World of Warcraft Shadowlands’ Alpha hints at upcoming RTX support

World of Warcraft Shadowlands' Alpha hints at upcoming RTX support

World of Warcraft Shadowlands’ Alpha hints at upcoming RTX support

With the release of the game’s Battle for Azeroth expansion, World of Warcraft gained support for DirectX 12, Microsoft’s latest graphics API. This feature upgrade for World of Warcraft enabled increased multi-threading within World of Warcraft’s engine, increasing game performance on modern systems while offering the game a higher baseline for future graphical upgrades. 

While World of Warcraft’s visuals are simplistic by today’s standards, Blizzard’s adoption of DirectX 12 could springboard the game’s visuals to new heights, and evidence of this can already be seen within the games’ shadowlands alpha. 

Support for DXR raytracing is coming to World of Warcraft, and blizzard’s raytracing journey with shadows. Right now, options for Ray Traced Shadows are within World of Warcraft’s Shadowlands Alpha, but at this time the option doesn’t do anything. In future alpha or beta releases, this new graphics option could be enabled, bringing Warcraft’s visuals to new heights. 

Right now, hardware-accelerated raytracing is only available on Nvidia’s RTX 20 series graphics cards, though that is due to change with the release of AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics cards later this year. At this time it is unknown how effective Blizzard’s raytracing support is within World of Warcraft Shadowlands.  

  

World of Warcraft Shadowlands' Alpha hints at upcoming RTX support  (Screenshot from Wow Head)

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