May 6, 2021 07:00 EDT
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition launches today and PC (and will soon be released on next-generation consoles, too, albeit with a more limited feature set) as the first triple-A game that actually requires a graphics card with hardware support for ray tracing, and we've got the chance to check it out in the past few days.
Let's begin with a brief technical explanation of what the talented developers at 4A Games actually focused on enhancing.
It's important to note that the developers themselves admit to be still using rasterization methods at certain points of the process, which means there's still a hybrid renderer at play here. To be more specific, they use it to determine the primary rays cast from the camera, as it's still a very efficient way that doesn't meaningfully sacrifice quality. These rasterized positions are then used via the lighting equation to generate direct illumination for a given surface.