World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Ray Tracing Screenshot Comparisons Released
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Ray Tracing Screenshot Comparisons Released
WOWHEAD has been quick to capture and release screenshots for Shadowlands’ ray tracing update, releasing a series of RTX On and RTX Off screenshots for the game. These screenshots appear to use Ray Traced Shadows’ High setting. Â
World of Warcraft’s Ray Tracing implementation uses Microsoft’s DXR 1.1 API and will be supported on all DXR 1.1 compliant graphics cards. This includes Nvidia’s RTX products and AMD’s upcoming RDNA 2 graphics cards.Â
Below you can see World of Warcraft’s new Ray Traced Shadows option, which is now available within the beta version of World of Warcraft Shadowlands.Â
Below, you can see the impact of turning ray-traced shadows on an off. As you should notice, shadows are now added where appropriate under building overhangs and many shadows gain soft edges when they are far away from the objects that cast them.Â
While these changes may not seem transformative to World of Warcraft: Shadowlands as a whole, they do add an extra layer of accuracy to the game’s shadows. It is possible that more ray-traced features will be added to future World of Warcraft patches, which will add further graphical enhancements to the game.Â
Below, you can see an area where the impact of ray-traced shadows is moderate, adding soft edges to many shadows as well as more accurate shading to some areas of buildings.Â
More screenshots are available to view over at WOWHEAD, but based on what we can see ray tracing in World of Warcraft is a mixed bag. Yes, visual improvements are there, but they are far from revolutionary in their impact.Â
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