I feel Metro Exodus EE looks better than like 90% of new releases and runs with RT enabled on consoles at 60 fps. 4A isn’t exactly a huge studio, why were they able to manage this but nobody else can?
They used temporal GI. Which looks great but has its own drawbacks.
Having said that, really looking forward to their next title. That should be well next Gen only and should push boundaries of what to expect. (Fingers crossed)
For me those ugly blocky textures (because of VRS) was the main problem of that game and temporal GI (with sometimes latency in the lighting) was not that of a problem when playing.