I was dismayed to find that utilizing ray tracing in WoW required the latest Windows build because my PC simply refused to update the core operating system past build 1909. I tried everything, except Microsoft’s final solution: uninstall all third party software. That was a step I was not willing to take because I have over 550 programs, 440 of them games, and back when I had 350 or so I had to do a repair install (long story short - landlord came in while I was in the ICU and started yanking wires) and it took me over a month to download and install all the software Windows wiped out.
Then after failing a fresh OS install on a neighbors Dell (I’m pretty sure she needed a startup disk from the manufacturer) I got it in my head that I should reinstall Windows 10 Pro on my machine and I went at it with a refresh install. BINGO - at least 75% of my programs (and all of my data, but few of my settings) survived AND Windows was then able to update to build 20H2, which was good enough to fire up WoW’s ray tracing.
What a world of difference - I don’t know why Blizzard calls the setting “ray-traced shadows” because almost all lighting, along with the shadows (which I care little about), are vastly improved, to the point it seems like a new graphical engine was installed (in a way, it was); glows, auras, light shafts, reflections, and a few other things were improved along with the lowly shadows. I was able to set ray tracing to medium with nary a performance hit, and I still get over 60 FPS at 4K with all settings maxed out on a lowly RTX-2080.
I HIGHLY recommend turning ray tracing on if your GPU has the feature; it adds a complete polish to the already colorful and creative graphics.
Ray-Tracing is pointless in WoW to be honest. Unless they substantially up the quality of everything, I dont really see any bit of a difference. And Im on a 3070
Blizz called it that simply because they could only implement partial RT - only the shadows. So imagine how full RT would look that includes lighting.
I agree with Kaiba; unless something recent was upgraded, when I initially tried it upon introduction, what little differences there was, wasn’t worth the 20fps loss and I’m on a 3080TI.
Unless they’ve updated it recently, I saw no practical difference between it on and off. Sure, if you looked very closely, you could see some small differences, but in action it was pointless. Not at all like the preview videos they showed of it, either.
This might be a very enthusiastic anecdotal evidence o what ray tracing does in WoW.
Because the game is not made to make use of it.
And I have this one station I use to develop Unreal Engine cinematics, it has “the” GPU, 256 RAM, and I can run multiple instances of Horizon Dawn full graphics without so much as a red dot in the tracker.
WoW with and without Ray Tracing almost remain unchanged.
You probably had the auto settings of your GPU hindering the use, and that made wow look worse even if you had it in ultra settings.
I play on 1
with some things manually turned off/down and some turned on.
Sometimes when there’s a patch Wow resets my configuration and I’ll go to play and I’m like
“Why does this game look so good?”
And I’ll check my graphics settings and it’ll be on 5
I’m always surprised just how good Wow looks with settings turned up
In the control panel of your Graphics Card there will be a ton of settings, some of them leave to the application to change it, and others leave it “in practice” to the graphics interface to decide it (eg Direct X) .
These settings often are set to a performance friendly build if you lack ram or cpu to run what the GPU alone could if you had better the other two.
You can force the GPU to run with it, but it is not recommended, so when in auto, it doesnt.
I’d like to try it myself but my version of windows went out of service very recently (that’s preventing me from trying ray tracing because I need version 20H2). I’ve got all the hardware for this feature but not sure how to fix the windows issue without doing a fresh reinstall.
I’ve tried automatically and manually downloading 20H2 and gets stuck at 99% each time, then tells me my windows is out of service .
This was my problem exactly. I had to “Refresh” Windows off of a USB Installation Media Drive (you can download the media creation tool from Microsoft) but I strongly suspect that Windows went for a backup image put by the manufacturer on its own HD partition. In either case, Windows was new, but still Pro, a lot of my setting disappeared but a few didn’t like the wallpaper and lock screen and a couple other minor things. All my utility programs/apps were reset to default, so the first thing I had to do is download Chrome to download the other necessary programs. Steam and GOG both got wiped, but after redowloading them I still had the same game library of at least 440 games, but some wouldn’t launch from the libraries, but those launched from the .exe files in their root directories. So now I just have to sort through a hundred or so shortcuts.
In any case, long story short/TLDR: Refresh installing Windows allowed it to update to 20H@ but lost a lot of programs but no data in the process.
Ray tracing in Wow from what i’ve seen is just extra shadows. Something that a game from a late PS2 era can do. Not to say it’s not impressive, it is impressive that WoW has that at all.
Yeah, I have a gaming problem - I buy games when they’re 50-90% off so I developed a library of pretty cool games for $5-20 apiece with a few exceptions, but by the time I’m done maxing out the graphics an d turning the sound down I gotta sit through 15-45 minutes of unskippable cartoon puppet show before I can even start a tutorial, which by that time I’m a bit worn out and a bit more bored shiftless, so I move on to the next game. But the biggest thing keeping me away from those games is maintaining four alts on WoW.
I mean there really is no difference. So the shadows are better, so what, I want better textures. Not expecting that anytime soon, though lets be honest most of the stuff Blizzard Art Team has put out is great, I’m just sick of seeing Stormwind with stretched out textures and crooked buildings.
This thread reminds me of all the people going crazy when linking two graphics cards was new… freaking out about how much better everything looked, OMFG IT’S SO AMAZING!!11111
Textures are a way off if they ever get revamped. But don’t you like your pixely, crooked textures to have a warm, healthy, radiant glow? Because some of them do with ray tracing on.
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