It makes perfect sense. Early adoption is never perfect. You’re talking first generation. But progress is progress.
Shadows and lighting are a big deal to the beauty of a game. It may not seem like much now, but it’ll add a lot to games down the road, and eventually take a great deal of light/shadow placement time off of developers that can be reallocated.
Hopefully this is in addition to making a fantastic storyline, raids, dungeons and the other things that keep us playing the game.
you didnt read what i said, wow itself the rtx shadows do not look any different than the one now. no difference but half your fps is cut.
…rtx shadows do not look any different than the one now…
To be fair, if you do even the slightest amount of investigation on your own you would be able to realize that ray tracing in the beta is not quite fully implemented correctly. Blanket statements are pointless. Pointing the devs in the direction of the bug is what helps.
In this beta build, it would seem that local lighting has not been implemented correctly. So what we are seeing in the beta is just the ray traced version of the lighting that was already in the game. Once local lighting shadows work, the difference will be more notable.
As for the framerate impact however, you’re not wrong.
yeah well im not going to hold my breath on it looking very good. wow in general is extremely dated and imo rtx doesnt belong in it. Dx12 actually gives many people lower FPS than Dx11 does already, they got to fix that first before adding rtx.
I have an RTX 2060 and honestly wasn’t impressed the Ray Tracing. Its going to take a huge hit on peoples FPS. Trust me your not missing allot if you play the game without it.
I understand exactly what you said.
What I’m saying is give it time. It may not be worth it for the FPS loss right now, but this will change. We early adopters will always see the concept in its roughest form, but it’ll be beautiful once properly implemented with GPUs that can eventually support it.
Not quite the case? The shadows are ‘correct’ for the fact they work with the light source they have. They are incorrect because:
So you’re complaining about 70 fps? I mean yeah sure that drop is significant, but I wish I could play with a steady 40fps sometimes.
this has nothing to do with early adopters but instead wow devs doing as lazy hack job just to get headlines. rxt shadows in any game are a waste of resources they dont make any difference. cod MW had them and they were worse than without because of the bugs.
While enhancements are always welcome RTX Ray-Traced Shadows are a total bust. Using a 2080 Ti you will see 140-160fps plummet to 40-50fps when you enable this. Sadly, FPS drops like this are very common for RTX enabled titles. A complete waste of resources and a shame for how much you lose. 
anyone know if the GeForce Gtx 1660 super will support this?
Technically? Yes, if you have the driver. Functionally? Not so much.
AFAIK they have currently not enabled it for that card. Technically it is supported (ish). But functionally they way they have it implemented it’s probably for the best (at the moment).
I get weird flickering using DX12, too, and have reverted back to DX11.
I know they’re trying to keep up with the times, but wouldn’t the time be better invested bringing every model, texture and zone in the game up to date?
Skybox tech has nothing to do with ray tracing. I would like to see some improvements to the skyboxes though. Dynamic shadows that move with the sun and moon(s) would be great.
Different things. This is engine level work to support cool things in the future. That’s art department work and competes with new content.
Yeah, I get it, but how many WoW players will be able to use this right now? I’m guessing, not many.
None that care about framerates, it’s de-facto just a tech demo. But it lays the foundations for cool things down the line. One of the critical things in software development is getting software into the hands of end users as fast as possible (so they can absolutely rip it to shreds). But in ripping it to shreds we’ll find all the holes and mistakes they made (e.g. doing ray traced shadows off the sun in Elwynn forest etc.). That will then allow them to iterate and refine, and thus enable the art department to do really cool things with stuff like sunshafts, color reflections and light.
As I discussed above Blizz has gone heavily in a ‘flat light’ direction lately, which is fine in content like a raid boss fight floor… but looks really really boring out in the world. So I’m really hopeful they take this in cool directions.
i havent seen any flickering but my framerate is significantly lower. DX11 i can usually maintain 144 fps (monitor refreshrate) but with DX12 its barely 60 in places.