Damn! I thought it is the new one :D

Driftwood, to you and to all of the Gamersyde team, thank you so much for this! Really, I sincerely thank you all a lot for making these incredible videos.

These are exactly the type of things that only Gamersyde can do, because of what it is and also because of how great you guys are. I honestly wouldn't even have begun to imagine doing something like this. You guys are creative and incredible.

This is how you end a discussion, don't say anything, just show and let people judge for themselves. These videos are the perfect example of how much far ahead, technically, some developers are over others. This game was released in 2013 and at 4K with all settings maxed, it looks gorgeous.

It shows that if 4A Games was able to do so much back in 2013, with the previous version of their in-house 4A Engine, why wouldn't they be able to do Metro: Exodus' level of quality 4 years later and with the next version of 4A Engine?!

Yes, Jon Bloch, Executive Producer of Metro: Exodus said in an interview with Geoff Keighley that they're always improving and iterating the 4A Engine for every Metro game. Therefore, one can think of it like this:

4A Engine v1.0 = Metro 2033
4A Engine v2.0 = Metro: Last Light
4A Engine v3.0 = Metro: Exodus

Also of importance is the fact that Metro: Last Light was Cross-Genenerations and was released on 7 platforms: Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox One.

So the question then becomes: If Metro: Last Light looked this great in 2013, running in 4A Engine v2.0 and being cross-gen, how great can Metro: Exodus look running in 4A Engine v3.0 in 2017, just for PC, PS4 and XB1 ?

And it should be noted that Metro: Exodus will only be released in 2018, assuming it doesn't get delayed - hopefully not. Either way, it's clear to see from these videos that yes, that demo was running in-game in real-time. Just like the developer said.

I have re-posted the important parts of Geoff Keighley's interview with Jon Bloch transcribed and the link to the video interview below - for accessibility and awareness:

Geoff Keighley: "What we saw here, you know, technically it was really incredible. So was that running on a PC or what it was running on?"

Jon Bloch: "This is actually representative of what it will be like on Xbox One X."

Geoff Keighley: "The same GPU, and sort of on a devkit or is this a PC of the same scope?"

Jon Bloch: "It was captured on a PC of the same kind of... spec. Our engine was built from the ground up to be cross-platform. And to take full advantage of every platform that it's released on. So regardless of the platform, it will be the best possible experience that it can be on those platforms. We're not like porting from one platform to another or anything like that and then you end up losing fidelity or something. No, it's gonna take full advantage of every platform."

Source: GameSlice - YouTube Live at E3 Day One (Metro: Exodus Developer Interview) [Starts at 4:10]:
https://youtu.be/sgEjJr0PYe8?t=250

So there we have it. While it was indeed running on a PC, it was a PC with similar specs to Xbox One X. And it is actually representative of what it will look like on it.

The reason it looks so far ahead - almost like next-generation - is because like Jon Bloch said, it's not a "port" in which you end up losing fidelity and stuff like that. It's gonna take full advantage of each platform's strengths. If this statement is true and those PC's specs are accurate, then yes, Xbox One X is indeed capable of running Metro: Exodus looking like in that demo at the Microsoft press conference.

Again, thanks a lot for these videos, Driftwood and the entire Gamersyde team. I believe I speak for most - if not all - that this is the type of thing we want to see more on Gamersyde. And it's the type of thing that only Gamersyde - and maybe Digital Foundry, but their non-YouTube 4K videos require a paid subscription - can achieve.

YouTube's and other sites' videos just can't compete quality wise. Plus Gamersyde isn't charging anyone for subscriptions to do so, it's "completely free". Though the Gamersyde staff definitely appreciates all the Patreon donations - to those who are able to help.

Let's just enjoy these astonishingly high quality Gamersyde videos and try to imagine what a Xbox One X will be able to achieve if it's properly supported - Metro: Exodus and Anthem.

Personally, I'm very interested to see how Red Dead Redemption 2 will look like on Xbox One X, since Rockstar is the best developer when it comes to technical quality, visuals and sheer amount of details. And they almost always - with the exception of Grand Theft Auto 4 on PC - do an excellent job with any platform.

in-engine. what they showed was not in-game in the slightest. not unless they have the most automated, perfectly animated on-rails shooting segments in an FPS. lol

No Pes or Fifa gameplay?

This look good. Not sure how I ever managed to miss out on this franchise.

You're right, it was in-engine running at native 4K. But the developers never said it wasn't actual gameplay. Either way, the visual quality of the game is possible on current hardware.

If you watch the Metro: Exodus demo in 1080p here at Gamersyde, you will realize that the game's visuals are on par or slightly better than Crysis 3 on PC with all settings maxed and at 4K.

At 1080p the game's visual quality isn't as striking and it falls more in line with modern FPSs. At 4K, the game looks much more gorgeous and almost unrealistic, but it has more to do with 4K visual quality and its benefits than anything else.

As an example, here we have Metro: Last Light looking incredibly gorgeous at 4K, and on par or better than most FPS games of the last couple of years. And I've played this game to completion, and it didn't look anything like here. I was playing with almost all settings maxed, but it was at 1080p - if I'm remembering correctly, only AA and Shadow quality were at High or Medium. 4K makes a lot of difference.

While it's true that as graphics technology advances, we get diminishing returns, people shouldn't forget that going from 1080p to 4K is still a big jump in visual quality. And I'm not talking about checkerboarding bullshit, I mean true/native 4k. Nothing against checkerboarding, but it's still upscaling.

It's the 4K video here at Gamersyde that really shows a visual quality that looks almost unreal. Though that has more to do with 4K quality and its benefits than anything else.

Below is the gallery of images from Metro: Last Light's Gameplay #2 video on Gamersyde, it's from the PC version and of the last DLC of the game. I would have put a link to the video, but the file is no longer available to download.

http://gamersyde.com/gallery_22736_en.html

That's more in line with what I remember the game looking like. Yet, here in these 4K videos, the exact same game looks far more beautiful. I'm sure the settings were maxed as well. So why is that?!

For comparison's sake, below is the gallery with the images of the second 4K video:

http://gamersyde.com/gallery_35863_en.html

I suggest you download the images, put then in a folder and see then at fullscreen with stretch options on. Because the goal is to make the 4K image fit into a 1080p format. It's basically downsampling. There's plenty of images and videos comparing 1080p vs 2160p you can find on Google and YouTube, but they generally favour 1080p because their quality is very low, which means 2160p loses a lot of its visual quality.

Metro: Exodus still looks gorgeous, even at 1080p, but not as striking. It's at 4K that it truly shines. But it's nothing impossible. I suspect that a lot of people will be very surprised when they see the difference in visual quality of a game running 1080p on XB1 and native 4K on XBX, if the latter is properly supported. Unfortunately, most developers will just put little effort in XBX versions. Like they do with PS4 Pro.

Checkboarding isn't upscaling. Upscaling is upscaling.

Checkboarding produces a full 4k output, it is just comprised of 2 frames worth of data. What we see is a 4k image, what was actually rendered for that 1/30th of a second was acually half that resolution. But you don't see it because its using the orevious frame to fill in the gaps. There is a reason full resolution checkerboarding seen in things like horizon produces results places like DF say are indistinguishable from native outputs.

Upscaling is just taking a render and stretching it to be bigger, complete with all the softness and artifacts that comes with that.

For someone who talks an awful lot, you don't seem to understand how things actually work.

"And finally, we have titles widely reported online to be operating at native 4K, but actually running sub-natively, or using other upscaling techniques like checkerboarding."

Digital Foundry - Every PS4 Pro native 4K game tested:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

"The quality of the upscaling varies on a title by title basis, but at its best, in living room conditions, it looks close to native. The principle behind the 'checkerboard' scaling is pretty straightforward - a 2x2 pixel structure is extrapolated up to 4x4, apparently using new hardware built into PS4 Pro's GPU, so there is no cost to developers."

Digital Foundry - Tech Analysis: 4K gaming on PlayStation 4 Pro:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

"An overview of a 2x2 checkerboard upscaling technique as revealed by Valve in relation to optimising performance in VR. In essence, it upscales a 2x2 pixel structure into a 4x4 block, cutting the base rendering requirement by half in terms of pixel count."

Digital Foundry - We built a PC with PlayStation Neo's GPU tech:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

"With one or two exceptions, the 'next-gen' upscaling techniques used on PS4 Pro don't tend to exist in the PC space."

Digital Foundry - Scorpio is console hardware pushed to a new level:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

"For the first time, we get to see Days Gone at full 4K via its checkerboard upscaling."

"InFamous First Light - the game uses checkerboard rendering at 1800p, upscaling from there to 4K."

Digital Foundry - Inside PlayStation 4 Pro: How Sony made the first 4K games console (Interview with PlayStation 4 and Pro System Architect Mark Cerny):
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2...

Richard Leadbetter is "someone who talks an awful lot, and doesn't seem to understand how things actually work" too.

PS. I know full well the differences between the two approaches, but both result in less quality than the present in the native resolution, and both produce visual artifacts that aren't present in the native resolution. So semantics apart, call it "next-gen upscaling" if you will, they still produce partially the same results, even if one does a better job than the other.

it isn't upscaling at all if the output is 2160. It's checkerboarding. That's what i'll call it because that is it's name. The same way i'll call insomniacs technique by its name temporal injection. it's hugely reductive to call it anything else. Like it shares comonalities between the shit thing the xbone does with non 1080p titles.

And i'm not saying native isn't better, i'm saying you are wrong to say it is upscalling.

Now, there are some games that do BOTH on account of them being seperate things. You already used infamous as an example. tomb raider too checkerboards to 1800p and THEN upscales to 4k. But they are very much 2 different things. And again, unless your eyeball is touching the screen, barely noticeable.

One is stretching lower res results to fit a frame, the other is creating data to fill it.

Jesus, that MS marketing really worked on you didn't it. Lol.

Still looks great on PC in 4K!! Can't wait for Exodus!!!