With the arrival of Shadowlands, you’ll be able to experience World of Warcraft in greater clarity and definition with the newly added ray-traced shadows feature.
8 Likes
i just found out that my card (1660) supports ray tracing…
That’s because the 1660 series uses the RTX chips. 
I hope there a option to turn that off.
I already lag. Ray light going to make me lag even more
3 Likes
It’s not forced on, no. I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but WoW’s shadows don’t look any better with ray-tracing enabled, so it’s not worth a 15-20 FPS dip.
9 Likes
Thank you for this update!
Will the specifications page be updated to include a minimum recommended GPU to utilise Ray Tracing within WoW? (Knowing that it may differ to the first GPU that supported it).
1 Like
waste of time and programming, rtx shadows are worthless, barely any improvement.
8 Likes
I assume tweaking and optimizing is to come, because the framerate hit for even the Low and Good settings is significant.
In an area where I can get the max of around 141 fps, enabling High cuts my framerate in half, with the lower settings still showing a massive fps loss.
Relevant Hardware
8700 / RTX 2060 / latest GeForce
Settings
Shadows: Ultra
Liquid: Good
Sunshafts/Particles/SSAO/Outline: High
Environment: 9/8/10
AA: CMAA
Textures: High/Projects/16x Aniso
Res: 1440p
Looks great IMO, but I am curious about the impact on performance.
4 Likes
Looks cool
4 Likes
I dont see any differences at all. I hope it improves
2 Likes
you cant enable it with a ray tracing GPU
Honestly, I wouldn’t expect much. the problem is first generation RTX is slow, on hardware level. This is true is pretty much all games using it currrently. Second generation RTX which will be on Navi RDNA2 AMD gpu refresh and nvidias aperture lines expected toward end of this year will be FAR better at performance.
With first gen RTX cards, (ie current nvidia offerings), massive. A very top of the line spec machine build yesterday will lose half of it’s fps. Outside of taking great photos RTX won’t be reasonably usuable until second gen RTX gpus are out.
2 Likes
This is where Blizzard does everything pretty perfect.
1 Like
nvidias aperture lines
I’ve never heard of this one. Did you mean their “Ampere” line or is it something else they’ve announced?
Looks nice, it’s always bugged me that light sources like lamps, torches, and campfires don’t cast shadows. Shadows softening with distance is great too, it felt silly seeing crystal clear shadows of dragons 5k feet up in the air.
3 Likes
hope its better than SSAO ended up to be 
game literally looks better with it disabled.
also wonder what happens if you throw a glowing fish in a cluster of ~50 ppl with raytracing on. hope it performs well.
1 Like
Seems like an odd thing to add when textures are still limited to such low resolution on everything.
4 Likes
I put all my stuff on high then lower my view distance all the way down to 1. Usually gives me my 60 fps, i’m on a GTX 1080 32 gigs of ram, and a AMD 1800x with my res at 3840x2160.
While all of these visual improvements look great, there are less computationally expensive ways to implement each and every one of them.
I can understand that Ray Tracing was probably the cheaper option from a development time standpoint.
But I would rather have a complete lighting engine overhaul that all players can enjoy, instead of only those with a specific, high-end GPU. And I say this as one who has an RTX card that can do ray tracing.
1 Like