World of Warcraft: Shadowlands

World of Warcraft is a sixteen-year-old game, but that doesn’t mean it’s stuck with decades-old graphics. WoW’s engineers have updated the game’s tech with every expansion, and the new Shadowlands pack this fall brought in a subtle, but important, new addition to the scenery: ray tracing.To get more news about wow gold pay pal, you can visit lootwowgold official website.

We say subtle because Warcraft’s lighting is already an enormous part of the game; a single map can have thousands of light sources, and that doesn’t include weather effects (which include ambient and natural lighting) and other sources of illumination. So if you’re hoping ray tracing will give you a BAM, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t impact, you may be disappointed. But like a gentle soundtrack score, ray tracing can increase your immersion in the senior MMORPG, and if you know where to look, you’ll see the difference.

We enlisted Ryan Anderson, WoW’s lead engine programmer, to shine a light on Warcraft’s newest shadows.Ray tracing turns light into streams of pixels, allowing the movement of those streams to be calculated and displayed in real time. When a stream of ray traced light hits an object, the pixels bounce off, reflecting and refracting, creating realistic effects and especially lifelike shadows, which move as the object does. The rays that are absorbed, reflected or refracted can in turn hit other objects, transforming again.

The tech has been used for a while in pre-rendered materials (animated movies, pre-rendered game cinematics) but didn’t see much use in gaming until the best graphics cards recently started including the tech to accelerate the process to acceptable speeds for games. While cards supporting ray tracing hit the market in 2018, most PC games featuring the tech didn’t appear on the market or in updates until late last year. And now you’ll also see ray tracing in console games for the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 (assuming you can lay your hands on one.)

NVIDIA built native ray tracing support into its Turing and Ampere graphics cards, but some support for basic ray tracing was also patched into older models from 1060s on up. For AMD cards, your choices are more limited: the 6800, our pick of the 6800 XT, and the 6900 XT all support ray tracing, but are incredibly hard to find.

For a fun little demo of what ray traced reflections look like in action, see this demo from the Unreal Engine folks way back in 2018:Lighting in WoW is created by layering effects, ranging from broad ambient daylight or dusk to specific spotlights cast by individual objects – a torch, say, or a light fixture, or even an NPC.

“It can vary depending on time of day, weather, world location, interior or exterior locations, map phases, local lights, and so forth,” Anderson said. “Light can be both baked into vertices and added at run time from dynamic lights.”Which of those you see may depend on the area where you’re standing. Lighting is generally baked in at the time an expansion is built – so the zones included in each new expansion include the new lighting features available at that time. Traveling from vanilla zones through each expansion into Shadowlands gives you a 16-year tour of lighting technology in Warcraft.[1]

“Given the breadth of content that’s been created for WoW over the years, and the fact that we support that older content as well as new ray-traced lights, you can imagine there’s quite a lot of variation in our lighting model. There can be thousands of lights in a map, and each can have an impact on performance,” Anderson said, and developers cheat a little to try and keep the processor load down.

“Lights marked as ray-traced shadow casters have the additional impact of calculating whether a pixel is shadowed from that light. We use features like draw distance, buffer resolution, and rays per pixel to scale the impact for various levels of hardware.”