We've already taken a deep look at Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition on PC and were genuinely impressed with its phenomenal ray tracing - perhaps not surprising when the new 4A Engine is built from the ground up with hardware-accelerated RT hardware in mind. However, the question we could not answer at the time was simple enough: how does that experience translate to the new wave of consoles? Is there enough horsepower on tap to deliver a state-of-the-art 60fps ray tracing showcase? We've now had the chance to test the game on both Xbox Series X and Series S hardware - and the results are excellent.

Comparisons up against the last-gen versions are entirely valid and looking at Xbox One X as the best of the lot, the new game is transformed. Yes, you're getting twice the frame-rate (last-gen topped out at 30fps) but it's the transition to an RT-based aesthetic that makes all of the difference. The rasterised real-time global illumination system of the old version looked fine, but ray tracing takes fidelity to the next level. All of the old artist-placed lights are gone, replaced with a fully ray traced alternative that 'just works'.

Light from the sun, the moon - or objects that emit light - taps into RT, illuminating any given scene with accurately calculated light bounce. The original Metro Exodus's PC RT solution shipped with just one light bounce, while the Enhanced Edition - even on consoles - works with infinite bounces, calculated over time. As a consequence of this, usual screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) isn't required. It's all part of the global GI solution delivered by ray tracing. It's also far easier to show rather than tell, so please check out the video embedded below to appreciate how this technology works.

Read more

Koch Media has announced a livestream as part of Summer Game Fest.

Koch Primetime is set to take place at 8pm UK time on 11th June.

Koch Media releases video games under the Deep Silver publishing label, and owns the likes of Saints Row, Dead Island and Metro. It also recently set up a new studio to revive TimeSplitters.

Read more

Metro Exodus's Enhanced Edition is a very important game - it's the first triple-A game we know of that's built on technology that demands the inclusion of hardware-accelerated ray tracing hardware. To be clear, the new Metro is not a fully path-traced game built entirely on RT, but rather a hybrid renderer where global illumination, lighting and shadows are handled by ray tracing, while other elements of the game still use traditional rasterisation techniques. The bottom line though is that this is the foundation for developer 4A Games going forward: its games will require a PC with hardware RT graphics capabilities, while their console versions will tap into the same acceleration features found on the ninth generation consoles. And while 4A is the first developer to push this far into next generation graphics features, it's clearly not going to be the last.

We've already reviewed the PC version of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and will be following up in due course with detailed analysis of the PS5, Xbox Series X and Series S renditions of the game. However, in putting together our initial coverage of the game, 4A Games were extremely helpful and collaborative in ensuring the depth and accuracy of our work. If you've seen our video breakdown of the title, you'll have seen the behind the scenes editor shots showing level design workflow before and after the transition to ray tracing - but that's just the tip of the iceberg. 4A were also very helpful in going deep - really deep - in explaining how their RT implementation works. On top of that, the developer gave us an excellent overview of the project: why it was time to move their engine to RT, how so many new technologies made their way into Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, and why we need to wait a little while until the console versions are released.

It's a wealth of in-depth information we're going to be splitting into two deep-dive interviews. This week, we begin with a discussion with Metro Exodus executive producer, Jon Bloch, covering the general approach to developing the game and its new features. Next week, we're catering to the hardcore graphics audience as 4A's CTO Oles Shishkovstov and senior rendering programmer Ben Archard go into extreme depth on the development of the 4A Engine's brand new ray tracing features.

Read more

The Humble Choice bundle for May is now live with Metro Exodus as the headline game - including the option for a free upgrade to the Enhanced Edition when it launches on 6th May.

Digital Foundry has already gone hands-on with this “simply brilliant” update which demands ray tracing capable graphics hardware to play. As the first triple-A game to make this demand it's a strong showcase for the tech so if you want to see the results and don't own a copy yet here's a cheap way to do so.

If you aren't aware, Humble Choice is a rolling subscription service that gives you a number of PC games to keep each month as part of your membership. If you're a new subscriber, you can get the latest bundle with all 12 games for a discounted introductory price of just £8.61 per month.

Read more

This is it: the first triple-A game release that will only work on ray tracing capable graphics hardware. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition takes the real-time RT global illumination of the initial PC release, improves it to an almost generational degree and hands in a game that actually runs faster than its predecessor. We're looking at the PC version today but you can see the groundwork laid here for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series renditions to follow later this year. Put simply, Metro Exodus was my number one title for 'best graphics 2019' and this enhanced edition takes an excellent game to the next level - and in fact, some might say it's our first look at the multi-platform game engines of tomorrow built from the ground-up with RT features in mind.

At the basic level, the enhanced edition takes the original 2019 version of Metro Exodus and revamps the engine to support ray traced global illumination along with a host of additional RT-based features. Further enhancements come from the additional of VRS - variable rate shading - along with Nvidia DLSS 2.1 AI upscaling, along with a temporal upscaling option best suited for AMD GPUs. The smart money suggests that this is the kind of scaling technology which we're likely to see deployed on the console versions (where both PS5 and Series X target 60fps output).

So, how has RT been improved? Put simply, the original Metro Exodus shipped with single bounce global illumination from the sun combined with ray traced ambient occlusion for all indoor areas. It looked great in comparison to the default real-time GI system that was already in place for the rasterised version of the game. However, the new RT system was added midway through development, so 4A Games had to essentially develop the game with two lighting schemes in mind. For the new Metro, the standard rasterised versions of each map - including all individually, artist-placed lights - are gone. The tricks, fake light sources and other legacy elements are replaced with a proper, real-time RT solution that 'just works'.

Read more

Metro Exodus developer 4A Games has announced a PC Enhanced Edition of its first-person shooter. As with the versions coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, this updated PC edition will be offered as a free upgrade.

"We have built an all-new Fully Ray Traced Lighting Pipeline that brings a number of optimisations, upgrades, and new features to the Ray Traced Global Illumination and Emissive Lighting that we pioneered with the original release of Metro Exodus, as well as an upgraded implementation of our powerful Temporal Reconstruction technology to further boost resolution, visual detail and performance," 4A Games wrote in a blog post on the new versions.

"And we've pushed these enhancements to the limit to take advantage of the latest Ray Tracing capable GPU hardware from Nvidia and AMD, to create the ultimate version for our PC enthusiast fans."

Read more

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Metro 2033's release, and developer 4A Games has celebrated the occasion in a wide-ranging new blogpost touching on its future plans - including a new IP, a new multiplayer experience in the Metro universe, and a free next-gen update for Metro Exodus.

The next-gen update will be available to owners of the existing Xbox One and PS4 digital and physical editions of Metro Exodus some time next year, and introduces significant enhancements on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, including ray tracing, faster frame rates, increased resolution, and reduced loading.

Beyond Metro Exodus, 4A has re-confirmed that a new Metro game is in development for next-gen consoles and PC at the studio. And while it says it's not yet ready to share more details, it teases that it's working on a complete overhaul of its engine and renderer "to take advantage of the new power, storage, and hardware supported ray tracing afforded by the new consoles."

Read more

Embracer Group's acquisition spree continues - it's now picked up Metro developer 4A Games for $80m.

Embracer Group, the parent company of THQ Nordic, said it bought 4A Games, which is home to over 150 people across two studios in Malta and Ukraine, via subsidiary Saber Interactive (World War Z).

Perhaps the acquisition shouldn't come as a surprise. 4A Games' Metro games are published by Deep Silver, which is owned by Embracer, so there's a long-running relationship. Embracer not only gets 4A Games, but the Metro IP and the developer's proprietary game engine, which will save costs for the company.

Read more

Metro Exodus: The Two Colonels is the first piece of DLC released by 4A Games and for PC users at least, an already state-of-the-art, forward-looking rendering implementation is pushed on to the next level - one of the best ray tracing implementations seen so far has a remarkable new feature. 4A's recently released expansion trades the wide sandbox levels of the original campaign for a more traditional Metro adventure, full of cramped corridors, tense scripted sequences and that bittersweet tone the game is known for. This return to a more familiar Metro experience sets the scene for 4A's latest transformative graphics update - the addition of emissive lighting ray-traced lighting.

It's exciting stuff, and the comparison gallery below demonstrates just how much more effective the new lighting is - but before we delve into specifics, let's briefly recap how RT works in the base game. Metro Exodus implements ray tracing through global illumination, where light emanates from the sun and the sky, bouncing once to light the game world more naturally than traditional rasterised techniques. This makes a huge difference to outdoor areas, as simulating rather than emulating creates new shadows, lights and colours that don't appear when ray tracing is turned off. However, indoor scenes - where the global illumination of the sun and sky aren't simulated - only see the benefit of screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO) replaced by ray traced ambient occlusion. This is a nice change to make, but it's a more of a subtle tweak to the already extremely dark tunnels of the metro compared to the radical transformation RT brings elsewhere.

In The Two Colonels, indoor scenes finally get their killer RT feature with ray-traced emissive lighting. Put simply, emissives are simply textures that are tagged as being of one or more colours which maintain that colour regardless of lighting conditions. For example, you might see these in sci-fi games for objects that glow. These textures are normally paired with point or spot lights placed inside or nearby, so that the emissive texture looks like it is lighting nearby objects. However, these two systems are disconnected in the game world, so the illusion can be broken by the emissive texture changing colour, growing in size or disappearing altogether when that change is not reflected in the paired point light. Metro Exodus solves this by using ray tracing for its emissive surfaces, so that light emanating from such a surface always matches the surface's shape and colour - no longer an illusion, this is now a physically-grounded simulation.

Read more

Here's an odd one: the PC version of Metro Exodus is available to buy on the Microsoft Store - despite apparently being an Epic Games store exclusive.

Metro Exodus is available to buy to own, or to download as part of the Xbox Game Pass for PC, which launched today.

When publisher Deep Silver announced Metro Exodus would launch as an Epic Games store exclusive - much to the anger of the Steam community - it stated it would come to other platforms a year later, in February 2020.

Read more