4A Games has announced a new Enhanced Edition for Metro Exodus that will come with better visuals and graphics. Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition will support more Ray Tracing Effects, will run on AMD’s GPUs, and will support DLSS 2.0.
As 4A Games noted:
“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.”
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition will require a Ray Tracing capable GPU as the minimum spec. 4A Games has not revealed the PC requirements for this new version.
Furthermore, Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition will be available for free to all existing owners. Additionally, 4A Games aims to release it in Spring 2021.
Lastly, you can find below its key features.
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“This upgrade is so extensive, it will require a Ray Tracing capable GPU as the minimum spec, and we will need to deliver this version as a separate product”
First AAA game that require RT in minimal requirement. Welcome to true next-generation. I hope more games will do that in 2021/22. This is only way to push games forward. No more static lighting “baked” into textures. No more games when you can’t destroy or move most of elements because of that static baked lighting. With full dynamic lighting computed in every frame game can be much more dynamic with better physics
“No more games when you can’t destroy or move most of elements because of that static baked lighting.”
yet you can’t move or destroy anything unusual in Metro Exodus. it would be great if ray-tracing lead to more dynamic game worlds but the reasons for static game worlds aren’t solely related to graphics.
In most games since 2011 you can’t move or destroy anything because they use static lighting layer baked into textures. Compare Battlefield Bad Company 2 with real physics and dynamic lighting to Battlefield 3 when EA started to use baked lighting. New BF3 looks better but game is more static than older Bad Company 2. Even Crysis 1 had better physics than Crisis 3 because of that
Modern games uses baked lighting for 95% of objects and only few objects use simplified dynamic lighting. You can move or destroy only those “dynamic objects”.
Imagine thinking you need Ray Tracing to add destructible enviroments, then use examples of games without RT and destructible enviroments lmao. And yes, there is a trade-off between high fidelity graphics and interactivity (think the pre-rendered backgrounds in 90’s games such as Resident Evil).
Games started getting less interactive because they pushed for high quality graphics at the expense of interactivity on outdated consoles.
Resident Evil 2 Remake is perfect example. Great looking… but fully static lighting. You can’t move anything in this game. Whole lighting information is stored as static textures so moving of destroying objects are forbidden by design
What do you call semi interactive shadows (the ones that appears with flashlight)? And what about Stalker Full dynamic lightning?
Look at those games. There are many light sources in every room but only single “dynamic” light source attached to player usually cast shadows. Shadows from all other light sources are static and don’t move or interact with new source of light. Shadows cast from dynamic light looks different (lower quality) than texture baked shadows created on design time.
Look at any game with multiple lights at night… and think if this is how shadows from all those light sources will look in real life. Usually even main player is “glued” to screen with simpler lighting. You will see that in nearly every game all dynamic elements are not blended with lighting from environment. You will see that something is wrong. Games with RTX will fix that
I think you are wrong on Stalker, there are several light sources that cast shadows in Stalker, player flashlight, bonfires, NPC’s flashlights, anomalies, the sun, etc.
For Example:
https://www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=zeo3R2p7xl8
Old game designed when average GPU had 128-256 MB of memory. This was few years before developers started to bake lighting into one layer of textures. At that time all games use simple dynamic lighting. Complex lighting models baked into textures started in 2011 and later when game cards had more than 1 GB of memory
Your point? Stalker does look amazing even today, and the game lighting system plays a huge part in that, and it doesn’t need a RTX 3080 to get the job done.
If you want know more Google: “Unreal Engine Lightmass Global Illumination” – it is easier to understand with pictures. You will find great tutorial from Unreal documentation with full explanation about “static” and “movable” objects. I hope that some day thanks to RT all objects will be “movable”
We all hope tech will be better in the future and hopefully not resource hungry (less likely) but so far Raytracing has proven to be a resource hog and the games that use it doesn’t deliver in the interactivity you like so much (cough… CP 77).
You can’t deliver ‘interactivity’ if RT is optional. It need be ‘minimum requirement’ if you want gameplay changes. This is why Metro is so special as first game that require RT to run
“You can’t deliver ‘interactivity’ if RT is optional.”
Other games did better without RT.
“This is why Metro is so special as first game that require RT to run”
Like i said earlier, if the game did pack more interactivity, physics, destruction, the devs would be the first to announce it.
Your point? Stalker does look amazing even today, and the game lighting system plays a huge part in that.
I think you are wrong on Stalker, there are several light sources that cast shadows in Stalker, player flashlight, bonfires, NPC’s flashlights, anomalies, the sun, etc.
Example:
https://www(dot)youtube(dot)com/watch?v=zeo3R2p7xl8
Non-RT dynamic lighting renders the shadows at a fixed resolution, based on what is being occluded from the light’s point of view. Each light is essentially its own “camera” and the shadow is a texture that is only visible where the mesh blocks the light.
Rendering several light sources with shadow maps can be demanding in its own right. Cyberpunk 2077 has dynamic lighting for most of its lights in both RT and non-RT modes, but maxing the shadow map resolution and distance for all shadows is almost as demanding as using RT shadows…with none of the benefits. RT shadows simulate the umbra effect, where the shadow gets softer with increasing distance from the light source.
Resident Evil 2 Remake is perfect example great… but fully static lighting. You can’t move anything in this game. Whole lighting information is stored as static textures so moving of destroying objects are forbidden by design.
He got the thing backwards, RT hasn’t helped in regards to interactivity, destructible enviromnents and attention to detail. CP 77 is a perfect example of a game with RT going backwards in evolution.
“first game that require RT as minimum”
don’t go for the usual marketing. Its not a brand new game, just an enhanced version of an existing game in a different packaging than the base game (which already does boast RT GI). Their next game will be the game that’ll truly require RT as minimum and it’ll surely look phenomenal.
They had 2 years and build new engine with RT required as minimum. This game was remastered. This is separate game just like “Metro 2033 Redux” in 2014 was separate download from older “Metro 2033”. New game, new textures, new lighting engine. No more baked lighting into texture at design time. Now whole lighting is computed every frame.
That’s not exactly true – yes the lighting is somewhat static, but Metro Exodus or and even semi-openworld games are not using lightmaps (textures with lighting information). There is too much surface area to cover.
They use Reflection Probes for specular reflections and Lighting Probes (using spherical harmonics) to capture indirect diffuse light. Both of them are usualy prebaked. They might store multiple bakes of lighting probes at different time-of-day for day/night cycles if that is necessary. Reflections probes can be updated in runtime, but usually as slower pace – every 60 frames, 2 minutes etc for example.
RT is more about “dynamic lighting computed in every frame” vs “static lighting computed at design time and stores as ‘baked’ texture layer”. Final result should look identical. Only difference is that “RT version” is dynamic and “Baked version” is static. Only one version can support real-time physics
“Only one version can support real-time physics”
What’s your definition of real-time physics and which game comes close to that?
Real-time physics is just an example. I thing about games where lighting information can be recomputed at any time. When I can destroy a wall and lights from one room will be used to change lighting in different room. In comment above i described one of very common optimization in RTX GI
Depends on the game, baked lighting of Metro Exodus is very limited, for example it doesn’t even have dynamic shadows when you use your flashlight, the AO is awful and incredibly demanding on foliage, while there are 20 years old games that can render very good dynamic shadows like Splinter Cell, Doom3 or Thief 3 for example, damn even Rune has better dynamic lights/shadows
“No more games when you can’t destroy or move most of elements because of that static baked lighting.”
If that was the case, Metro devs would be the first to announce this feature.
“With full dynamic lighting computed in every frame game can be much more dynamic with better physics”.
what does dynamic lighting have to do with better physics?
If lighting is computed at game design time and stored as static textures (“light mass”) then you can’t move objects. If you try move something that use static lighting model then image will broke. All lighting and shadows will be still on old positions just as they was created at design time. You need to drop all static lighting textures if you want fully dynamic world
“You need to drop all static lighting textures if you want fully dynamic world”
You will also need two or three NASA PC’s in order to render a full dynamic world with Metro level graphics fidelity, not to mention the amount of resources needed to develop the game in question.
You don’t need to compute whole world every frame. You can still use lighting textures but recomputed every few seconds or after world change.
Just like in UE5 demo. In that demo EPIC show that after scene was changed GPU use several frames to simulate RT light bounces. Results are stored in lighting textures like in current games for performance. But If you can recompute lighting in less than 1 second nobody will notice that light bonces need for example 10-15 frames before image will stabilize. Every frame is blended with previous so you need watch frame by frame to see that in some frames light was wrong.
You can see this is UE5 demo when light still bounces half second after world was changed. Half second is not perfect but can be hidden in games by some explosion. After that game have new lighting textures ready until player change world again
ITS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. Welcome to the future where water has 0 motion or physics becouse were like 20 years away from consumer grade hardware that can handle things being fully dynamic like that.
You trhink its a coincidence that games like Watch Dogs Legion has puddles that function like glass? Or any game that had ray tracing it always had such limited implementation?
Even without dynamic destruction and movement, there is a world of difference between baking and raytracing and raytracing is far superior.
Oh let’s hold everyone hostage to a spec for scarce scalper cards by an evil gpu company called envy. Sheesh they needed to release a great game first rather than scuttle the series with a buggy mess cringefest.
Excellent!
meh… honestly wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA secretly paid 4A to do this. Ray Tracing still while has it’s benefits still haven’t seen a title that can do something incredible with it. Unless you are looking at a game side by side with and without it, it’s not that noticable. Games that don’t have it can do mirrored reflections and lighting just as well. I am still not sold on it. I think maybe in 10 years it might be worth it with higher end gpu’s but right now… i’d rather have the extra frames
I think right now raytracing has its limited uses in conjuction with the standard rasterization techniques. Don’t get me wrong it’s a neat feature that in the future will lift a lot of unnecessary burden off the developers’ shoulders.
But at this exact moment the performance is just not there to justify using it exclusively considering standard rasterizations and global illumination made by hand still looks great?
I think you mean Spring 2021? Cant wait.
just what i was thinking lol.
Obviously 😛
Very nice! I like!
Probably to save HDD/SSD space. Games with classic lighting use several GB of data for “lighting layer” stored as textures. Game use whole new dynamic lighting computed in real-time all those textures will be a waste of space. Now they can drop all those unused textures and increase size of rest of textures and still fit in 50 GB
Slightly off-topic, Crysis 3 still looks phenomenal :
https://youtu.be/CJP4xWkN8Ow
so they shat the bed and is trying to redo it lol https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c697d2272716dd612434a9c46496eb80b2fa8eb0dad563143767f1c50e7a942e.jpg
They would move on to another project by now if it wasn’t profitable.
Reality AMD vs Nvidia
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/904a00735cb417f5352a6e4295ae6d47aff98a693a76aaccd3de771bad4c4f11.jpg
AMD shows 200% mesh shading improvement from just a Driver… Consoles using ray tracing are AMD…. It’s why Nvidia over charged and wanted it 1st on the market… AMD is going to win in the long run since all the games will be based on AMD CPU and GPU hardware 😀
Great, The dlss in this game is trash and it actually needs it. The raytracing could also use work too. I’m overjoyed since I was really right about to buy it. I love the series.
Putting a new version of a game that requires raytracing from the get go, while you can’t currently buy a GPU with that is kinda dumb…but at least is not some next gen console exclusive bullcrap.
Game runs like garbage on decent hardware already so this will no doubt really finish it off.
Why don’t you just, like, I don’t know – put this !@#$% #$%$^) $^*)$) in the @$!%@#*@%#)*#@! game to begin with? Are you going to EGS exclusive this one too?
I’ll pay -$50 for this. That’s right. I want them to give me like $30 for this as an apology for the $20 or whatever I did pay for Metro 3 on Steam and the DLC I bought.