Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition revealed with vast ray-tracing improvements

Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition screenshot

Late last year, 4A games announced an update to the console version of Metro Exodus that would deliver a next-gen experience to Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 owners. While that project is still underway, 4A Games today revealed another Metro Exodus upgrade, this time for the PC version.

The aptly named Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition is built to fully utilize high-end PCs and ray-tracing capable hardware according to the developer.

"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," said 4A Games.

"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 developer went on to say. This edition will require a ray-tracing capable GPU at a minimum due to the additional graphics features being utilized. Moreover, DLSS 2.0 will be present for Nvidia graphics card users.

Considering the enormity of the changes, the PC Enhanced Edition will not be an update to the existing game, instead, the developer will offer it as a separate branch that is still free to all owners of Metro Exodus across Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG. 4A Games is aiming for a spring 2021 release for this version. The macOS and Linux editions of Metro Exodus are launching soon also, with the former landing in March while the latter will arrive a little later.

Metro Exodus differences between enhanced PC and console version

Meanwhile on the console side, 4A Games also detailed what improvements are included in the upcoming free Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 upgrade. Much like the PC version, this edition will utilize ray-traced global illumination and emissive lighting techniques across the base game and expansions for a 4K 60FPS experience on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The developer is targeting 1080p60 for the Xbox Series S, but it will still feature all of the ray-traced effects.

Vastly lowered loading times, an FOV slider, spatial audio enhancements, as well as Dual Sense controller support for the PlayStation 5 will be included here as features as well. Check the image above to find the differences between the upcoming PC and console enhanced editions.