Ray tracing?

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.

yeah I won’t be using it, it’s not enough of a diff right now. Even if full raytracing comes, I would definitely need DLSS to bear the fps drop.

Have you seen the before/after pictures for WoW? There’s almost no difference.

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Wow has never had full raytracing.

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.

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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.

Whatever it is that they just enabled, it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference at the cost of half your framerate.

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.

I completely agree. It gives hope for the future tho.

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.

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I really really hope they do light shafts next. Because the following would be amazing if they can get it right:

  • Nya’lotha exit to the outside portion
  • Duskwood/Elwynn/Eversong/Jade Forest
  • Priest Class hall
  • Stormwind Cathedral
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If you have coords I’ll test later, I was going to see if I couldn’t get a list of places to test that likely have direct illum.

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).

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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!

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At this point I’m going for best guesses. As direct lights are… exceedingly rare in the game as far as I know.

Its actually very groundbreaking lmao

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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.

Nope! Ray tracing is just shadows right now. It does not extend to other types of illumination as far as we’re aware yet.