Blizzard has finally introduced some new Ray Tracing effects in the PTS version of World of Warcraft Shadowlands. This new build adds support for Ray Traced Shadows, improving all of the game’s shadows with this new technique.
Going into more details, Ray Tracing produces shadows with more natural softness, greatly increased precision, and from additional light sources. In short, you’ll get the same quality of shadows like those found in Shadow of the Tomb Raider RTX. The game comes with three RTX settings: Fast, Good and High.
WoWhead has shared a number of comparison screenshots between the vanilla and the ray-traced shadows. These screenshots will give you an idea of the graphical improvement that this new feature brings to the table.
According to some early reports, however, performance takes a big hit even on an RTX2080Ti. NVIDIA’s GPU is reportedly unable to maintain a constant 60fps experience at 3440×1440 even with “Good” Ray Tracing Shadows. Some users also saw their framerates halved by enabling these RTX Shadows. So yeah, this implementation does not appear to be as optimized as some were expecting.
It’s also worth noting that World of Warcraft Shadowlands does not support DLSS 2.0. Thus, it will be interesting to see whether NVIDIA and Blizzard add support to it (especially considering these somehow underwhelming performance reports).
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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