Not too sure what is is. I’ve seen a few examples of them “off” and “on” and the only difference I’ve been able to see are a few extra shadows.
Am I missing something? Because my Google feed is making it out to be groundbreaking.
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Not sure how you can look at any game with ray tracing and not find it ground breaking.
It’s a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels.
It produces a high degree of virtual realism compared to scanline rendering. It just costs more computer wise to do it.
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When it’s done properly, the biggest effect will be more realistic lighting, refraction, and reflections. Other than that, it doesn’t do overly much
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Lipstick on a pig in this case. Dont worry about it too much.
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to me RTX on and RTX off looks the same sorry
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Night Elves are now wearing lipstick?
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Just more realistic shadows and lightning or something I think from what I gathered. For Shadowlands at the moment they are just doing it for Shadows I believe. Instead of seeing an outline. It’s much more faded.
You’re going to need a video card that supports ray tracing to see it yourself, but just go to YouTube and check it out. Digital Foundry is a good YouTube channel for showing those kinds of things and explaining them in detail. My old GTX 1080 Ti surprisingly does support it, so I lucked out.
Oceanic may not get much from this. Not sure if OP is that but just saying… You see many play in the dark of azeroth almost exclusively. So if the sun makes things look amazing…cool. If you actually see the sun to give rays to trace lol.
I am fortunate to telework to see thus glorious sun of azeroth more these days. One day I will go back to office work. And that sun will just be dream…
Ray tracing is a more realistic way of handling how light actually interacts with our eyes. Versus rasterization that just assumes.
However blizz has yet to implement anything beyond shadows. Moreover they don’t exclude things like the world light from the ray tracing so places like Elwynn and duskwood absolutely tank currently.
Another thing to realize is that blizz traditionally hasn’t had ‘lights’ per se, just a world light and shadow maps. So I wouldn’t expect this to really do much with current content.
The biggest in your face difference will be google minecraft raytracing comparision. Watch videos. The difference is absolutely massive.
where you will have a harder time seeing a difference is games that are already cutting edge with high quality shadows and lighting.
games for a long time uses a lot of guesswork and cheap calculated code to interpret where light will illuminate the game world and how shadows will will be created.
In wow, full raytracing would mean, all your spells would have light and would light up a hallway when cast, and shadows would be cast in areas the light would’t hit. Reflections would realistically reflect the full scene. Even shiny silver armor would have the ability to reflect for a change.
But all this is a bit of a dream, the raytracing that is supported in Shadowlands atm is only 1/3 of the formula (shadows) without global illumination part of Raytracing, you won’t have much benefit at all.
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Or don’t use lighting at all generally… e.g. WoW. This game has baked shadows for the majority of content and uses default shadow methods for most of the rest which is minor in comparison. Places like Duskwood should be a best case scenario to show this off… but don’t because they aren’t optimized for it yet.
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Yeah, wow would be an amazing power showcase for full raytracing if it ever happens. I wish it could be as easy as a flip of a switch like AA and ambient occlusion is. Older games like kingdoms of amular reckoning, Divinity original sin, GTA’s, Dragon Age Origins, even Kotor. These games are ones that I imagine popping with new appeal.
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Full ray tracing is unlikely to happen as it’s incredibly computationally intensive per frame. Generally you can use ray tracing to do things like validating what you got via more conventional methods. The more rays you have the more accurate you can be. So things like screen space reflections can still be used, but ray tracing can be used to determine cut off and alpha for example. It’s the classic dichotomy of accurate and fast.
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For a game pushing for realism like Tomb Raider i can see the benefit.
For a cartoony game like WoW? The point is entirely lost to me.
Still want to get 2-3 years out of my current rig anyway so not going to see it for a while outside PS5 games.
It can actually look insanely cool for things like light shafts, shadows, and reflections even in games like WoW.
That’s a slight perspective fix. We are kind of used to seeing “good lighting” in realistic games and realistic games looking dark and sparse.
But full raytracing in wow would most likely embolden the cartoon atmosphere, the enhanced global illumination would make the cartoon graphics pop more and add even more color.
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I guess while questing, but while raiding or playing M+ or Arena i actually drop graphical settings.
I mostly pay attention to timers and the ground anyway, i prefer not dropping frames than a pretty game.
I’ll be honest it’s not ready for prime time yet: