WoW has ray-traced shadows.
So why stop there?
If the engine can do ray-traced shadows, why not ray-traced reflections or global illumination?
(this would be easier in classic for performance reasons)
imagine classic fully ray-traced
The game would explode if they added all that at once.
- Performance. The more ray tracing effects you do, the worse the performance. It’s why so many games only do limited forms of ray tracing.
- Art. The game’s art wasn’t designed with GI in mind. Heck, the game doesn’t even use HDR lighting.
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“Behold the splendor… of my 3 pixels!”
Long story short, the game is old, the engine is old (even with the updates over the years), most updates that changes a lot of things at once REALLY breaks the game, so… they might add more stuff, but it ain’t going to be all at once and it also has to be for a better reason than “why not.”
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Because wow is a 20 year old game that can’t really even handle ray tracing as it’s currently implemented.
Wow is very likely the least optimized game on the market.
i do think performance would be a issue for retail but for classic that shouldn’t be a issue i run classic at around 200 fps with all its graphics turned up and its raytraced shadows on i do believe there is more of a reason the just why not i mean there’s a reason that a lot of games have gotten the ray tracing treatment its kind of like a soft remaster
Ray traced WoW will look more or less just like it does now. You will have slightly more accurate shadows and reflections … that’s it. WoW doesn’t rely on accurate lighting. It was made 20 years ago and lit using vertex lighting.
look up a video of Minecraft with ray tracing on vs off.
I’ve become disillusioned with PC gaming and no longer care about graphical fidelity.
Easy to run, highly optimized games that prioritize fun and snappy feel wins
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Minecraft ray tracing
You can get most of the effect just by using HDR lighting.
Unlike Minecraft, WoW has lighting sources placed by artists to get the look they want. If you change the lighting model, it will screw everything up.
Meanwhile some of us with up to date nVidia cards can’t run the game on DirectX 12.
Maybe blizzard should fix their game before adding new graphics intensive features.
Ray tracing is a garbage feature, it’s the equivalent of adding rocket boosters to a bicycle. While it technically improves the visuals, the trade-off is ridiculous and never worth it.
Even with a high end PC like mine, I disable RT immediately in every single game because the performance hit isn’t worth the minor visual gains, and I suggest you do the exact same.
Also, performance>>>>>visuals any day.
The first time I saw it in action was when I cranked it up while playing Control.
It looked neat, but after like 10 minutes I turned it off. I just don’t think it really adds much to a game.