Metro Exodus Developers say next gen consoles are far more powerful than they thought

[Gizmo_Duck]

There's a fairly long story of how we actually brought it to the consoles because before we even had the hardware, we were obviously very cautious. We didn't know exactly how it was going to perform. We initially very much hedged our bets and instead of going all-in with the full next-gen PC experience that was already well in development, we decided to implement a fallback solution for global illumination, which was actually what became DDGI in the end. That's a cheaper solution, it doesn't do the full-screen raytracing. But long story short, we needn't really have worried, because ultimately, the consoles did actually prove to be a lot more powerful than that initial pessimism would have led us to believe. As you start putting things in, you gradually work up towards better and better frame rates. Ultimately, we got to the point where it actually looked like the next-gen consoles were doing well enough that we'd be able to bring essentially all of the entire feature set over. So at that point, you then have to ask 'Are we going to be able to make this hit 4K@60'?

[Wccftech] Do you expect that the time saved during development thanks to raytracing will actually translate in shorter average development times when creating new games in the future, or perhaps the gains will be offset by other sectors?

Jonathan Bloch: We think it's more complicated than just saying simply that it will make things go faster because there's so many other parts of development that have nothing to do with ray tracing. Certainly, as we showed, it will make things easier for artists in levels. What that translates to, I guess depends on the team, on the game, and what's happening. In some instances, it could just mean that the artists are able to polish the area better than they maybe would have, based on the amount of time that they had with the old method, or it could mean that they could make the area bigger because now they have more time to work on more area within that, that same schedule. So it kind of depends, again, it kind of depends on you know, again, each team each game, how things are set up, you know, how things are gonna work, and but no doubt, there are huge benefits to the team, to any team.

[Digit Magazine] How have you accomplished shorter load times and how much of it depended on console hardware?

Jonathan Bloch: I don't know if you want to take that one? I think the easy answer is a lot of that came natively with the faster SSDs. But we did do a lot of optimization. I don't know if you want to speak a little bit more about that.

Ben Archard: You're absolutely right. It really is very much just like those SSDs are just better. Like really, that's the story. There's a lot of that is handled natively, or pretty much all of that is handled natively on the platform API side. And the fact is that those SSDs are just super fast. That's really just full credit to the platform developers, I think.

[Wccftech] Did you evaluate the implementation of other DirectX 12 features like Mesh Shading and Sampler Feedback when developing Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition? Are you planning to use them in future titles?

Ben Archard: As far as Mesh Shaders, they're not really something we had any need to use because they essentially change the way that you run your geometry pipeline and we already have a very mature geometry pipeline. Maybe we can experiment with them, we're not ruling them out, but there weren't strictly speaking necessary for this project.

Sampler Feedback, again, it's something we'll look into. I like the look of it, but it needs to be experimented on. In Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition we do have Variable Rate Shading, a Tier 1 implementation that we use to reduce the actual number of pixels drawn for our transparent effects. That helps performance a little bit, but we haven't gone fully into Tier 2 VRS yet.

TLDR:
Metro devs thought they might not be able to do full RT GI on the consoles, but turns out they could.
SSD is used as is in PS5 / X.
No VRS tier 2 was used. Tier 1 on Series consoles, and similar software based VRS on PS5.
No mesh shaders and sampler feedback streaming tech used.