This is topic is about Nvidia so please stop it! No AMD shilling in my threads! 
In all seriousness, I certainly hope so! Some healthy competition to keep things lively…
Hey - have you ever seen “The Masks” episode of the Twilight Zone? If I keep this up long enough do you think that might happen to me? 
lol
well, either way, i’ll likely finally buy into ray tracing if either company offers some significant performance upgrades.
Twilight zone, no. But I have seen TNG “Masks” and I love that episode.
Whacko-mode Brent Spiner is quite something lol.
Looks like you can turn it on manually now on PTR/Beta
The new nvidia cards…aren’t gonna be cheap.
The 3090 is looking to be close to $2k 
Welp, that’ll be a hard ‘nope’. I just won’t pay that much considering how fast the technology is evolving. I don’t want a $2,000 GPU in my system when the 4090 or 4100 comes out in a year. 
Where did you find that? Any other pricing hints?
I tested this out on the Shadowlands beta and grabbed a few quick screenshots. All-in-all a subtle but notable improvement, albeit with a predictably massive performance hit.
Core i9-9900K @4.5 GHz
32 GB DDR4-3200
RTX 2080 Ti
Do note that there’s an “Ultra High” shadow setting that currently makes some up-close non-RTX shadows unnaturally soft.
That’s amazing, thanks for sharing.
So it seems RTX cost you ~45% performance hit?
Give or take, depending on the scene. There’s a lot of areas where it essentially cuts framerate in half. It’s pretty brutal for all three of the settings that enable RTX shadows.
I don’t think it’s going to be a realistic option to enable in most cases on current hardware. Hopefully Ampere GPUs can pump out some markedly better performance.
This is exactly why SL’s should have dlss 2.0 support. In the pic of the guard with RT shadows, that 71 fps could have been 101 if dlss 2.0 was supported & enabled.
RT on high just slaps my system silly.
8700k @ 5.1 ghz
2080 Ti
16gb DDR 3200 14-14-14-34-1t
At 1440p, max settings, RT knocks me from my frame cap of 85 down to the 20-35 range. Brutal. I know RT does create a performance loss, but this is huge. Other games with RT seem have a much smaller performance loss.
Hopefully Blizz has room for further optimization, like yeah dlss would rock 
I think a lot of those utilize DLSS to help offset the performance hit. So without DLSS it’s probably as you say.
I think it’s probably healthy for us to look at this more as a “proof of concept” exercise rather than a practical real world application. There will be hardware improvements and software optimization - we’ll get there, it will just take some time. I’m pleased to see that it works at all.
I’m going to have some fun, turn it on with my RTX 2070, take some screenshots so I can ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and then turn it off until it’s more practical. 
Awesome. 
Now if only the RT works on any game and can be enabled on any game. And i mean, ANY game.
Sometimes technological evolution takes place in giant leaps and bounds. Often it’s a series of smaller steps (particularly when it requires both hardware development and software optimization). I’m not worried whether it ‘will happen’, it’s just going to take some time because it needs to happen both effectively, and eventually: affordably.
Ray traced shadows seem to have a roughly static performance impact regardless of resolution. I can set renderScale to 0.1 and framerate won’t nudge too much in most scenes.
I’m still getting 60+ FPS in most locations on a 2080 Ti, and an RTX 3000 series card will invariably perform much better. I could imagine an RTX 3080 pumping out 60+ FPS at 4K or higher in complex environments without much difficulty.
I’m actually wildly impressed with how these shadows are looking and performing on retail right now. I figured the setting might be a bit of a novelty for a couple of years, but it’s actually perfectly usable right now on higher-end supported hardware.
if either company can offer 2060 super / 5700XT performance w/ ray tracing at 1660 super pricing then I’ll jump on it otherwise I’ll hold out for the next round. Like Kodiak stated, “subtle improvement for massive performance hits” is not something I’m interested in.
At first I was on board when it seemed you could get excellent performance and ray tracing for $699, but now that I know nvidia themselves are essentially killing off the $699 FE (BB USA Only, otherwise nada), and launching a 20gb model in a month, I am not interested.
Ampere cards are $1000 cards and were always meant to be. This whole $699 thing was just a scam. They’ll phase out the 10gb cards completely within the next few months and it will just be a marketing scam.
AMD, you can have my money.
60fps+ is when doing low intensity content like questing.
Raytracing is rough on RTX 3000 series also, unfortunately. Here’s an example of 40-80fps when just walking around doing nothing. Getting into raids or PVP will tank perf below Gsync range and the experience will be tough.
I’m curious how Linux will handle this when they adopt Vulkan RT for WoW. Vulkan is able to GPU+CPU for some extra perf.
Doesn’t seem worthwhile at all.
