The 4A Engine implementation of " Metro 2033 " features volumetric fog, double PhysX precision, object blur, sub-surface scattering for skin shaders, parallax mapping on all surfaces and greater geometric detail with a less aggressive LOD ( s ).
This engine supports a number of graphical capabilities and techniques, including dynamic colored lighting, realistic dynamic shadows, skeletal animation, detailed models and textures, pixel shaders 2.0 & 3.0 ( with a great number of corresponding effects ), normal and parallax mapping, shader materials, bloom, blur and particle effects.
Particle and fire effects help give the illusion of volume along with motion blur and real time depth fields, the engine supports color Specular maps, Normal Mapping, and Parallax Mapping technologies . " Haze " runs at 30 frames per second; the team claimed that 60 frames per second was not needed for the pacing of the game.
"' Parallax mapping "'( also called "'offset mapping "'or "'virtual displacement mapping "') is an enhancement of the bump mapping and normal mapping techniques implemented by displacing the texture coordinates at a point on the rendered polygon by a function of the view angle in tangent space ( the angle relative to the surface normal ) and the value of the height map at that point.