Exclusive tech interview on Metro 2033

PC Game Hardware interviewed Dean Sharpe, producer of Metro 2033. He delivered information about the support of DirectX 11, GPU Physx and multi-core processors. He also revealed the technical and visual advantages the PC version of the game will have in comparison to the consoles:

• most of the textures are 2048^2 (consoles use 1024^2)

• the shadow-map resolution is up to 9.43 Mpix

• the shadow filtering is much, much better

• the parallax mapping is enabled on all surfaces, some with occlusion-mapping

• we’ve utilized a lot of "true" volumetric stuff, which is very important in dusty environments

• from DX10 upwards we use correct "local motion blur" (sometimes called "object blur")

• the light-material response is nearly "physically-correct" on higher quality presets

• the ambient occlusion is greatly improved (especially on higher quality presets)

• sub-surface scattering makes a lot of difference on human faces, hands, etc.

• the geometric detail is somewhat better – because of different LOD selection (not even counting DX11 tessellation)