Why it matters: If, like me, you love Metro Exodus and have already played through it several times, here's some good news: an enhanced edition of the FPS arrives on May 6. It's free to existing owners, though there is a small caveat; it requires a very beefy rig.
Metro Exodus was one of the flagship titles for showing off ray tracing abilities when it launched in 2019. The Enhanced Edition builds on that by only working on ray tracing-capable graphics hardware.
As the name suggests, the Enhanced Edition brings a slew of improvements. Not only does the game run faster, but it also adds variable rate shading (VRS), advanced ray traced reflections and DLSS 2.1 support for Nvidia GPUs that offers "sharper image details and increased framerates and display resolutions." There's a temporal upscaling option for AMD's cards, too.
The enhanced edition of the game is free to owners of Metro Exodus on Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store, and GOG---no Stadia, Amazon Luna, Linux, or Mac versions. It isn't an upgrade to the base version; so many new features have been added that it's being released as an entire game, hence the new PC requirements.
Save files will carry over on Steam, EGS, and GOG, but not the Microsoft Store, sadly. It's also worth noting that progress within levels isn't saved---you'll have to restart each chapter. There is a "chapter unlock" feature that creates a new save with default equipment and resources, but you won't be able to earn achievements using said save slot.
Here are the PC requirements for Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition:
The game also requires 73GB of storage space, along with an extra 1GB for The Two Colonels DLC, and 7GB for Sam's Story.