4A Games has detailed next-gen upgrades for Metro Exodus, which will release sometime later this year. The developer also confirmed that those who already own the game on last-gen consoles will receive the upgraded version for free.
On both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, Metro Exodus will offer “a fully ray traced experience” that’ll run at 4K/60 frames-per-second. Load times have been reduced significantly, and on the PS5 specifically, Metro Exodus will take advantage of DualSense’s features. The upgrade will also come with additional features, including the ability to change field of view – a first for the series.
“With Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 consoles offering Ray Tracing support, we took the decision to radically overhaul our proprietary 4A Engine and realize our ambitions for a fully Ray Traced experience on next gen consoles and high-end PC,” wrote 4A Games. “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.”
Here’s a rundown of what console players can expect:
- Full ray traced lighting throughout—every light source is now ray traced.
- Next-gen ray tracing and denoising.
- Next-gen temporal reconstruction technology.
- Per-pixel ray traced global illumination.
- Ray traced emissive surfaces with area shadows.
- Infinite number of ray traced light bounces.
- Atmosphere and transparent surfaces receive ray traced bounded lighting.
- Full ray traced lighting model support with color bleeding and for every light source.
- DirectX 12 Ultimate support (including DXR 1.1 and variable rate shading)
- GPU FP16 support and thousands of optimized shaders.
- Addition of field of view slider to main game options.
- 4K textures added to packages.
- Further bug fixing / polish pass.
[Source: 4A Games]