Ray Tracing is just a completely different way of rendering environmental effects, and it's supposed to be far more accurate it terms of how objects in the world respond to a variety of materials, like water, metals, lights and shadows, etc.That said, Ray Tracing tends to benefit a lot more from CGI films or video games with the intention of super realism at lower cost of resources.I am kinda scratching my head thinking how a game like World of Warcraft can benefit from this, i guess i'd have to see what they are doing with their building materials in Shadowlands, because historically the game worlds environmental materials have always been on the cartoon-ish side of the art world- the only thing i can think of is this is a resource measure for them to have RTX-enabled machines to render the shadows instead of the older rendering methods.As someone mentioned earlier, the difference is barely noticable visually in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but i always had it turned on because i had been told if you have a RTX card or Ray Tracing compatible hardware, it's easier on resource management; But again, i barely ever saw the difference visually; you need like a really keen eye to these sort of things to spot it when it does visually make a difference.
It's time for my 5500 XT to shine in all the tracing glory!
Non hardware agnostic? :(
note that this is about ray-traced SHADOWS only, which is just a slightly fancier way of doing shadows.it is NOT ray-traced shading which would be a large graphical overhaul in most lighting effects.it also looks to be completely optional and so this addition should not affect framerates or anything unless specifically enabled.
seeing how raytracing works on 10 series cards, blizzard better not artificially limit it to 20 series cards only, like mojang did -_-
BFA made my game into a laggy mess, which when compared to Legion is an incredibly frustrating experience as I was able to play on ultra settings and had instant portals and rarely saw a loading screen. I just want Shadowlands to be more optimised rather than adding more pointless graphic features that I bet a tiny fraction of the community even have the machines to run properly anymore. Not everyone is so well off that we are able to keep upgrading our computers with new expensive parts just to run a game that's worked fine for 10 years prior.
I'm really concerned about optimization
All these features will not even be enabled unless you have an RTX card. For some it may be a reason to upgrade. Most users will just keep on playing as they have always done so.
Excuse me. Does that ray tracing come with optimizations in regards to better hardware utilization? I mean, my PC has so much processing headroom left untapped while I drop under 60fps. The recent optimizations, thought pleasant as they were, aren't really enough.
Let's hope the heightmap used for land will also cast shadows / self shadows now... it's always been weird that it doesn't currently.
Someone turn this feature on while standing in Suramar and tell me how many minutes you get before your PC explodes. ;)
Depends on how Blizzard gonna implement it. It might make the game look amazing if they add real time shadows from lights. Thats not possible right now