You’re not the only person to do this, and ray tracing was 1/2ing your framerate. But lately with Nvidia’s DLSS. You can bring your res down to 1080, DLSS upscales it to 4k (results show even better results than native 4 in a lot of cases) and you can still get 60 fps.
It’s said that Full raytracing Cyberpunk 2077 was running at 60+fps during it’s influencer demo.
There’s always [Sunwarmed Sand] and [Jar of Sunwarmed Sand], both of which change the time of day to noon for an hour for just your character, the former of which has no cooldown.
I was going to ask if anyone had tested with a potion of inky darkness but this confirms my hunch that it doesn’t matter as the lighting is largely baked.
As I’ve said elsewhere it’s currently best used as a tool with other techniques and not alone. As blizz matures their implementation we’ll probably see much better performance. They seem to be rapidly evolving their engine to support a lot more options than previously existed.
To have any seriously noticeable difference you’d need spot lights.
If you play with low shadow details, you’re not going to see any major differences. Play with High Shadows and the difference becomes clear especially with movement. Screenshots don’t do it any favors being still images, moving around with Ray Tracing you really see the effects play out.
Correct, this is because WoW has never really used spot lights, just a global ‘light’. Everything else is off of that AFAIK currently. There are some minor exceptions but they are rare and I’m struggling to even remember where they are.
There are some doodads and weapons that cast dynamic light, like the lampposts in Elwynn which have had dynamic light since the original WoW alpha. These lights have never factored into shadow calculation though, they only affect lighting. If raytracing made them cast shadows that’d be neat.
Don’t have coords, but AFAIK the torches/lamps at Lion’s Rest in Stormwind are dynamic (not those in the rest of Stormwind oddly, those were part of some weird vertex lighting kick they were on during Catacylsm).
Ray tracing tech … in simplest terms is mathematically calculated lighting, that you could say is "proper realistic lighting ". Hence the terminology “ray” (the light source) “tracing” (through advanced calculations the ray is traced properly to mimic how it would interact with objects IRL).
The intensity of the light source is of course also a major factor in ray tracing.
A proper ray traced scene looks PHENOMENALLY better than one without. Seriously its a tech that you need to have serious vision problems to not notice how cool it is!
One of the first things that struck me when I logged onto the PTR recently was how different everything looks - the world seems much more vibrant and alive. I would imagine part of that is due to ray tracing and its effect on the lighting/shadows.