Its interesting to see the PC being treated as a first class citizen here. This isn't the first game like this, Just Cause 2 is another such example with a pure native DX10 path.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-interview-metro-2033?page=1
Oles Shishkovstov: The PC version has all of these techniques available (although we aren't sure yet what to allow in the final build).
On PC we do even more interesting deferred stuff; we do deferred sub-scattering specifically tailored for human skin shading. But that's another story...
Digital Foundry: Does PC hardware offer up any additional bonuses in Metro 2033 aside from higher frame-rates and resolutions?
Oles Shishkovstov: Yes and no. When you have more performance on the table, you can either do nothing as you say, and as most direct console ports do, or you add the features. Because our platforms got equal attention, we took the second route.
Naturally most of the features are graphics related, but not all. The internal PhysX tick-rate was doubled on PC resulting in more precise collision detection and joint behavior. We "render" almost twice the number of sounds (all with wave-tracing) compared to consoles. That's just a few examples, so that you can see that not only graphics gets a boost. On the graphics side, here's a partial list:
*Most of the textures are 2048^2 (consoles use 1024^2).
*The shadow-map resolution is up to 9.43 Mpix. (I'll add it is about 3072x3072 shadowmap res)
*The shadow filtering is much, much better.
*The parallax mapping is enabled on all surfaces, some with occlusion-mapping (optional).
*We've utilised 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 the PC 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.
*We are considering enabling global illumination (as an option) which really enhances the lighting model. However, that comes with some performance hit, because of literally tens of thousands of secondary light sources.
Interesting stuff. This is one of the first DX11 titles, it makes use of PhysX *not that I approve of PhysX* and it takes advantage of additional performance on the PC. This definately makes the PC look like my primary platform for this game, so long as they don't screw over ATI card users.
