The Shadowlands expansion of World of Warcraft introduces new graphics options. Among them is apparently the ability to enable ray tracing for lighting. What could this look like?
In the files of WoW Shadowlands, hints of ray tracing support have been discovered.
What kind of hints are these? Ray tracing cannot yet be enabled in the options, but these entries in files suggest the following:
- RTTier – Maximum RT tier to use
- RAIDshadowRt – Raid Raytraced shadows (0-2)
- shadowRt – Raytraced shadows (0-2)
- Ray Tracing Support – DXR 1.0 / DXR 1.1
- vrsWorldGeo – Render scale like effect for terrain, buildings and liquids
- vrsParticles – Render scale like effect for particles. Only used if lots of particles are on screen
- Variable Rate Shading not supported on this hardware
WoW with new lighting?
How would WoW look with ray tracing? Based on a somewhat older video, you can see how ray tracing would visually enhance World of Warcraft.
How certain is ray tracing support? It has not been officially confirmed by Blizzard yet. The entries in the Shadowlands files might just mean that the developers are experimenting with ray tracing. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this feature will actually come.
What is ray tracing anyway? Ray tracing is a physical calculation of light and reflections. The lighting in the game world is intended to look significantly more realistic as a result. However, ray tracing puts a heavy burden on the GPU of the graphics card and can affect performance. Furthermore, specialized graphics cards like Nvidia’s RTX series, which support hardware-based ray tracing calculations, are typically required.
More graphics options for WoW
What other graphics options will WoW get? Patch 9.0.1 already shows some new options in the new menu that allow you to influence the graphics of the MMORPG classic more strongly. This includes the spell density option. This allows the number of spell effects to be reduced. Thus, WoW’s performance should not falter even in large battles.
You have the choice between these settings:
- Important: Only the truly important spells will be displayed.
- Some: About 75 percent of unimportant spells will be reduced.
- Half: About 50 percent of unimportant spells will no longer be displayed.
- Majority: About 25 percent of unimportant spells will no longer be shown.
- Dynamic: The display of unimportant spells is reduced depending on the frame rate. If the set frame rate is exceeded, then all spells are visible.
- All: All spells are always displayed.
When we will be able to officially experiment with these graphics options is still unknown, as it is currently not even clear when Shadowlands will be released.
Do you enjoy Blizzard’s WoW and are you looking forward to the Shadowlands expansion? The introduction to the expansion will turn out a bit differently than you might think. Exactly how, author Benedict Grothaus reveals in his article.
