I think because WoW no longer really has “darkness” the ray tracing isn’t super prominent here. I hope the devs consider bringing back at least a graphical option for real darkness (like the Inky Black Potion).
If more things are dark, stuff like torches and campfires are going to look much cooler with the ray tracing feature. As it stands right now I feel WoW is just too artificially lit, so as we see in these screenshots, there just aren’t huge differences.
Hate to say it, but this seems to be a very poor investment.
I turned it on on the beta and went from the capped 100 frames I limit the game to to under 30, with spikes even lower whenever I encounter a cluster of new shadows.
Is this something expected to improve in quality over time?
Because right now I literally can’t discern a difference, and it has reduced my fps by nearly 60+.
On an RTX2080 super.
EDIT - Also I can not replicate that shadow scenario with the tauren.
No matter what angle I stand at with respect to light sources like fires or braziers my character does not cast a shadow on anything close to him, and the only noticeable difference is that the fire effects flicker much more wildly.
Which honestly makes me worry about those with light sensitivities.
Don’t really see the point in using RTX when the particle system etc is still a fully lit additive shaders. In that tauren picture by the fire… No volumetrics on the fire. The flame particles aren’t lit correctly (in the sense they’re 100% lit with no shadows). No translucency on the flames & no SSS. If anything the before / after shot of the tauren by the fire simply look like shadows off vs on
Seems like time would’ve been spent better elsewhere. More so on the particle side so RTX is actually going to have a decent impact on the visuals
Should this be available now? Seems other people have been able to give it a go, option is not available in my client, Unsupported for graphics related reasons which I was seeing prior to this post already.
Running an RTX2070 with latest NVIDIA drivers
You also have to have Windows 10 updated to the latest version 2004.
Thanks for that, I’m still waiting for 2004 update to be available for my system 
Trying to manually update tells me something with my config is not supported yet without telling me what…
Ugh, that sucks. Something similar was happening to me a few weeks ago, but between then and now it somehow decided I could get it.
Does this mean we can have a proper skybox now?
Currently all shadows cast southeast and it’s mostly static, so the skybox has the sun and moon rise from the north west then also set in the north west which makes no sense.
So Azeroth spins 180 degrees in one direction, stops, then spins 180 degrees back in the opposite direction.
Not going to lie… I did go around in the PTR and submit a ton of bugs on this… mostly because I really want to see this be cool. But at the same time… sun shafts and lighting PLEASE. Wow as the blog admits has been stuck with a single global ‘light’ for ages and there are so many atmospheric things that are lost because of this… I want Duskwood to be creepy and it’s just not as creepy as it should be right now.
My wife’s PC which I built very similar to mine finally got the 2004 update this week, biggest difference was different Asus motherboards to suit her standard gaming rig and my power user needs. But honestly I don’t know if it is hardware or perhaps software I have installed cause Microsoft won’t tell you what it was that wasn’t supported …
Can confirm that only directional lights are casting shadows in the beta with Ray tracing on high. No local light sources are worrying with Ray tracing currently.
I’ve been testing ray tracing a lot on the beta. Please address or acknowledge that what this post shows is not how it works on the beta.
On high settings directional light does work
Occlusion of directional light does not work
Local lighting does not work
Multi shadow does not work
Computer setup:
Amd 3950x
RTX 2080TI
64GB ddr4 at 3200Mhz
Windows 10 version 2004
Ya, so you are saying that this situation in the post is… not actually happening in the game, is that right?
That kind of scares me haha
Correct, currently in the beta:
Computer setup:
Amd 3950x
RTX 2080TI
64GB ddr4 at 3200Mhz
Windows 10 version 2004
I hate to say it, but my experience matches yours. Only directional lighting works. I cannot get any shadows to cast outside of the one cast by the skybox.
Any locations you can point out? I’ve been testing and filing bugs so I’d like to test that.
I’ve tested areas in each expansion. It’s not a particular area where local lighting isn’t working, it’s the whole game in the current build.
Well there is no local lighting in the entire game as far as I know. They never implemented it. I actually spent quite a bit of time filing bugs against it yesterday.
Well you can see non-ray traced local lighting if you go up to a lamp or fire in the game. You will notice your character light up when walking near it. However, it does not cast shadows with ray tracing on as shown in this blog.
I sure hope this is an optional setting that when disabled, doesn’t change the current performance of the game.
If not, I can see that this will cause eye strain and headache issues for me yet again. I had issues on release of the pre-patch for both Legion and BfA (and built a new rig when BfA released because of it), and I’d really not appreciate this happening again, especially for something that apparently isn’t working properly anyway.