Evil Village (technology test) uses. However, at that time there was only a relatively simple implementation. Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition goes several steps further. Every single light source, be it direct or indirect, is now calculated using ray tracing. In addition, the RT rays can now “bounce” an infinite number of times if necessary. This means that a light source can spread out much better in a room and does not stop immediately after it first hits a surface. In addition, luminous objects can now transmit their outgoing light to nearby objects. Green glowing mushrooms, commonly found in Metro Exodus, now also illuminate other surfaces, which then change color.

Reflections on water with raytraced influence

Completely new in Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition are reflections optimized by raytracing, which in the original version are displayed exclusively by Screen Space Reflections (SSR). However, this only seems to affect reflections on water. And there, too, SSRs still form the basis, RT only fetches objects that SSR would not have taken into account, although that should be the case. The denoiser has also been revised and should now work much faster and more effectively than before.

FP16 shaders for everyone, DLSS 2.0 only with Nvidia

In order to improve the performance of the game, some FP32 shaders have been replaced by a half-precision FP16 variant, which can be calculated much faster by the graphics cards. If the performance is still not enough, variable rate shading is also supported.

While all of the features mentioned so far work on all ray tracing graphics cards, this does not apply to DLSS, which has been updated from the poorly functioning original version in Metro Exodus to the significantly better version 2.0. DLSS 2.0 requires a GeForce RTX graphics card. On the other hand, a new temporal reconstruction developed by 4A Games can run everywhere, which, like DLSS, reduces the internal resolution to increase performance and then tries again to restore lost details by mixing information from different frames.

In terms of content, the same Metro Exodus

Despite the many changes to the graphics engine, Metro Exodus is still exactly the same game apart from that, there are no gameplay changes. In terms of content, the game is the same, as are the controls and the options available.

Small technical problems

The PC Enhanced Edition showed small technical problems in the test. For example, the game never started in the set resolution, but always in a much lower one. The graphics menu showed the desired resolution, but this was simply not implemented. The solution after each start: change the resolution to any other one and then reset to the desired one.

In addition, saved games showed the phenomenon of not wanting to load correctly the first time. Instead, you ended up in the main menu without comment. A second loading attempt was then always successful.

VRS has virtually no effect

Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition features Variable Rate Shading. Previous games usually show a small performance boost with the feature, but the graphics quality is visibly reduced – as recently with Resident Evil Village. None of that is the case with Metro Exodus.

Both VRS 2X and VRS 4X deliver the same image quality as with deactivated variable rate shading. You have to look very closely to see a difference with VRS 4X. However, this also applies to the performance, which simply remains the same. Neither the GeForce RTX 3080 nor the Radeon RX 6800 XT increase in FPS. The feature is simply pointless.

On the next page: Graphic quality and cost of performance of ray tracing