World of Warcraft's upcoming Shadowlands expansion will bring a whole host of new content to the ageing, but not aged, MMO, but one of its most exciting additions will be to introduced ray traced lighting to the world of Azeroth and in an early demonstration, it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Ray tracing was a technology thought a decade or more away from being possible in real time gaming, but Nvidia's hardware acceleration in its RTX Turing generation of graphics cards implemented Microsoft's DirectX powered solution and it works really well. It's still a performance hog, and with the current generation of GPUs, at least, you need a hefty card to power it, but the results speak for themselves. Now they're coming to WoW, too.
shadowlands beta ray tracing, 9700 k 5,1@1.30 v, rtx 2080 super , settings al 10 ,msaa 8x , ray tracing alto,1440p pic.twitter.com/5Ua8qiQMC2
— Sergio Guillén (@SergioGuilln12) August 20, 2020
Players during the alpha test of Shadowlands were the first to get a look at what the new lighting effect looks like in action. They're given four different options to play with, ranging from no ray tracing at all, through Fair, Good, and High settings, with each adding progressively more rays at higher resolution. The lowest settings enable just directional light source ray tracing, while highers add local and directional ray traced lighting.
They need to have an RTX generation graphics card and the latest Nvidia Game Ready driver to enable it, but once it's turned on, it looks pretty great, making WoW look far more contemporary than its evolved graphics would typically appear. Shadows are crisper and track better throughout the changing light of a WoW day.
Shadowlands will launch this Fall.
