But over the past two years, ray-tracing hardware and top-end PC components have become significantly more capable. Metro Exodus on PC delivered a taste of that vision, with a single-bounce RTGI implementation, and lifelike materials. But in 2019, with the 9th generation consoles just months away, and with NVIDIA having announced its ray-tracing enabled RTX cards, people were excited to see what the future actually looked like. The logic made sense – developers had to compromise their graphics vision to accommodate hardware that would’ve been described as midrange even before the consoles themselves came out. “Downgrading” was something of recurrent theme in criticism of eighth-gen visuals, all the way up to Cyberpunk 2077 – which looks like a PlayStation 1 game on base platforms while assets stream in. A year later, when it released on the eighth-gen consoles, Watch Dogs was roundly criticizing for what fans thought were “downgraded” graphics. Back in 2012, Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs tech demo showcased a game with mind blowing visuals, with reflections and real-time shadows, in particular, a leap above anything we’d seen in seventh-gen titles. While the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One promised impressive “next-gen” rendering technologies like physically-based material and global illumination, the midrange graphics hardware powering both these consoles – equivalent to an HD 7870 and HD 7790 respectively – soon turned something of a hard wall for AAA developers. In terms of visual features, both Metro games held their own to the extent that, in 2014, 4A Games bundled the two and released them with just a bit of spit and polish as Metro Redux on the PS4 and Xbox One.įast forward five years, and in-game visuals have somewhat stagnated. Back in the pre-GPU-shortage days, when $900 was an unheard-of ask for graphics grunt, Metro Last Light proved its mettle, with an enhanced visual set and more open environments. In 2013, months before the eighth-generation consoles came out, 4A Games launched Metro: Last Light, a game that demanded a GeForce GTX Titan as its recommended GPU. Even in 2021, Metro 2033 cranked up to its highest settings holds up surprisingly well, barring the occasional low-res texture. Its extensive use of DirectX 11 features like hardware tessellation gave these parts a thorough workout, and made 60 FPS gaming a distant dream for next-gen hardware. By leveraging the full power of high-end PC hardware, 4A Games has created experienced that hold up, years later.īack in 2010, Metro 2033 at its highest settings barely ran on flagship graphics cards like the GeForce GTX 480. Over the past 10 years, 4A Games has been one of the few AAA studios consistently focused on building a top-tier visual experience on PC.
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