World of Tanks’ DirectX 11 raytracing solution is more impressive than you think

Raytracing is the holy grail of graphics tech, but its use in games has been limited to relatively few use cases. Raytracing is a demanding feature, and in most raytracing enabled games, it comes at a high performance cost and requires specialised hardware. 

Wargaming has decided to take a new approach to raytracing, opting to steer clear from raytracing hardware like the Nvidia RTX 20 series and away from API-specific implementations. In World of Tanks enCore RT, raytracing will arrive in a totally new form, delivering a clear visual upgrade while retaining support for all DirectX 11 graphics cards. 

How is this possible? Simple. Wargaming has limited their technology to just their tanks, and the company will utilise both CPU and GPU power to bring raytracing to World of Tanks. War Gaming has also opted to limit their raytracing implementation to one ray per pixel and uses a temporal/spatial denoiser to help deliver soft shadows.   

By partnering with Intel, Wargaming will use Intel’s Embree library to utilise CPUs to create BVH (Bound Volume Hierarchy) construction. These constructions can then be used with graphics cards to conduct raytracing calculations using compute shaders under DirectX 11. Thanks to World of Tanks’ enCore RT update also offers players “concurrent rendering”. PC players can expect to utilise multi-core processors better to accelerate the World of Tanks’ performance. This change helps to enable raytracing by allowing this extra CPU power to be used for BVH construction. 

When raytracing is added to World of Tanks, the option will be disabled by default, even at Ultra settings. Four raytracing options will be available to gamers in World of Tanks’ options menu, allowing PC gamers to adjust the game’s quality and performance. 

The image below showcases how raytracing impacts World of Tanks’ visuals.