Doesn’t changing how shadows look affect your perception of lighting by contrast? I’m not certain, but I am certain it looks more lively and vibrant - almost Nintendo like to some degree.
For those who doubt the glory of the RTX, go look at some minecraft ray tracicing images and/or videos. It makes that Super Nintendo graphics era game look amazing.
Those who talk down ray tracing (and I dont mean to be cynical) I can’t help but wonder if you just genuinely have a vision problem, can’t afford an RTX card, or are trolling because ray tracing is amazing.
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It shouldn’t, the world is still being rasterized the same way it was before. The only difference is dynamic and some static shadows are being ray traced. It’s literally just that in the current implementation. Honestly testing with it… Full ray tracing and off looked pretty similar. Only the mid values looked different and fuzzy. Things like sunshafts and reflections are not yet implemented AFAIK.
We’re not? It’s just WoW’s implementation is very immature? Please be respectful of other posters.
Here is a link to Nvidia’s discussion on the topic as it relates to different chipsets.
No and neither have you because WoW doesn’t have ray tracing. The option is there to turn it on but it is disabled at the moment.
It’s not actually:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/how-to-turn-on-ray-tracing-if-your-settings-is-broken/616152/21?u=jessail-terenas
You just need to ensure you’re up to date.
Edit: better link
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Im being as respectful as I can but it feels like a lot of the talking down to ray tracing is either ignorance or stubbornness? I feel like it is the single largest leap in graphics in at least 10 years.
I will concede that it may look bad in WoW, its certainly possible. But in general, ray tracing is amazing. IF you have the hardware to do it.
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Yes, and like I said, certain GTX cards like my 1080 Titan support ray tracing as well - not as well as an RTX card but if I understand things correctly, it supports whatever WoW is doing with shadows.
So… Ray tracing as been in games for 15ish years now… it just wasn’t used for things like we’re seeing now. It was largely used for ambient occlusion etc. So it’s not new per se. It’s just that we have the hardware and sheer horsepower to do more rays now than we could before allowing for more general uses than alpha testing a reflection etc.
I’m still wondering how Blizzard managed to put ray tracing into the ancient engine WoW is still using and why they even bothered. I cannot imagine the engine took it well and their programmers had to forcibly put it in and now it will be a delicate jenga block that is just waiting to break in spectacular fashion and take the whole engine with it.
Okay so it existed for 15 years not 10…but it hasn’t really came into the mainstream until the 2000x series Nvidia cards and is set to really shine with the 3000x series.
its like saying smart phones existed before iphone/2007. I mean yeah, technically, I guess.
Part of the DX12/Metal overhaul they did in 8.1. They bothered I’d guess because they want to make a pretty game too. Being held back by an older graphics engine can’t feel good.
Seems to have taken it just fine and done quite well actually, at least on my hardware.
But it was, it just wasn’t called ‘ray tracing’ because traditionally that means what I linked in the wiki article above and that would create confusion. It was called “Global Illumination” or “Ambient Occlusion” etc. But it was mainstream, it’s been in games and part of default settings forever now. So it may seem nitpicky (and it is). But the difference is the ability to in some form support the style of rendering described in the wiki article directly vs. combining it with rasterization techniques to do trickery to make it seem closer.
I had a 3d ray tracing animation program called “Imagine” running on an Amiga computer back in the early 90’s so this method of rendering has been around for a long time. It just needs a lot of power to run in real time.
Again… it depends on how many rays you’re doing. If you’re doing a sampling ray for Ambient Occlusion it’s fairly cheap because you know about where it should be and all you’re looking for is the shading values that you’ll then normalize. You probably won’t use variation across the shadow either. If you’re doing proper ray tracing shadows however that doesn’t work because surfaces don’t just shade, they reflect which can produce light and dark spots. That’s what we have the ability to do now.
Edit example of what ray traced shadows can do with insight into technique:
And if the game is one that you can enable raytracing with without it destroying your FPS. As cool as raytracing is, it’s probably going to be treated a bit like a gimmick feature by the masses until entry level GPUs perform as well or better at it than the RTX 2080 Ti does currently, just as countless other graphical frills were.
You lose -80 FPS , This being tested on 2080ti btw.
0 Difference to the EYES.
Hopefully they will have an OFF switch because this will make WoW unplayable to the vast majority of players.
You are absolutely right. I currently have a 1080ti and since WoW is practically the only game I play, I have had no reason to upgrade. That said, if Shadowlands does for sure have ray tracing, and its as good as I expect it to be, I will definitely be getting a 3000x series card this fall which is rumored to handle ray tracing much better than the 2000x series cards.
They do, it’s there. But i’m pretty sure the new 3000 series RTX cards will have 80% more advance Ray tracing TECH than the previous 2000 series, that’s what they are saying on the NVIDIA website.
Pretty sure a 3080 RTX would preform better with Ray tracing than a 2080.
We will see, but anyways the difference are not worth it so far with or without… Hardly you see the difference.