We’ve seen some confusion lately over World of Warcraft’s DirectX support, and specifically the difference between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 on NVIDIA hardware. We’d like to take a moment to clear that up.
With the Battle for Azeroth Pre-Patch, we added support for DirectX 12, solely to improve performance on certain hardware. NVIDIA’s DirectX 11 support is already heavily optimized for WoW, to the point that there is currently no performance increase to be gained through our current implementation of DirectX 12 for WoW on NVIDIA systems.
Furthermore, there are no graphical differences between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 in World of Warcraft. The end result is visually the same. For these reasons, the decision was made to stay focused on DirectX 11 support for NVIDIA systems until we further optimize the engine.
That said, we will continue to optimize for DirectX 12 in future patches, and will move any hardware to DirectX 12 if it will result in visual or performance benefits.