Developer 4A Games recently announced a fully ray traced "Enhanced Edition" of their latest entry in the Metro franchise. Free for all owners of the original game, it essentially replaces all lighting with ray tracing, and the PC system requirements reveal it needs a pretty beefy setup in order to run at its best.
The good news is that Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition will be launching a week today on May 6th, so we won't have to wait so long. There's also a bunch of new PC features that are included in the Enhanced Edition, like the addition of DLSS 2.0 (the base Metro: Exodus game only had support for DLSS 1.0).
The bad news is that it looks like if you want to play Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition at its best, then you will need a pretty beefy setup in order to run it. Thankfully, the system requirements below have been listed without DLSS in mind, so enabling Nvidia's AI upscaling technology should help you reach better performance/resolution without the need for the most powerful ray tracing graphics card out there.
Also worth noting is that whilst it is free for owners of the base game, it isn't just a simple update or patch. Instead, this is a standalone title with new and enhanced features to the base game. There is also no extra content added, though there is no indication whether it will include all previously released DLC, or only if you already own the DLC.
The official PC requirements for Metro Exodus EE also only listed a certain number of cores for the CPU specs, rather than any specific CPUs to use. So we have chosen the closest matching components based on the hardware descriptions provided, but if you have any of your own input then feel free to let us know in the discussion area below! Let's help everyone make sure they can run this game in the proper conditions.
With that in mind, let's jump in and take a look at the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition PC system requirements...
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition minimum system requirements - 1080p/45fps
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (20H2)
- CPU: 4 Cores + HT [Intel Core i3-10100T or AMD Ryzen 5 2400GE*]
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU RAM: 6GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
- DX: 12
- Storage: 72.2GB (+DLC = 80GB)
*PC specs listed only a certain number of cores plus Hyper-Threading, so we have chosen the best suited CPU based on the hardware description provided.
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition recommended system requirements - 1080p/60fps
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (20H2)
- CPU: 8 Cores [Intel Core i7-9700T or AMD FX-9370*]
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070/Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT
- DX: 12
- Storage: 72.2GB (+DLC = 80GB)
*PC specs listed only a certain number of cores plus Hyper-Threading, so we have chosen the best suited CPU based on the hardware description provided.
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition High system requirements - 1440p/60fps
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (20H2)
- CPU: 8 Cores [Intel Core i7-9700T or AMD FX-9370*]
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT
- DX: 12
- Storage: 72.2GB (+DLC = 80GB)
*PC specs listed only a certain number of cores plus Hyper-Threading, so we have chosen the best suited CPU based on the hardware description provided.
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition Ultra system requirements - 4K/30fps
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (20H2)
- CPU: 8 Cores [Intel Core i7-9700T or AMD FX-9370*]
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU RAM: 10GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT
- DX: 12
- Storage: 72.2GB (+DLC = 80GB)
*PC specs listed only a certain number of cores plus Hyper-Threading, so we have chosen the best suited CPU based on the hardware description provided.
Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition RT Extreme system requirements - 4K/60fps
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit (20H2)
- CPU: 8 Cores [Intel Core i7-9700T or AMD FX-9370*]
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU RAM: 24GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090
- DX: 12
- Storage: 72.2GB (+DLC = 80GB)
*PC specs listed only a certain number of cores plus Hyper-Threading, so we have chosen the best suited CPU based on the hardware description provided.
In order to run Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition on High graphics settings your PC will require at least an RTX 2070/RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT graphics card paired with either a Core i7-9700T or FX-9370 processor as well as 8GB of RAM. This setup should then deliver 60fps performance at 1080p resolution.
Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition will need an RTX 2060 GPU in order to play on Normal graphics settings, which should then be coupled with either a Core i3-10100T or Ryzen 5 2400GE CPU and 8GB of system memory, achieving 45fps performance at 1080p resolution.
Your graphics card will need to be capable of running the DirectX 12 API and support ray tracing. In summary, looking over the recommended settings you will need at least a 1 year old PC in order to play Metro Exodus PC EE at its best.
As ever, remember you can always check out how well your PC can run the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarks and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to the Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition GPU benchmark chart and we also have a Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition Frames Per Second system performance chart for you to check.
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First thing i noticed was the people in the background are more clear , however it feels more like a remastered version rather than dramatic changes , but yes it is beautiful looking, as it was before tho.
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So i have the new version and yes all i can say is with everything on its better looking and its not as demanding i use an HDR Rog Swift PG27UQ monitor 144hz GeForce RTX 3090 OC i7-6950X Extreme its as easy as before to run 70+fps
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aeeeeeeeeeeee
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See he did it again
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Explain ?
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shedletsky34 was posting spam on articles. He hasn't done it since I called him out on it even though I got no response from it.
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LOL what is the writer smoking here ? An FX CPU for 1440p and 4k resolution for running an current gen fully ray traced game.
From what limited stuff that I have read up online, an 8 core FX CPU performs like an 4 core CPU when multi threaded applications like this game run on it and not to mention the poor single threaded performance of these CPU's which thrashes the performance even further.
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Yeah, I would have ignored FX and just put an older gen Ryzen in there at the least.
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Damn, hurts when you can't get to 4k 60fps on a brand new system.
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You will be able to, just need to use DLSS. These settings indicate that it was not used. If you check out their specs page it says at the bottom that the performance will further improve if you use DLSS.
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Ah ok. DLSS ftw.
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Metro Exodus already looks amazing.
This fully ray-traced version will be the new can it run crysis
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yes thats what I think, and in HDR cant complain at all, so enhanced? really looks great now. I guess i wouldnt be saying this if i didnt have a top pc, https://youtu.be/WpQIsdB3Lao
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As an eastern european I feel offended that the game VO you have is set to English xD
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hopefully i can turn off all these RT settings or push it down to the lowest to play.
If i can't start the game on my gpu.... I will be kinda sad.
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Sounds like it requires an RT-capable GPU to run. Technically you might be able to run it, if the devs allow it (or if some mod can bypass such restrictions, if any), but doing RT on CUDA alone would be painfully slow.
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The devs confirmed that it is RT only.
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Yeah, I only later started looking into the technical aspects. An interesting move, but nobody can really complain when it's a free add-on for the existing owners of the game :D
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Just play the standard release from a couple of years ago, what's wrong with you ?
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I highly recommend checking digital's foundry video on this, this is remarkable, it looks more like comparison between rtx on vs off rather than different levels of ray tracing, was very cautious about the performance but it seems it will be OK, cant wait for it, havent played exodus yet, might replay whole franchise
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I love metro franchise, these devs always brought graphics to new level, even original metro which was made in 2010 still holds pretty good. I remember they said some time ago that their next metro game(at the time they already released exodus) will require gpus with ray tracing capabilities now with this enhanced edition and the revolutionary development pipeline (using only ray tracing, no baked lighting) seems like its going to be true.
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It seems that their average time to develop new game is -5 years, it seems like it could be feasible considering that next metro series should launch in 2026-2028 and we will see around 3 more of gpu generations, so plenty of development time from all fronts and the fact that creating ray tracing only game is much faster means that they will have more time for optimization, damn interesting times are coming for gaming
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Also i forgot to mention that the performance is actually better I guess calculating RT AND prebaked dynamic lightning is more demanding than only RT or at least costs the same in performance, which is pretty insane. Would probably be better if games make "2" games, one with baked lightning only and one with RT-only. Though it increased a little bit of cpu requirements.
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I started watching the video and the very first thing that I noticed, beside the awesome looking GI, is how bad the textures are... why are they so blurry? And model detail could be better in places. I don't know if this has anything to do with video compression or what (and I haven't played the original Exodus), but I sure hope the textures can be better than that...
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And the temporal accumulation of RT samples is still slow... at 8:10 in the video you can see how long it takes for the bounce lighting to react to the spotlight moving. This is usually remedied by having higher fps, as it takes less time for the RT to resolve, but the temporal effects are still there. I'm a bit numb to it because I've seen a very good implementation of all of this in Quake II RTX (and I work with 3D myself) but it's great to start seeing this in games nonetheless!
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Hmmm... I'm having doubts about "everything" being raytraced here. You shouldn't be seeing stair-stepping like this in raytraced shadows - this is a by-product of a shadow map of an insufficient resolution.
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I dont really know about that shadow stuff you mentioned but yeah textures leaves a lot to be desired though it is zoomed in some random spot, not characters, not guns which usually gets best quality textures, but yeah agreed it doesnt look that good.
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Yeah the game (the baase version at least ) has sometimes blurry textures, i tought this version solved that ssue but i think they did not touched textures, it still looks really cool tho
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i like how this game will be able to run on PS5/XBOX series, but not on mine PC, okay.
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Maybe because the PS5 is not 5 years old and the 1050Ti is a low/mid range card to begin with? I don't want to sound mean, but it's kinda obvious.
You could still try and run it, though. The requirements there are most likely for raytracing, that's why you only see Nvidia and AMD cards with raytracing support.
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this metro exodus enhanced will only launch on ray tracing capable gpus
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My bad. Didn't have the time to watch any content. The first point still stands true, though.
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i like how u said 1050ti is 5 ys old, but u didnt said anything about my CPU or my ddr3 xD @xquatrox
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DDR3 is fine for gaming and the CPU would probably still hold ok, I just genuinely thing the GPU is the weakest link, as is often the case with gaming :D
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like i said before. Nowadays games minimum req are for CPU's from 8 ys ago and a gpu from 3-5+- ys ago, but as ray tracing going if it becomes min req soon enough then my PC will not be able to play them and a change is a must. Simple like my laptop couldnt played dx 11 games since it had dx 10 and i needed a change.
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That's true, but the beautiful thing about GPUs is that it's just PCIe - buy a new one and drop it in, see if that works - unlike CPUs, which need a new mobo and RAM now. Even if you upgrade the GPU to the newest one - a CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade can come after, since you get to just keep the GPU anyway. That's why I keep swapping out GPUs while my CPU is from 2014 :D
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well thats why i swapped from my 760 ti to 1050ti since my card broke, but right now 1050ti is good for all my needs. If i need to change my CPU it will be with mobo/ram/cpu and i will get 2 tb nvme
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Hey, hey... What is this?! CPU: 8 Cores [Intel Core i7-9700T or AMD FX-9370*] for 4k/30FPS and 4k/60FPS??
Am I dumb or what? xD
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I don't think the CPU pairings are good at all... Who would use the trash FX with a high-end GPU? And the 9700T is a low-power chip as well.
If you have in mind the 8-core thing instead - that would probably be for any AI, physics, etc as usual.
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Exodus already looks gorgeous, what more can you do to enhance that game.
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Make visual changes that are barely visible but uses twice the resources
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I can only assume you have not even bothered taking a look at the raytraced Enhanced Edition, because you wouldn't be saying that.
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The thing with the "demands" is that in theory, even a weak entry level GPU is "strong" enough to run demanding games. Problem is the API that establishes the communication between the GPU and the application. Again, in theory, one could write such a good API that throws out all Hardcore PC reqs. That is just a pipe dream though. I am hoping that the developers (as a physicist/programmer this is a must in my area) optimize the engines that run their games. It's sad when you see a ****ty looking game needing RTX Over 9000 to run at medium settings and RTX infinity to run recommended, maybe, only because they rushed the product.
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Well, you have to keep in mind that this is with raytracing as well (at least I assume so), which is orders of magnitude slower than raster, even if you have the leanest light transport system available. There's already a lot of under-sampling with heavy temporal denoising and upscaling on top to make the modern games perform somewhat decently without looking like noisy trash - that denoising gives a substantial kick down in the performance department, mind you (just test Quake II RTX, if you have the time).
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I don't think it's down to code/optimizations alone - and it's most likely not even a significant part of the performance slump, IMO, compared to all the layers of shading and compositing going on. But I'm speaking from the perspective of a professional 3D artist, rather than that of a programmer, of course.
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I'm worried about future games, which may require RTX GPUs as minimum
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At some point they will, because eventually we'll move away from raster graphics (and the associated limitations) to full-on raytracing and, after that, pathtracing. Though this is quite a few years away, I'd not rule out the possibility of a few games popping up that outright require a capable raytracing card to be played due to the way the game is made to work (maybe some horror game with heavy emphasis on lighting and mirrors, or a puzzler with emphasis on light and reflections). It's the future of real-time graphics, as a natural evolution.
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Fun fact is newer games will work better on rtx cards then older games just because of the technology inside them..
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For comparison BF1 8K runs 50fps while warzone 160+fps..DLSS makes a HUGE difference in fps...
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Yeah, but IIRC - you're referring to the "ultra performance" mode, which means you're only rendering 1440p natively, not even 4K or anything useful for properly detailed 8K. I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't make a difference to you, but as a 3D guy I'm a pixel-peeper by profession and anything other than DLSS "balanced" or higher is just pointless and visually wrong vs what native should be.
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Its inevitable, sooner or later. I think in this console generation most games will still have hybrid ray tracing but i dont think metro exodus enhanced is the last example, i wouldn't be surprised that some developers would go similar route, by releasing 2 separate versions of the game because if im not mistaken, eliminating all prebaked shadows and point lights and relying on ray tracing for most of the graphical features actually improves performance though i might bewrong
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Removing overheads in anything improves performance, be it redundant code or those lights that suck up resources while not doing much. RT won't be faster than raster (because RT is RT and raster is raster), but I'm digging this ditching of the hybrid approach. Gotta say - that DF video was a worthwhile watch.
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i think it will depend how optimized ray tracing will be, it is very new technology in video games and im pretty sure there are many low hanging fruits for optimization, so while purely rasterized game is probably faster right now, in the future it will probably require much less resources to reach same or better visual fidelity, while requiring much less labor from dev, but im not really knowledgeable in this
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but it seems like win/win situation except for people who dont have ray tracing capable gpus, which is still majority unfortunately. I think ray traced games that will require such gpus will surface as soon as it will start to be feasible from business perspective because how much better it is for everyone.
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There are no "low hanging fruit" for optimization when it comes to RT. Even with basic tasks RT is multiple orders of magnitude (that's powers of 10 in math, so 3 orders would be 1000x) slower than raster and I'm not even joking. You have to understand that raster was created BECAUSE raytracing was so slow, and raytracing is a biased (untrue, cut down) form of pathtracing, which is even slower, but can produce "ground truth" images due to the way it works (mimicking real life light transport).
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Raster is full of hacks and trickery because with that insane (compared to RT) speed come a lot of cut corners. Raster can't occlude objects (a separate z-depth pass is needed for that), raster can't produce shadows (lights go through walls), raster can't produce bounce lighting, reflections, refractions, etc. It's not quite easy to understand if you're not into 3D, unfortunately, but raster is a pile of trash that needs a LOT of hacks to get it to look even remotely close to what raytracing can do effortlessly, albeit much slower.
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So there's no such thing as raytracing ever being faster than raster - that's not how it works. Instead - it's about the reduction in hackery needed to produce a realistic result, which results in lower development time and faster raycasting acceleration (RT cores in latest GPUs) to make this viable. We're not even close to a pure raytraced game - not Metro, not Quake II RTX. Real raytracing is very slow, that's why the shading is still done in raster, with only the light/reflections being done in RT, but EXTREMELY undersampled and simplified.
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We're talking about raytracing as the holy grail of sorts nowdays, but it isn't so. At some point realtime graphics processing will become fast-enough for pathtracing! Pathtracing works by shooting billions of photons out from the light sources, bouncing them around the scene (where they lose energy, get absorbed, reflected, etc) and a small amount of them reach the eye/camera. Raytracing works the other way around - rays are traced from the camera to calculate where they land, eliminating a lot of "wasted" photons, at the cost of accuracy.
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I hope this crash-course style explanation makes sense and shines a bit of light into what's happening in games nowdays and where the future is heading. It will be a long time before we can comfortably ditch raster completely and all the trickery that comes with it - and even longer still till we can ditch raytracing in favor of pathtracing for "true realism". Is it necessary? Probably not, considering the compute resource cost vs visual quality. Will it happen? Absolutely - and that is what excites me! I might even live long enough to see it :)
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Gonna be honest, while a lot of people will hate it for being so demanding. I will instead be cheering on, i love seeing games REALLY pushing the limit. I would actually love a new Crisis 1 game... EXTREMELY hard to run, but also WAY ahead of it's time. Just to see what the future of gaming can bring.
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im kind with you on this, RT is just a stepping stone to fully Path traced lighting and reflections. unless these techs get pushed forward by someone FPT is at least a decade away
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+1 here, though there were pitfalls with games like Crysis when they pushed those limits - maintaining even 60fps on modern systems is still near-impossible at ultra just because they completely choked the DX10 API with the stupid amount of draw calls. At least on my system I have demonstrable places where I can easily go between 5K and 1080p with no FPS difference, because the GPU is not the problem - the programming needs bruteforcing on the CPU side.
Still, on PC we can eventually bruteforce anything, so I welcome all games that push the bar :)
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question, as I've never had a 4k or above screen so don't have any context for that scale. do you think there is a point where things like RT/FPT become more important to "realism" than resolution?