Metro Exodus PC requirements revealed

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Numbers first: on January 25, 2019, 4A Games revealed the PC requirements for Metro Exodus in four tiers (minimum, recommended, high and extreme), and the message was clear: anyone wanting the game at maximum was going to need a serious machine.

According to the spec sheet Steam still keeps today, the minimum is an Intel Core i5-4440, 8 GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX 670, GTX 1050 or Radeon HD 7870, with DirectX 11. For 1080p at 60 frames per second on high quality, the 2019 announcement asked for a GTX 1070, RTX 2060 or RX Vega 56, with 8 GB of video memory; Steam lists those cards alongside a Core i7-4770K. At the top, the extreme tier, designed for 4K at 60 frames, asked for the most expensive hardware of the time: an RTX 2080 Ti and a Core i9-9900K.

In practice, this means the game scaled well downward, but charged a lot to shine. And there was an extra reason for RTX card owners to be interested: Metro Exodus was one of the first games to use real-time ray tracing, applied to global illumination, which changes the look of the post-apocalyptic scenery quite a bit.

In the same week, on January 28, Deep Silver announced that the PC version would be exclusive to the Epic Games Store for one year, which generated a negative reaction and mass review-bombing of the previous Metro games on Steam.

What came next

The game came out on February 15, 2019 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with Metacritic averages between 80 and 82. It reached Steam on February 15, 2020. On May 6, 2021, the Enhanced Edition, free for existing owners, rebuilt the lighting with ray tracing; PS5 and Xbox Series received the version on June 18, 2021. By February 2024, the game had passed 10 million units.