Shadowlands New Graphics Settings
Two new Graphics Settings have been added: Target FPS and Spell Density. ** some interesting new console strings.
Raytracing support could improve lighting in the game, while variable rate shading can improve performance by having the GPU render some less important areas on the screen at a lower quality, while still maintaining a higher quality image for areas that matter.
Raytracing and Variable Rate Shading
RTTier - Maximum RT tier to use
RAIDshadowRt - Raid Raytraced shadows (0-2)
shadowRt - Raytraced shadows (0-2)
Ray Tracing Support - DXR 1.0 / DXR 1.1
vrsWorldGeo - Render scale like effect for terrain, buildings and liquids
vrsParticles - Render scale like effect for particles. Only used if lots of particles are on screen
Variable Rate Shading not supported on this hardware
I think my biggest concern would be that it would only be available in SL areas. Whereas the best areas for it in the game: Ghostlands and Duskwood would probably not get it which just makes me sad.
Sounds cool, but it wonāt impact me until accelerated raytracing is a more widespread feature on graphics cards. Itās technically present on the more affordable Nvidia RTX cards, but in practice itās a gimmick, with the feature only really performing well on high-mid and high-end RTX cards. Also, AMD cards (the camp Iām in) donāt yet have an RTX equivalent.
Hopefully it fixes weirdness like terrain not casting shadows and player shadows and object shadows not āmergingā as they would in real life. Shadows that soften with distance would be a nice bonus ā your shadow being razor sharp on the ground while youāre 1k feet up in the air has bugged me since WotLK.
Depends on how itās implemented. If itās baked into the base lighting system (as things like stencil shadows have been) itāll be available everywhere.
It really canāt be turned on though in areas with legacy static shadows. The lighting needs to be fixed and AFAIK WoW never really had proper global illumination I donāt think. So given that it would take scene changes regardless I donāt see it happening. You canāt just turn DXR on and expect it to look good. Remember most of that content was built when global illum was in its infancy and was a toy feature in high end AAA titles. It would probably be easier in Legion and BFA areas which do have some dynamic shadows.
The current stencil shadows we have actually do have a degree of dynamism compared to the Vanilla-style baked shadows ā they move around subtly over the course of the day, and the shadows of moving doodads also move.
What I see being more of a problem than the shadows is actually small bits of lighting. Anything untouched from Vanilla/TBC/WotLK should be fine (if not perfect) and anything from WoD/Legion onward should be fine, but in Cata and MoP they used some weird techniques to simulate spot lighting. You can see a great example of this in Stormwind, where the lamps in the Cata-revamp part of the city have their lighting baked in as a weird sort vertex lighting that doesnāt affect your character, but the lamps around Kingās Rest are proper lamps with dynamic light that do affect your character. I donāt know why they did this, because the original vanilla dungeons are chock full of baked lighting that does affect your character.
Sadly that wonāt help. Its not Spells Iām worried about, often to small of a area to affect it. Iām talking about enviromental. Go to Firelands and look at a series of smoke or embers rising up. Or a good example is the Netharionās Lair with the first set of mobs that drop that green crap with particles. That utterly ruins everything. I can run everything well but god forbid my PC doesnāt wanna see Particles.
And before anyone says anything. I tested it well before I did upgrade from windows 7 to 10. Clean install, new hardware, etc. Same issue. Particle Effects in general is awful.
They are, they adding two new options in Shadowlands
Target FPS
Framerate you ideally want to play at. If your framerate is below this number, dynamic systems will reduce graphics quality to attempt to hit this framerate.
Spell Density
Essential: Only show essential spells. Your own spells are always shown.
Some: Reduce non-essential spells shown by around 75%.
Half: Reduce non-essential spells shown by around 50%.
Most: Reduce non-essential spells shown by around 75%.
Dynamic: Reduce non-essential spells shown based on framerate. If you are above your desired framerate, everything will be shown.
In BFA and Legion content yes, but not in Cata revamp or BC content. BC is hard shadows baked into the textures. Cata Iām pretty sure is too.
Remember that anything pre MOP would be hard baked shadows still, so all that content would need lights added to all the āilluminatedā bits. All the lampposts etc.
Pretty sure the first dynamic lights were in MoP or WoDā¦ Definitely werenāt Cata. Those are baked in lights which is why your character doesnāt cause ambient occlusion on them. Itās just a more advanced bake in.
Thatās because those are actual lights in the scene and thus cause ambient occlusion etc. Legion should have this too.
AFAIK this is not the case, also most vanilla dungeons got facelifts around MoP.
Itās highly possible those effects are implemented on the CPU and not the GPU. Cata was about the time they started to make that switch but may have held back on it for compatibility reasons. They should be done with shaders in MoP forward though.
Running a Nvidia RTX 2070 super, so looking forward to the upgrades, going to look nice, had the card for almost a year now so its about time they caught up.
I know for a fact that this was never a issue. They did something since WoD. All I know is that everything may ālookā prettier but when I was running a 4 core intel CPU, I never dropped FPS back in Firelands. So they did something that changed how it all behaved. Now with a much more higher end hardware, if people like to nitpick about AMD Ryzen 3800xā¦ It sure runs a hell of a lot better than on my dinky intel that canāt run with so many people at once in view but still canāt handle the horrors that whatever Blizzard did with that particular enviromental particle effects.
Nope, outdoor lighting has always been dynamic, and modern stenciled shadows work fine in early xpac content. Just shot this in Outland.
Hereās a screenshot of mine I dug up from some time around late Vanilla/TBC that shows off fake/baked interior lighting affecting characters. It worked by assigning a hue and brightness to character models depending on where they stood. Dungeons worked the same way, as did most buildings.
Hardware transform and lighting has been around since DirectX 8 so itās highly plausible. However without a reference client or inside knowledge Iāll never be able to confirm. The core point I was making is you canāt just turn it on and expect it to look good. The ray traced dynamic shadows will conflict and make the static shadows look bad or odd. Blizz would have to do quite a bit of work to make DXR not lookā¦ funny (literally) in older content.
