What exactly do ray-traced shadows do? I tried it and couldn’t see a difference, but my frame rate dropped by 20.
They ray-trace your in game shadows.
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From what i can tell, they make the shadows look less sharp. It’s really hard to tell the difference and not really worth having it on imo.
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It’s a typo.
It’s actually Rey - traced
It gives you ultimate Mary Sue powers.
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I actually have no idea what a Mary Sue is, despite that name being thrown about so much.
I googled the term and this was the first thing that popped up for me.
A Mary Sue is a generic name for any fictional character who is so competent or perfect that this appears unrealistic for the world’s settings, even in the context of the fictional setting.
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I guess Anduin is no longer a mary sue because he was yoinked by sky monsters.
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Looking at this
and the screenshots in this
https://wccftech.com/wow-shadowlands-ray-traced-shadows-screenshots-dxr-1-1/
I THINK ray tracing shadows makes them more crisp for lack of a better word. They sharply standout as opposed to being like shadow dusting.
But I dunno, I don’t care about graphics, I keep most of my settings on 1 or off 
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He was never a mary sue (Gary stu for male actually), he always sucked at fighting and now sucks as a leader. He’s just a good boi.
All of Blizzard’s expensive cinematics are fully ray-traced by server farms. That’s why they look so good. Ray-tracing is almost like echo location with light beams.
Ray traced shadows do almost nothing in WoW, so far. They did show a video preview of it where light from a fire would cause shadows to flicker and dance on walls, but in the actual game, I’ve never seen any light source do this.
They do make shadows sharper the closer the shadow casting object is to the ground. So if you jump off a cliff, you can see your shadow getting sharper as you get closer to the ground, which is more realistic, but… is that something you really need in WoW?
In 3D computer graphics, ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects.
From what I’ve read it’s a minor improvement to shadow realism in WoW at the cost of a major hit to FPS.
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Simply put, ray tracing is a technique that makes light in videogames behave like it does in real life. It works by simulating actual light rays , using an algorithm to trace the path that a beam of light would take in the physical world.
imo can’t speak for the 30 series cards but ray tracing isn’t worth it for me, the fps loss is just to much.
In this game, basically nothing.
They halve your FPS and you have to take side by side screenshots to notice a difference.
In games with dynamic light sources they make a big difference, but even with Inky black on, it seems to make no difference at all to me.
turn it on, fly around boralus (or somewhere with water) and check out the reflections in the water, thats a good example of ray tracing