Metro Exodus runs smoothly with ray tracing on – but there is a price to pay

Nvidia's ray tracing is no stranger to Metro Exodus, and they get along pretty well. An off-screen gameplay proves that the game can handle ultra-realistic lighting at 50+ FPS in 1080p. But it comes at a price.

It seems Nvidia’s cutting edge ray tracing technology isn’t a system killer after all. According to an off-screen gameplay captured by PC Games Hardware, Metro Exodus handles the infamous realistic lighting effects just fine, maintaining 50+ frames per second in 1080p, no sweat. There’s no room for mistake – see for yourself:

But there’s also a price to pay. The demo is running on an RTX 2080 Ti. This flagship GPU by Nvidia costs a whopping $999 – enough money to get hold of three PlayStation 4s and still have some spare change for three DualShocks 4. It’s up to you to judge if it’s worth it, but keep in mind that we’re still to learn how other Turing GPUs – a $699 RTX 2080 and a $499 RTX 2070 – handle this piece of technology.

Metro Exodus runs smoothly with ray tracing on – but there is a price to pay - picture #1

I mean, life itself rarely looks this good.

And why is ray tracing getting everybody in a tizzy, anyway? In case you couldn’t determine from the gameplay, it’s Nvidia’s newest, state-of-the-art technology; an advancement in computer graphics that allows lights coming from many sources to be reflected and refracted, and shadows to be realistically diffused, all in real time. Although pretty demanding, it’s basically cutscene-tier graphics becoming reality, and most likely a standard in the future. But don’t take my word for it – the first game to support ray tracing, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, debuts on September 14. That’s 6 days prior to the launch of new Nvidia GPUs. About time you spent the money you’ve been stashing away and gave one of them a test drive.