4A Games has announced that its nice and shiny upgrade to Metro Exodus, Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, will be released for PC on May 6th, 2021. Previously announced, this specific version of the game is a newly built version that will take advantage of Ray Tracing for Nvidia and AMD graphic cards. It will be free to everyone who already owns a copy of Metro Exodus from either the Epic Games Store, Steam, or GOG.
Weighing in at 80GB, this version will include all of the DLC and will only run if your PC has a GPU that supports Ray Tracing. Meaning if you don’t have an Nvidia RTX or an AMX RX card, you won’t be able to play it. This is a strictly Ray Tracing affair, complete with DLSS 2.0 and Advanced Ray Traced Reflections. Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition will also see a release for Mac and Linux OSs.
As Ray Tracing is now implemented, it goes without saying that the game is more hardware dependant than before. On one end of the spectrum, at minimum requirements, we see Nvidia’s RTX 2060, and the RTX 3090 is required for what’s being called RT (Ray Tracing) Extreme. That’s not even talking about the CPU requirements, with anything past the recommended settings requiring a CPU with 8 cores – not hyperthreading. You’re really going to need a beefy PC to see everything that’s being offered here.
You can see just how much of a beast of a PC you’ll need to play this game. I wasn’t kidding when I said the requirements were hefty.
4A Games provided Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry with an advanced version to do the technical magic that they do. The result is a wonderful look at the updated game and perhaps one of the more impressive showcases of Ray Tracing on the PC to date.
Give it a watch below.
As for what 4A Games has done, I can only hope that other developers and publishers continue this trend. Clearly, the developer had a vision when they first worked on Metro Exodus, and they skipped implementing 4K originally as there weren’t a lot of PC gamers with Ray Tracing enabled GPUs. Mind you, not that there are many now, thanks to the current scalper and silicone demand. But that’s another story. Now, they’re releasing the game they envisioned, and I’m looking forward to seeing just how much of a difference the game is with Ray Tracing enabled.
I’m looking forward to seeing just what this RTX 3090 (that’s not a flex, this thing was expensive) can do. This just might be the first game that will stress this video card – looking forward to it.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition releases for PC on May 6th, 2021. An enhanced edition for the PS5 and Xbox Series X is also in development and will be released later.
