World of Tanks’ enCore RayTracing Demo is now available

In a future update, World of Tanks will gain support for what Wargaming calls enCore RT (Ray Tracing), offering gamers high-fidelity tank shadows without the need for specialised hardware like Nvidia RTX.

Today, Wargaming has released their WOT enCore RT demo, a benchmarking tool which will allow gamers to test the performance impact of the company’s raytracing implementation while also looking at its graphical impact. In this demo, raytracing is disabled by default, though additional options of Off, High, Maximum and Ultra will be available. 

Wargaming’s implementation of real-time raytracing utilises a combined CPU and GPU approach, using Intel’s Embree library to create Bound Volume Hierarchy’s (BVH) to allow the user’s graphics card to conduct raytracing calculations with a relatively low performance impact using compute shaders. This is much faster than completing both tasks using a graphics card. This solution also enables ray tracing in World of Tanks through DirectX 11 without specialised graphics technology or new APIs. All you need is a relatively new processor and a DirectX 11 compatible graphics card. 

Below is an example of how raytraced shadows can impact World of Tanks’ visuals.