Alex Battaglia analyzes the ray tracing, global illumination, and performance of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition.
The first triple-A PC game that will *only* run on ray tracing equipped PCs (and next-gen consoles to come), Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a phenomenal improvement over the 2019 original release. In this extended video, Alex Battaglia reveals the new RT effects, shows off the benefits for developers, checks out DLSS, VRS and TAA upscaling and analyses performance on both AMD and Nvidia hardware.
Introduction
New Feature Analysis: Global Illumination from All Lights
New Feature Analysis: Ray Traced Emissive Lights
New Feature Analysis: Unlimited Light Bounces
New Feature Analysis: Ray Traced Reflections
Exclusive Behind the Scenes: Developer Tools and Process
Ray Tracing Trade-Offs
PC Performance: New Ray Tracing Options (Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2060)
PC Performance: Metro Exodus 2019 vs Enhanced Edition 2021 (Ryzen 5 3600/RTX 2060)
New Feature Analysis: Variable Rate Shading, DLSS 2.1, Temporal Upsampling
Alex's Optimised Settings
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT vs Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080
Conclusion
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Why it's here
3 people recommend this
What people say. Recommended as an excellent overview of real-time global illumination and how ray tracing changes game development.
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Real-time ray traced reflections are an impressive trick, but real-time global illumination is where this tech shines IMO. This Digital Foundry video ( link to this video ) is a good overview of why this is such a huge leap forward for developers and players alike. Metro: Exodus EE (the game discussed in the video) is the only game I've played that really shows what 'RTX' and similar GPU hardware is capable of, IMO. Even CP77, which was supposed to push modern systems to their limit, feels like its ray tracing and GI stuff is janky and tacked-on.
Here is a good video by Digital Foundry looking at Metro Exodus Enhanced edition with devtools. Where they show what raytracing is and how it differs from regular lighting. link to this video simplified tldr: with raytracing you build the environment, designate which parts (like sun, lamps) emit light and you are done. With regular an artist has to spend hours to days adding many fake lightsources to get same result.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition uses RT for basically all lighting, doesn't it? link to this video Same with Minecraft RTX link Though both still calculate the lighting over several frames, so if you want to be pedantic you could argue that it's not strictly real time.
