Metro Exodus PC enhanced edition will use fully ray traced lighting
It'll be free for all Metro Exodus owners
One of the benefits of Metro Exodus escaping the dark underground tunnels of its predecessors was getting a look at just how lovely freezing to death could look. 4A Games are planning to pretty up their apocalypse FPS even further this spring. The PC enhanced edition will trick out Exodus's visuals and lighting even further with expanded ray tracing capabilities and higher resolution textures and other goodies. All the better to see those approaching baddies and frigid, reflective puddles with.
4A Games explain that the PC enhanced edition will require a GPU with ray tracing capability as the minimum system specs. The enhanced edition is such an overhaul, they explain, that it will be released as its own product instead of a patch for Exodus. You'll be able to grab it free if you already own a copy of Exodus on PC.
Here's a bit of the tech talk for you, in 4A's words.
"We have built an all-new Fully Ray Traced Lighting Pipeline that brings a number of optimizations, 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. 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."
The PC enhanced edition kits out Exodus's lighting by making every light source in the game ray traced, 4A say. There's a long list of other upgrades like support for DLSS 2.0 and 4K resolution textures. You can find the full list of features over on their announcement post.
4A say that the Metro Exodus PC enhanced edition will launch on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store sometime this spring free for current Exodus owners.
If you're looking towards Metro's future, 4A have previously mentioned that they're working on the next Metro game and experimenting with multiplayer components that they'd always wanted to pursue with the series.