World of Warcraft Set to Receive Ray Tracing Support with Shadowlands Alpha

erek

erek

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RTX getting big?

"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."

https://www.techpowerup.com/266648/...ve-ray-tracing-support-with-shadowlands-alpha
 
I play this game in 4K. RTX will destroy my FPS unless the Nvidia 3000 series is godly.....and I hope they are.
 
stamsek said:
I play this game in 4K. RTX will destroy my FPS unless the Nvidia 3000 series is godly.....and I hope they are.
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Probably not an RTX implementation but an DX12 implementation and that alone is a 15-20% performance increase in the same hardware supposedly. Will it still kill your frame rate probably, but hey it would be old school like the many of us who had to angle our cameras to the ground on boss fights to keep the FPS out of the single digits. No excuse to be standing in the red at that angle either.
 
Lakados said:
Probably not an RTX implementation but an DX12 implementation and that alone is a 15-20% performance increase in the same hardware supposedly. Will it still kill your frame rate probably, but hey it would be old school like the many of us who had to angle our cameras to the ground on boss fights to keep the FPS out of the single digits. No excuse to be standing in the red at that angle either.
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RTX is a middleware that invokes DXR calls, so you're going to need to provide some evidence that a "DX12" implementation is "15-20%" faster.
 
Armenius said:
RTX is a middleware that invokes DXR calls, so you're going to need to provide some evidence that a "DX12" implementation is "15-20%" faster.
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Think he's just talking about the DX11 --> DX12 gains.

Which are probably nothing to write home about in lower pop areas, but also might actually help significantly in higher pop areas and boss fights and so on.

On another note, I have a feeling that like Minecraft, ray tracing may help really bring Blizzard's cartoony art direction 'alive'.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Think he's just talking about the DX11 --> DX12 gains.

Which are probably nothing to write home about in lower pop areas, but also might actually help significantly in higher pop areas and boss fights and so on.

On another note, I have a feeling that like Minecraft, ray tracing may help really bring Blizzard's cartoony art direction 'alive'.
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Except Blizzard added the DX12 rendering path to WoW back in 2018.
 
Armenius said:
RTX is a middleware that invokes DXR calls, so you're going to need to provide some evidence that a "DX12" implementation is "15-20%" faster.
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RTX is using DXR 1.0 Microsoft rolled DXR 1.1 into Direct X 12 Ultimate, the way improvements in 1.1 are proving to be more efficient and are having a positive impact on performance.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Think he's just talking about the DX11 --> DX12 gains.

Which are probably nothing to write home about in lower pop areas, but also might actually help significantly in higher pop areas and boss fights and so on.

On another note, I have a feeling that like Minecraft, ray tracing may help really bring Blizzard's cartoony art direction 'alive'.
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No I meant the performance gains advertised between the DXR 1.0 add-on which is used for RTX and the DXR 1.1 that Microsoft rolled into DX12 Ultimate a few months back.
 
I feel like this would somehow cause even more server disconnects than they already have.
 
stamsek said:
I play this game in 4K. RTX will destroy my FPS unless the Nvidia 3000 series is godly.....and I hope they are.
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It'd be fine as long as they support DLSS (2.0 preferably) in order to negate the performance hit from RTX, which I'm not sure I've seen any games only support one tech and not the other since Nvidia pretty much made them to go hand in hand to make RTX more viable in the first place.
 
I'm not against this in theory, but I really hope it is both a hardware agnostic and OS agnostic implementation. Blizzard games , notably WoW, have been noteworthy for years in that they offered OpenGL support (and Mac clients) back when few others did. This is one thing that allowed WoW to work easily via WINE even back in the old days long before Valve's push to shore up Linux gaming in so many ways including Steam for Linux and the development of Proton. Blizz also deserves kudos for - perhaps the only major one to date - specifically working with the development of their Warden anti-cheat system to be friendly to those playing the game on Linux via Wine / Proton et al! I can only hope they approach raytracing with similar openness.

On the hardware side, hopefully it won't be too biased in support of RTX exclusively. We're expecting that by launch of Shadowlands (Holiday this year many seem to suspect) the next AMD RDNA2 cards will arrive with hardware raytracing support, so with luck it will be equally viable. The usage of DXR 1.1 / DX12 UIltimate for instance would in theory be equally hardware agnostic, provided that it didn't favor RTX way of doing things or hardware over AMD's RDNA2 cards.

When it comes to OS however, I'm a little more concerned. I'm unsure how Vulkan specifically is going to handle raytracing and if WoW will be given a Vulkan backend (I've not played for this latest expansion so I'm unsure; would be great if it was all ready there!) natively. In theory, DirectX 12 and Vulkan are very "close" and easy to translate between, but I'm unsure if this DX12 Ultimate and especially DXR 1.1+ style raytracing support is parity supported or better in Vulkan. Hopefully it will be, but we'll have to see. If nothing else, we've seen a lot of DXVK progress (mostly DX11) with Proton and if DX12 is even easier/closer perhaps it won't be difficult to have them supported, but I suppose we'll have to see.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
The timing looks like it's probably related to having AMD RT hardware becoming available.
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DX12U has the DXR 1.1 cooked into it with official support it is hardware agnostic and is supported by nVidia’s existing 2000 series cards as well as the new AMD stuff coming this fall/spring.
It’s timing probably has less to do with AMD and more to do with Microsoft offering programming support as a bonus on their licensing renewal so Microsoft is footing the bill for a short time on training why not take advantage of that.
 
I honestly want to see this utilized in a raid setting... Already had to turn stuff down with all of those spell, animations, and other graphical events.
 
DukenukemX said:
I wouldn't consider Retail WoW big. Classic has far more players. I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't removed the monthly subscription from the game yet.
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Why would they remove the monthly subscription and why is it surprising that it’s still there?
 
I loved wow back in the day I played it far too much, to the detriment of many things. Eventually learned how to balance life and still enjoyed it till Mist’s but it hen life got in the way and I just couldn’t find my way back. Now I look at it and it just feels intimidating to even think about getting back into it. I tried to get into Classic and it was just as I remembered it but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to the grind anymore and Classic isn’t overly casual friendly. I’m still happy to see that it is being worked on and enjoyed, after 14 years most titles would have slipped into maintenance mode with the occasional seasonal update or event for Christmas or something but not churning out new content and certainly not bothering with game engine upgrades for edge cases like ray tracing. I love giving Blizzard crap for all the stuff they pull on the business side but I’m going to give them props for this one.
 
Shoganai said:
Why would they remove the monthly subscription and why is it surprising that it’s still there?
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Whenever a MMO bleeds players then the next logical step is to remove the subscription. As far as I know Battle for Azeroth is a colossal failure, with something like 300,000 active players. WoW classic has less than 1 million. It's getting to the point where you may have to sacrifice the $15 monthly fee to sell $60 games. I'm sure the game designers would be relieved that they don't have to design a game around the idea of keeping you paying $15 a month.
 
This is great and all but they need to ditch this old engine and start utilizing the overwatch engine for WoW. Now that would be cool.
 
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