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Exclusive: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition Analysis - The First Triple-A Game Built Around Ray Tracing

Exclusive: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition Analysis - The First Triple-A Game Built Around Ray Tracing on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2021–2025.

Digital Foundry

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Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it as a good overview of what ray-traced lighting changes for developers and players.

people recommended it
3
separate months
3
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2021–2025
“is a good overview of why this is such a huge leap forward for developers and players alike.”
— caconym_, Dec 2021, in “Cornell McRay T'Racing”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

MawrOct 2025Recommends

There's also Metro: Exodus, which the developers have re-made to only support RT lighting. DigitalFoundry made a nice video on it: ▶ this video

in “AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline” · View on HN

TiredOfLifeMar 2025Recommends

Here is a good video by Digital Foundry looking at Metro Exodus Enhanced edition with devtools. Where they show what raytracing is and how it differs from regular lighting. ▶ this video simplified tldr: with raytracing you build the environment, designate which parts (like sun, lamps) emit light and you are done. With regular an artist has to spend hours to days adding many fake lightsources to get same result.

in “Raytracing on Intel's Arc B580” · View on HN

caconym_Dec 2021Recommends

Real-time ray traced reflections are an impressive trick, but real-time global illumination is where this tech shines IMO. This Digital Foundry video ( ▶ this video ) is a good overview of why this is such a huge leap forward for developers and players alike. Metro: Exodus EE (the game discussed in the video) is the only game I've played that really shows what 'RTX' and similar GPU hardware is capable of, IMO. Even CP77, which was supposed to push modern systems to their limit, feels like its ray tracing and GI stuff is janky and tacked-on.

in “Cornell McRay T'Racing” · View on HN

paavohtlDec 2021Cites it

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition uses RT for basically all lighting, doesn't it? ▶ this video Same with Minecraft RTX [link] Though both still calculate the lighting over several frames, so if you want to be pedantic you could argue that it's not strictly real time.

in “Cornell McRay T'Racing” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Computer graphics & renderingGame programming & enginesGaming culture & analysisray tracingglobal illuminationdlssgame graphicsmetro exodus