I prefer sharp shadows
To be quite honest, this is a bit meh. For those curious, the PTR has RT shadows enabled as well. I had the shadows set to "Good" with a 2080 ti with a 3440x1440@100Hz monitor. Just randomly flying around in Tiragarde Sound I was sitting on 99-100 fps but flying around in Val'Sharah saw my fps fluctuate from ~50-100fps and the main "town" there had me sitting on 50-60 fps while just sitting there. RT shadows are not really worth the loss in fps with current GPUs (I will have to test with the lower quality shadows) but with the rumoured performance increase with the next gen cards, it maybe perfectly fine to enable for the extra fidelity.
anyone else experience huge fps drop since this update?
WoW remains beautiful, and progressively has gotten more complex models through expansions, but its graphics seems more outdated which each expansion as well, compared to the other games. A new engine seems inevitable. The question is when...?
I'm not sure why blurry shadows are supposed to be better? I'd rather see what's above me clearly, especially with war mode on.
A lot of people commenting that it just makes shadows softer. This is false. With ray-traced shadows you get contact hardening, so shadows very near to the shadow-casting object will actually be harder than they were before. The screenshots don't do a good job of showcasing this, but look at the character shadow in the fifth comparison.
Is it just me or do the RTX off shadows look way better
Finally! It's been bugging me all expansion that my raid fps only drops to 40 with RTX 2080. Can't wait to raid with an optimal 25 fps while enjoying the beautiful rays.
wow, i thought the pics on the left were the RTX ones.
I've been testing zones in Nazjatar, Boralus, zuldazar and broken isle with my RTX2070.Honestly I loose 30-40 fps for having some blurry shadows from afar, and there's no "new shadow render" when getting close to a fire or anything dynamic like that.Ambiant occlusion is not included. It's just... Blurry shadows with my rtx2070 fan getting crazy. Maybe the actual Shadowlands continent will take advantage of that technology because right now, it's a nice "Disabled" option :-p
Soft shadows may not immediately seem impressive but they are much closer to shadows in real life and have traditionally been tricky to implement in realtime graphics. With traditional realtime shadows, pixels are either in shadow or not, causing abrupt edges which can appear unrealistically sharp or pixellated without additional tricks and processing. In reality, shadows have areas that are darker and lighter because different amounts of light can reach different spots based on light source size, angle, distance etc. Ray tracing emulates these qualities very well, but it is an extremely computationally expensive method, which is much more often used for pre-rendered graphics that can take hours to render a frame instead of milliseconds. Real time ray tracing is a big deal, but it will probably be a while before hardware makes it feasible enough to always be worth the huge performance impact. Currently this more of a peek into the future than a setting most people will use.
Looks worse to me, like I need to go to an eye doctor and get some new prescription glasses.
Nice.. Something that I will hardly even notice xDDDD
Shrug, they are certainly better looking shadows than those ancient sharp stencils. Maybe in another couple of years we can get global illumination, that would improve image quality immensely-- but I doubt it, since most of the game is artificially lit and it would be an insane amount of work to add real lights to the environment everywhere and make it look right.
can't wait to try it on my 10 fps laptop!
Ooo I just got a new graphics card that supports this too
Can i ask, who cares about this ? just another &*!@
AO is still screen space, raytracing is really only used for the sun light shadows. Also shadows appear blurrier the further away the object casting it is, when the object is closer to the one receiving the shadow then it's sharper.