A massive visual overhaul is headed to Metro Exodus with the upcoming Enhanced Edition release, and it needs some serious hardware to run—nothing less than a GeForce RTX 2060. Hardware is just part of the equation, though. In preparation for the game's release, Nvidia's latest 'Game Ready' GPU driver (version 466.27) is optimized to take full advantage of the game's "fully ray-traced lighting pipeline" and DLSS 2.0 support.
Nvidia points out that Metro Exodus was one of the first games to employ real-time ray tracing. It was also one of the first to leverage the original version of DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), which taps into the Tensor cores found on GeForce RTX graphics cards for better visuals with a minimal performance hit. The original version was not without its flaws—it sacrificed too much visual fidelity—but DLSS 2.0 is a big improvement, and worth turning on.
"Experience new, advanced ray-traced reflections, improved ray-traced global illumination lighting that’s applied to every light throughout the game, and the introduction of ray-traced emissive lighting, previously seen exclusively in The Two Colonels DLC," Nvidia says of Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, which releases on May 6.
The newest driver release also brings Game Ready optimizations to a couple of other upcoming games, including Resident Evil Village (releases May 7) and Mass Effect Legendary Edition (comes out on May 14).
Beyond the performance tweaks, Nvidia added five more G-Sync Compatible monitors to the fold, with this driver update. They include:
- AOC 24G2W1G8—1920x1080, 48-240Hz VRR range
- AOC AG274US4R6B—3840x2160, 48-144Hz VRR range
- Asus XG349C—3440x1440, 48-144Hz VRR range
- Philips 279M1RV—2840x2160, 60-144Hz VRR range
- Samsung LC27G50A—2560x1440, 48-165Hz VRR range
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Monitors validated as G-Sync Compatible lack an actual G-Sync hardware module, but have passed muster by Nvidia to support G-Sync on compatible graphics cards and with the latest driver. There are now over 150 displays bearing the G-Sync Compatible badge.
The release notes only mention three bug fixes this time around. One of them addresses "a number of performance related issues related to Nvidia Reflex and Rainbow Six Siege," while another squashes a bug that was capping in-game framerates to the display's refresh rate when connecting via HDMI 2.1 and turning off vertical sync. The third bug fix deals with crashing issues affecting Rigid Gems and Prepar3D.
You can install the latest driver through GeForce Experience, or head to Nvidia's driver download page to grab and apply it manually.
