As I walked home from work today I pondered the pricing of the RTX 40 series cards and remarking that they were too expensive, and then I thought about how RTX wasn’t all it was cracked up to be because it would be far too much work for older titles, like this one, to implement it.
Then I get home and find this:
Now, I’m not suggesting that Blizzard just AI upscale the whole thing with no further Q/A, but what I am suggesting is that this is VERY interesting for a game like this one and I hope Blizzard takes serious consideration.
RTX should never be allowed to kill WoW’s art style of course, but it doesn’t have to. WoW’s art style is not incompatible with more realistic though stylized lighting, just look at the cinematics.
Nah it’s actual RTX. The issue is that they simply just put a direct light in to the north-west of the character shining a light on it and then only render a shadow without shading the textures. It results in self-shadowing and softer shadows but otherwise doesn’t do anything. The game does not place lights in the correct locations and does not have any physically based materials.
But this tool can, apparently, generate them.
I think this perception is because screen-spaced rendering is already extremely good - however WoW’s could really use some work but it’s nearly impossible due to the incredible amount of legacy assets.
There are some things screen-spaced rendering can’t do though. For example WoW has no mirrors. Not a single one - just the water. That’s not an accident, in case you were wondering. And whenever it does have mirrors it just looks like a nondescript, stained gray wall. It doesn’t have proper mirrors.
Man this reminds me of all the buzz when Blizzard announced they would add raytraced shadows to WoW. Practically no one bothered to read the “shadows” part so people were hyping this to the moon.
I saw multiple people claim they had gone out and bought a RTX20XX series card just so they could play WoW with raytracing because “it was going to revolutionize WoW’s graphics, just look at Minecraft with raytracing on and off!!”
And then came the day Blizzard provided screenshots of their implementation of raytracing and people lost their marbles. I even saw some guy claiming he was going to sue Blizzard for false advertising. Doubt that went anywhere.
WoW used to have a lot more glossy textures. You can look back at Classic Durotar and you see the ground shine. Over time they made the game less glossy, which I guess is a purposeful artistic decision even if it’s one I don’t agree with.
A lot of these AI solutions are focused around realism and it looks better because it looks closer to realistic. However, WoW’s goal is to look cartoony, so none of this would natively work and you don’t need raytracing to bring back glossy textures. You just need specular maps.
A lot of gamers have forgotten that before we had PBR and raytracing we had specular maps and bump maps.
Then again you have the issue of the game looking good on a variety of PCs. A huge part of WoW’s success is that it runs well on incredibly weak machines by modern standards, and Blizzard is conscious of this fact. The game shouldn’t require an RTX gpu to look good.
The water works with screenspace reflections and that technique can’t be used for mirrors. Pre-RTX mirrors are usually handled by rendering the entire room again, but mirrored on the other end of the mirror.
So far, the only way we can use RTX is in combination with DLSS. Without DLSS, rtx simply isn’t worth the performance hit.
The lack of deferred shading is a bigger problem for WoW. Simply retrofitting deferred shading into the game can dramatically increase the quality of graphics without the massive performance cost of raytracing. Not sure if it’s worth it - to be fair, I think WoW is so far the best looking MMO. Not even Black Desert with its awful interface and disgusting pop in can compare.
WoW does have deferred rendering. It’s had that since we switched the DirectX 11 renderer.
Transparent things are drawn on top of the final image. You can actually tell that if you zoom very far into your character so it becomes transparent, or you go into stealth, the colours are off.
At least the coming Radeon 7000-series is looking pretty good in regards to RT, and those are both cheaper and better performance/watt than Nvidia’s cards.
I do like the ray-traced shadows features in WoW quite a lot, because the standard shadows look very unrealistic. But honestly, it’s just a small overall improvement, and considering how much it costs to compute them, I wouldn’t recommend anyone from buying an Nvidia RTX card just for WoW.
That was then - today you have a large number of FPS drops if your machine does not meet the current standards of at least 6 cores. Sure you can still quest in the open world and maybe do a few dungeons, some raid bosses might be fine others you may experience fps drops. But the moment you have cluttered ground affects your FPS drops radically (mine can drop to as little as 5fps ) and in some cases . especially PVP, you can even end up with a screen freeze - reboot if you want to get it back. This is particular to the hunters kyrian & nf abilitie. In case you wondering my machine is only 7 years old - Processor Intel(R) Core™ i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
I sure hope so. As impressed as I am with NVIDIA’s tech here, I can’t afford it. Almost no one can.
And none of it matters for WoW gamers anyway unless Blizzard is prepared to put in that work - my point was simly that the work now is quite a bit less than it used to be.
They seem to even have gone backwards a bit, since on the Beta / PTR, local light sources kinda just gets deleted in the outer world if you have RTX on Good or High. They stay in Fair. This didn’t use to be the case before DF, I tested it. Maybe they changed how Raytracing works or maybe they are doing something new with how the local lights work.
That’s not true. A lot of people’s problems don’t come from the game, but stacking tons and tons of addons. Things like ThreatPlates will tank your FPS severely, depending on the preset. WA’s that constantly inject code into the memory, full UI replacements, elvui, class weakauras.
My PC is getting old now, it was never that powerful “gamer PC”, but it still runs the game on the highest settings perfectly smoothly. I run minimal addons, mostly just scrapper and details and for the rest I try to learn the game. DBM while I am learning a fight. Sure, it was cool to have threatplates interfacing with mdt, which showed me the path on the mob plates, however in the end it was just a tool to make me lazy and worse at the game. This is why I run a minimal addon setup.
