4A Games has announced that it will be delivering the Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition "later this Spring". This is an update to the game so significant that it wasn't able to roll it out as a patch but worry-not, it will be a free upgrade to existing game owners.
So, what is enhanced? The update takes advantage of 4A's new Fully Ray Traced Lighting Pipeline which can deliver the "ultimate ray traced experience" on both modern AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. Actually a modern hardware ray tracing graphics card is a minimum requirement to play the Enhanced Edition on PC.
In-game screenshot captured on PC showing new RTGI, Emissives, Infinite Ray bounces, and RT Reflections.
Click to Zoom image.
Ray tracing frills available to those lucky enough to own the requisite hardware include; Ray Traced Global Illumination (RTGI), Ray Traced Emissive Lighting techniques, and Advanced Ray Traced Reflections. Moreover, there is an upgraded implementation of 4A's proprietary Temporal Reconstruction technology to further boost resolution, visual detail and performance. On Nvidia GeForce RTX graphics cards there is support for DLSS 2.0 for sharper images and increased frame rates and display resolutions.
This Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition is going to be a free update to all owners of the existing Metro Exodus on PC on the Epic Games Store, Steam, and GoG.
Consoles and other platforms
If you own a new generation console you will also be getting an Enhanced Edition upgrade. The base game and expansions will all run "at 4K / 60FPS with full Ray Traced lighting throughout on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X". On the Xbox Series S, 4A is targeting 60 FPS and full Ray Traced lighting throughout.
Console users are also going to benefit from controller latency improvements on Xbox, and support for the haptic features of the PlayStation 5 Dual Sense controller. Further polish and quality of life improvements are included in the update too. As with the PC version, these updates will be free via Xbox and PlayStation stores.
Apple Mac users will get Metro Exodus in March, and Linux a little later in the year.