About a month ago, 4A Games announced that Metro Exodus will support real-time raytracing with the advanced Nvidia RTX technology, which relies on the artificial intelligence capabilities of the Volta architecture, and supposedly the new Turing architecture that will arrive this year.
Comparison of raytracing vs. rasterization video on Metro Exodus
4A Games will use raytracing in Metro Exodus to render the ambient occlusion and indirect lighting in real time. PCGamesHardware has published a video comparing the result achieved with raytracing with traditional rastering techniques. The video makes it clear that raytracing offers a significantly higher level of graphic quality, which was already to be expected, as we are talking about the most advanced and realistic lighting technique available.
Nvidia RTX is an extension to Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API, a technology that makes use of the high processing power of the Volta architecture, and the capabilities of the Tensor Core to apply a small amount of raytracing, and then extend it to the entire scene using a complex algorithm based on artificial intelligence. For now ,this is only possible with the Volta architecture, although new gaming cards based on Turing are also expected to be compatible.
Metro Exodus is the first announced game to make use of Nvidia RTX technology, it is to be expected that we are facing an important graphic revolution that we have not seen for years, although we will have to wait for its arrival to the stores to check it out.