In an interview with PCGamesHardware.de Oles Shishkovtsov, Chief Technical Officer at 4A Games has revealed some technical details about the upcoming game.  Metro: Last Light will be very scalable in a graphics department, running on Intel's integrated HD 4000 on low settings, while bringing GTX 680 and HD 7970 to their knees on very high settings with SSAA. The game will support DX9 for compatibility reasons, but DX11 offers 10-15% better performance on the same settings even on an integrated GPU. There is also a DX10 rendering path, which is close to DX11 one, but lacks tessellation and parallax occlusion mapping.

There won't be any MSAA support in Metro: LL, AAA and FXAA post-processing anti-aliasing methods tailored to the game will be the default solution without the option to turn them off. Additional shaders are used to reduce the aliasing of sub-pixel detail. For the higher quality image, options for SSAA (Super-sampling AA) are present. Oles Shishkovtsov says that post-process AA together with 2xSSAA offer better quality than 4xMSAA at similar performance cost. There will be several choices for tessellation in the game – enabling it only for some objects or taking an additional 15% loss for tessellating everything. Finally, there will be PhysX support, with a lot of object on highest level of detail. While the possibility of running advanced PhysX effects on CPU was mentioned in the interview, it is not clear if it was theoretical (few FPS, but not blocked) or practical (>30 FPS with advanced PhysX on powerful CPU).

Metro 2033 had very good graphics and looks like Metro: Last Light will improve over its predecessor both in quality and performance. Just a few weeks are left before a new journey to the post-apocalyptic Moscow Metro.