Tuesday, May 5th 2020
World of Warcraft Set to Receive Ray Tracing Support with Shadowlands Alpha
Blizzard Entertainment is set to bring a significant upgrade to World of Warcraft's graphics just in time for the next expansion. A new Ray Traced Shadow option was discovered by Jaydaa over at the Wowhead forums on the Shadowlands Alpha, the ray tracing settings can be viewed on the alpha but can't be enabled yet. When Blizzard enables Ray Tracing support, players with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards will be able to take advantage of more realistic shadows and lighting within the game. The screenshots show the option for three levels of ray tracing fidelity from fair to good and up to high which will each offer higher resolution and more detailed lighting.
Source:
Wowhead
18 Comments on World of Warcraft Set to Receive Ray Tracing Support with Shadowlands Alpha
These games are often not very graphically demanding and very CPU bound because they are single threaded, so there is a lot of GPU headroom. At least assuming the game does not have MSAA, because if it does then applying MSAAx8+SGSSAAx4 is enough to stress the GPU and improve picture quality massively.
I don't know how much CPU ray traced reflections need, but looking at how massively regular reflections affect CPU performance in games like ESO or LOTRO, I wouldn't be surprised if ray traced reflections actually increased the performance, taking some load off this poor single core into the GPU. Next to generational improvements in single threaded performance from CPUs this is the only way to get performance increase in such games, it is not like they are getting multithreading support anytime soon, or ever.
2080Ti at 1080p, ain't it cool?
If it ain't, let us sprinkle it with "better than native" fancy upscaling tech.
Still not cool enough?
What if we use more buzzwords, like "AI" and "machine learning"?
RT looks impressive on games like Minecraft, which don't have any sort of shadows/reflections.
Much less so on games already having it.
This is a screenshot of a game running on a 7870 kind of a GPU:
And here is an even older game, from PS3:
Stop pretending most games are like Minecraft.
Optimising games with RT in mind would save them a huge amount of time and money.
I know it is not very realistic and most of such games won't ever get ray tracing, just something that's crossed my mind regarding reflections specifically, knowing how badly the work in many MMOs.
Do you still have to pay $15 a month to play btw? All mmos from that era and before were like that.
And then there is Crytek's RT demo, running on Vega 56, that could fly right now, perhaps.