World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will feature “ray-traced visual effects” confirms Nvidia

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will feature

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will feature “ray-traced visual effects” confirms Nvidia

Starting with World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard started to make significant upgrades to the MMO’s engine, enabling DirectX 12 support to deliver increased performance levels on compatible hardware. 

With the release of the game’s new Shadowlands, expansion, World of Warcraft is due to receive support for “ray-traced visual effects”, as confirmed by Nvidia.  

With Alpha releases of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, strings referring to “RT_Shadow_Quality”, appeared within the game, offering users “Fair”, “Medium” and “High” quality settings, offering ray-traced shadows from directional and local light sources at varying resolutions/quality levels. 

World of Warcraft is the world’s most successful MMORPG, making the addition of raytracing to the game a change that will drive many longtime fans of the game to upgrade their systems. It is also likely that Blizzard has made some major changes to World of Warcraft’s DirectX 12 to accomplish this, which could enable increased performance levels for World of Warcraft in other areas. 

Moving forward, it is likely that World of Warcraft will gain support for more raytraced effects as time moves on. Ray tracing hardware is due to become more powerful in the future, and game developers will seek to utilise this performance when it becomes available. In time, World of Warcraft may also gain support for ray-traced reflections and ray-traced global illumination, both of which could significantly change World of Warcraft’s visuals.  

World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will feature  

At this time, World of Warcraft Shadowlands lacks a firm release date, though it is likely that the game will release in early Q4 2020. 

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