World of Tanks is set to gain “Ray Tracing Technology” in a future update
World of Tanks is set to gain “Ray Tracing Technology” in a future update
The first of these changes is continued updates to World of Tanks’ Concurrent Rendering, a feature that’s designed to parallelise World of Tanks’ game engine to enable greater levels of CPU and GPU utilisation. This will help World of Tanks run better on modern machines, especially those with high CPU core counts.
The second of these updates is support for “more soft and realistic shadows”, which will come thanks to “Ray Tracing Technology”. This support will come thanks to a collaboration with Intel, and will be available on “all graphics cards that support DirectX 11 and higher”. Raytracing will be restricted to intact vehicles in direct sunlight, but it should present players a significant graphical uplift.
Note that World of Tanks isn’t using ray tracing over Microsoft’s DirectX 12 only DXR API. At this time it is unknown exactly how this feature works, or how much it relies on ray tracing.
Ray Tracing technology will work on all graphics cards that support DirectX 11 API and higher, but only for intact vehicles that are in direct sunlight. You can enable/disable this function in the game settings. The support for brand-new shadows on tanks will be added in the upcoming updates of World of Tanks, after the tests have been completed.
You can join the discussion on World of Tanks’ promised use of raytracing on the OC3D Forums.