This video is a paid promotion for Nvidia. I was given the game,
and told to stare at walls. Which I gladly accepted…
forgetting how much I hate survival horror. ‘ARTEYONMM WE CAN HANDLE IT HERE’
The Metro series has always put me in an awkward position. Because I really hate jump-scares.
But I love pretty graphics. So this series repeatedly lures me in and then
beats me with a stick… but then it gives me something nice again, and all is good again.
UNTIL THE NEXT ONE! Oh Jesus. But yeah, this new, latest,
Enhanced Edition- OOH HNOOOO Where was I? YES!
The latest in this confusing series is Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition.
‘BUT PHILIP’ I hear you cry. ‘Metro Exodus only just came out in 2019,
and is already one of the best looking games ever.
It even had raytracing already- how could the Enhanced Edition possibly improve on all that?!’
Well, that’s what I’ll be investigating in this video.
‘BUT PHILIP!’ I hear you cry again. ‘Didn’t Digital Foundry already cover this?’
…yeah. Yeah they did. I’m here to make sure they didn’t miss anything!
OH JEEZ
If you enjoy following the graphical progress that computers are making, then Metro Exodus is
an exciting title to learn about. Let me explain. When Metro Exodus was first released in 2019,
it showcased the very best that the old consoles were capable of. It came out at the
very end of the console generation, meaning that the developers had plenty of time to
master the hardware and to find clever ways of squeezing as much out of it as possible.
But this just happened to represent something bigger than that. These graphical tricks and
shortcuts, employed by the older consoles, represented the BEST ways we had found -up to
that point- of mimicking reality, in videogames. The reflections and lighting in those games
weren’t being done properly- they were doing using clever tricks,
all of which came with their own limitations. But this would all change with the advent
of raytracing, which does those effects PROPERLY. For back in 2019,
PC users already had raytracing-capable PCs, in the form of the Geforce RTX 2000 series.
Users with an RTX card could enable raytracing in this game, swapping out the older methods of
simulating shadows and lighting for a more accurate raytraced approach.
Fast-forward to today, and things have advanced a lot. Raytracing has gone from being a niche
to being supported on all new graphics cards and consoles. To celebrate this advancement
in computer tech, the team has reworked the game from the ground up to embrace raytracing- and this
is what the Enhanced Edition is. It is the first AAA title to require raytracing support. And this
time around, not only does it use it to simulate light realistically, but it does so BEAUTIFULLY.
So what is the raytracing doing here, exactly? Judging from the raytraced games released so far,
you might think it means ‘reflective puddles’. I think these are used because the effect of
raytracing here is obvious, and in your face. But Exodus uses the power of raytracing for
something a bit different. Something more subtle, but beautiful in its own way.
URGHHH! -oh no, it's just my
waifu.
Exodus uses millions of rays to simulate the LIGHTING. Lighting is a big problem for games-
because it’s difficult to get it right! However, Exodus has managed it
IOASFHGOA
To understand the complications, let’s look at what light does.
You have light coming from the sun and light bulbs, which does brighten up the areas it hits.
But the light doesn’t stop there- it then bounces OFF those surfaces,
and onto anything else it hits nearby. And then off those things, and onto everything else,
and so on. As you can imagine, this quickly results in billions of calculations.
Not a problem for reality, but for videogames trying to maintain 60 FPS, this can be an issue.
But you can’t NOT have light bounces, because otherwise it would be really hard to see indoors,
and all shadows would be pitch black. Here’s what a room would look like if light didn’t bounce.
Yeah, it doesn’t look right, does it. Look around your room right now, and see how much direct
sunlight you can actually see. The chances are that most of the room, basement or bathroom you’re
in is being lit indirectly by bounce lighting! Or lightbulbs. Which also result in bounce lighting.
So this is a quantum leap for graphics in videogames. You can no longer think of scenes
as ‘lights’ and ‘surfaces’, because raytraced global illumination can potentially turn any
surface into a new light source, provided it’s already lit brightly enough. And whereas lights
used to always be ‘points’ of light, they can now be any size and shape they please, and the
shadows in the scene will react accordingly. But bounce lighting doesn’t just brighten areas
up- it also paints them with the colours of the surfaces the light has already hit.
Which is why, if you have a bright red thing in the sunlight, it will make the
rest of the room appear reddish in colour, too. Here’s an excellent example of what difference
correctly coloured lighting can make- this is Metro, without raytracing. And here it is,
with raytracing. Note how the raytracing doesn’t just more realistically light the interior up
more brightly closer to where the window is- but it applies a warmer, more orange glow to the wall,
since the light it’s receiving has already bounced off something orangey in colour.
It’s a subtle change, but it makes the scene more cohesive and ‘realistic’, and switching back to
the old methods again highlights the shortcomings of how we used to do lighting in games.
That’s an extreme example. The sad reality is that most of the time the effect is more
subtle than that. And ESPECIALLY so in a sewer. But even if you don’t notice it, it’s there,
and it’s making the environment look right, instead of slightly wrong, in a video-gamey
kind of way. Do you know why it looks right? That’s because it IS right- it’s simulating
how it is in real life. This is what Raytraced Global Illumination does, by firing out millions
of rays all over the place, every frame. To ensure that wall over there looks JUST right.
Let’s compare the 3 ‘versions’ of Exodus. This one here is using old techniques, no raytracing
at all. On its own, this appears quite acceptable. But then we move across to raytracing, with up
to 1 bounce of lighting, and suddenly you can see what the fake techniques lacked. Adding
raytracing better matches the lighting to what’s going on in the environment. It lights this wall
here from the sunlight that’s bouncing off the ground. Which the non-raytraced method doesn’t
seem able to do. And while the older version lights the whole interior up evenly, raytracing
lights the area closest to the sunlight up the most, and plunges the far side into darkness.
Now are you ready for the NEW raytracing method? Here it is!
This is the result of infinite bounces of light, all applying light and colour to each
new place that they bounce off. The result is a much warmer, brighter looking environment.
The whole room has a lovely, orangey glow because of the warmer colour of the sand and walls,
which bounce off each other to produce an even warmer look to the image. But all these light
bounces everywhere results in softer shadows than you might be used to seeing in a videogame.
We have spent so long judging game graphics on the quality of their shadows that this is a problem,
because there are no defined shadows here, since light can reach virtually
every part of the room from so many different directions, cancelling any potential shadows out.
You can still see darker patches around the bases of objects, and behind the oildrum by the door,
but for the most part the lighting is so soft, there’s no sign of the kind of clear-cut shadows
that we’re used to seeing in games. …Not until I fire my gun, which creates
such a bright light that it overpowers the bounce lighting and produces one of
those good-old sharp shadows that we’re a lot more accustomed to seeing in games.
Now to ask the hard questions.
Does this mean the old method of raytracing was wrong?
And is there the possibility of EVEN BETTER raytracing in the future?
Well I don’t think the old method was wrong- merely restricted in its number of light bounces.
The resulting atmosphere and ‘look’ was faithful to the non-raytraced style, which made direct
comparisons in the older game easier than between the two different raytraced versions.
For this Enhanced Edition, the developers deliberately went through the game and
designed it with raytracing in mind, so whereas the first implementation of
raytracing was merely to replace older techniques with a more accurate system,
this Enhanced Edition is intended to LOOK nicer as well. Which I certainly think it does,
even if it does make some parts of the game much brighter than it was originally.
As for the possibility of even better raytracing in the future,
yes I’m sure it’s possible. There is already a limitation with the Enhanced Edition.
And it’s that, while it CAN do INFINITE bounces, it’s restricted to lighting the
scene one bounce at a time. And by one bounce at a time, I mean one bounce per pixel per frame.
Just one bounce per frame would be TERRIBLE! You can see this best when turning a lamp on
or off. It isn’t instant. It looks as though the lamp is warming up and cooling down,
as the light bounces rapidly approach, yet never quite reach, infinite accuracy.
It’s understandable why it’s done this way. It gives you the best of both worlds:
the beauty of infinite bounces, and the framerate of doing just one bounce at a time.
Raytracing in the Enhanced Edition can be set to NORMAL, HIGH or ULTRA. NORMAL shoots rays at
quarter resolution. HIGH is checkerboarded and ULTRA is native. Indeed, one ray, per pixel,
per frame. But in the grand scale of things, even one ray per pixel is tiny. It used to take
HUNDREDS of rays per pixel to eliminate grain from renders. So it’s testament to the quality
of Metro’s denoising filters that the screen isn’t constantly bathed in aggressive, speckled grain.
You can still sometimes spot it in the darker areas like this bit here, but the effect is tame
and actually rather pleasant if you ask me. But this is still a limitation with current
raytracing. We could get around this by either firing MORE RAYS PER PIXEL,
or to reach framerates so high that this shimmering would no longer be visible.
But no matter what you set it to, it still only does one bounce per frame,
which means that there’s a delay before things are lit correctly.
Especially if lights are suddenly turned on or off.
And now in SUPER SLOW MOTION.
So in theory, while each additional bounce makes the scene better, it will NEVER
reach perfect lighting accuracy. Because that would require infinite light bounces.
The lighting in Exodus will simply get ‘close enough’ to perfection that you can’t tell
the difference any more. In some cases this can take just 3-4 frames, in others, 20-30.
So the limitation really is how long it takes for our computers to render that many frames. So what
if we run this game at native 5K, with raytracing? OFHHOAFGAOH
URRUGHGHHHHH
As you can see, with a low framerate it takes a REALLY REALLY long time for all the bounce
lighting to react to change. Turning the light on isn’t so bad, but switching it
off again takes many, many seconds before the surroundings finally look right again.
But if we drop the resolution to 1080p, which produces a much faster framerate,
the time taken gets much shorter. And here’s a comparison between the two.
The reason this recording was cut off early was because I thought the lighting had fully updated
on the 5K version- it’s only in comparison to the 1080p version that I can see that the lighting
still has some way to go, even 4 seconds later. So in short: the faster your framerate, the
faster the bounce lighting in Exodus will update. Which is why upscaling techniques like DLSS exist,
which uses AI to upscale visuals to a higher resolution, hopefully resulting in higher
framerates, better graphical fidelity and smooth looking anti-aliasing. And this feature is another
reason why Metro Exodus is so interesting- because it’s one of the few games to have used
multiple versions of the technology! Exodus uses DLSS 1.0, and Enhanced Edition uses the newer,
improved DLSS 2.0. Let’s compare them. DLSS 1.0 notoriously made everything
look blobby. Sure, it removed jagged edges. And yes, it ran much faster than native resolution.
But it resulted in an artificial-looking image, without the same texture or feel as the original.
It looks almost like a water-colour. You can see it also manages to make straight lines look kind
of hand-drawn and there’s a lot of ‘sharpening’ around the edges of things. Not a great result.
And to top it all off, it automatically disables below 1440p resolution, which took me far,
FAR too long to realise in my testing. But, as we all know by now already, DLSS 2.0 is
substantially better. These comparisons speak for themselves- it’s much better at resolving
fine lines and sub-pixel details. Looking at this distant bridge, there’s not a hint of aliasing
in sight. Despite rendering at a lower resolution DLSS 2 manages a significantly better result than
native here. And the same applies across most of the screen, especially on any man-made structures.
Let’s be honest, since DLSS 2.0, it’s been a no-brainer to enable it whenever it’s available in
games. For it to provide image quality so similar to that of native, but at much higher framerates,
makes it incredibly hard NOT to recommend. I want to make that clear, because I’m now
going to go off on a lengthy tangent about tree branches, which isn’t a serious issue,
but IS an aspect that I believe DLSS could do better at. Take a look at them here;
they don’t even look like the same models! Native retains a lot more of the thinner branches,
but also a lot more pixellation. DLSS 2 takes a different approach, masking out the smaller
branches but producing a less aliased result. I don’t know which bit of the DLSS pipeline is
causing this difference compared with native- is it because it’s using a lower base resolution? Or
is it from the AI upscaling part of the process? It reminds me a bit of DLSS 1, actually… but on a
far more localised, less noticeable scale. I would say that the trees in native are rendered more
faithfully to how they’re meant to look- I ran up to one to get a closer look and they do indeed
have that tufty bit at the very top that DLSS likes to reduce down to just a couple of branches.
It’s a fascinating topic- I get the impression that conventional AA methods have a tendency to
make thin details appear THICKER than they’re supposed to be. But I think DLSS is doing the
opposite of that here, hiding sub-pixel details in the trees too aggressively. Perhaps it’s
because these models, at this distance, rely on transparency, which might be something DLSS
doesn’t know how to resolve? I’m interested to check out DLSS in Red Dead Redemption 2
once it’s implemented, because I can’t think of a game more in need of good anti-aliasing,
plus it will be a great test for DLSS 2.0 to have to render so much foliage all over the place.
But yeah, tree branch rant over. Despite this, I wouldn’t hesitate to enable DLSS in this game.
You’re talking like, double the framerate, more responsive global illumination and,
for the most part, better image quality, especially around the edges of things. If that
means that distant trees look less branchy from time to time then that will be my burden to bare.
But WHICH version of DLSS should you use? Quality looks the best, then as you drop down
the settings towards Ultra Performance, the image quality degrades, but your framerate improves.
Generally, at 1080p you’d use Quality setting, then at 4K you’d go to something like Performance.
Just for the fun of it, I ran at Ultra Performance at 1080p which I think makes it run at a
resolution like 360p. And I was impressed by how well it held up, actually- it still didn’t appear
blurry, even when upscaling from an ultra low resolution. The underlying checkerboard pattern
became visible, and shimmering was noticeable on thin details. And any movement has a halo artifact
behind it. So it’s not like I’d recommend using Ultra Performance setting at a low resolution
like 1080p, but you can see from the footage here that the image is still ‘coherent’, if not ideal.
And last, I swapped it for the even newer DLSS 2.2. This edition has been known to
effectively cut down on the ‘tails’ behind small objects in games like Death Stranding.
Unfortunately, in this game 2.2 didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Though admittedly,
very few things in Metro Exodus cause this effect in the first place and it isn’t very noticeable.
While we’re on the topic of framerate improvements, there are other options as well like
VRS. VRS drops the resolution that certain things are drawn at where it thinks you won’t notice. It
sounds GREAT in theory, and promised to use clever tricks to deliver a free framerate boost. But
unfortunately, in Metro I did immediately notice it in the form of severe pixilation around my
lighter, thought ‘eugh’ and turned it off again. In its defence, in the game’s first sequence,
the pixellation is made worse through the blobby face-mask that you’re wearing,
and it isn’t quite so bad in later chapters or in lighter environments. But so what? The feature
PIXELLATES stuff. Look at this cobweb, burning! It’s disgusting! Sure, you could turn VRS down to
just 2x to make it less disgusting. Or: you could turn it off, and have no disgustingness at all.
I’ll be honest: I really didn’t bother doing more with this feature than that.
As far as features go, it’s not the same level as the likes of raytracing or DLSS,
and let’s be honest, if you can even run the Enhanced Edition,
you probably don’t need the miniscule framerate boost that VRS brings to the table. I’m saying
this to acknowledge the feature’s presence, but it didn’t interest me in the slightest.
But getting back to the topic of raytracing, and how long it takes for bounce lighting to update:
it entirely depends on your framerate, and whether you’re going to spend your
time in this game flicking lights on and off and studying the result.
No doubt, as computers get more powerful, and as framerates increase,
the time this ‘fade in’ and ‘out’ takes will drop. So yeah, I just see this Enhanced Edition
as the best iteration of the technology YET, and as the graphical bar the developers have
set for the new generation of consoles and graphics hardware to achieve, moving forward.
And impressive, it is. Smaller objects- which used to be lit rather flatly- now receive the same high
quality of lighting as the rest of the scene. These bottles, although not directly lit up
from the lamp, still receive light bounces coming from the table and pages nearby.
And these boxes of eyecare previously looked flat and lit from all directions equally.
But raytracing lights this side up with lighting that’s bounced off the book pages, and subtly
darkens the table around the objects’ bases. And this is how it would be in real-life, too.
In short: raytracing will ensure that, no matter the lighting conditions,
that our boxes of… FARTIZIN and… ‘AFLATUM’ will finally be lit correctly. About time.
The game has raytraced reflections. So I took a trip to this beautiful place to take a look
at them. This zone acts as a welcome respite from all the other jump-scare laden chapters
of the game. And I felt that here, I could just sit back and AJOTJHGOGJHOJH
After a lengthy scene, I found myself in this blissful paradise!
All I needed was to get out far enough to view the reflections…
Just a little further… …oEHJDROGFHG
ANY WAY. I eventually reached here, and went to test the raytraced reflections.
Does it work on these sorts of surfaces?
…no.
It turns out that Metro is not the easiest of games to find reflective
surfaces for. And failing to find reflections there, I went elsewhere for water reflections.
And where better than the desert. I must admit, this was when the
game’s appeal really clicked for me, as I trekked over seemingly endless sand dunes,
with nothing around me but rolling tumbleweed and the sound of a gentle breeze and- OFHOAFHOFHO
Eventually, I reached reflective water! And this one has reflections! Look down,
and the screen space reflections make way for… something else,
of varying quality. I’m still unsure what’s going on here. It’s not a direct, one-for-one
reflection of the world. It’s a low-resolution version of it that excludes certain details,
like some of the surface textures and models. And it generates a weird distortion thing if I move
the camera around like so. And I hate to parrot digital foundry here, but while it doesn’t look
perfect, it seems to do the job of ‘disguising’ the lack of screen space reflections. At a glance,
it’s fine. And most surfaces are ripple-y enough to mask the reflection’s limitations.
Speaking of ripples, check out these bad boys! It’s like Trespasser, all over again. And I
mean that in a good way. I’ve not had this much fun since Morrowind. And again, in a good way.
IN CONCLUSION: Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition is a pretty game, with some very advanced graphical
features. The original game set a high bar to beat, but the raytraced versions have only built
further on the series’ reputation of delivering very pretty -but depressing- looking environments.
I never thought I’d say this, but testing the raytracing has been a harrowing experience.
And since every train journey in this game ends in disaster, I guess that’s one more thing I can
add to my phobia list. OFHJOOFHOHOQH