It appears that the alpha build of World of Warcraft Shadowlands has some technical features. According to its code, the game’s engine supports both DXR and raytraced shadows. Moreover, there is also support for VRS (Variable Rate Shading).
Unfortunately, these new graphical features are not fully implemented yet. As such, the game crashes the moment you enable the Ray Tracing Shadows. VRS is also not working at the moment. Still, the good news is that Blizzard has already added these features to the engine.
In case you weren’t aware of, Variable rate shading is a mechanism to enable allocation of rendering performance/power at varying rates across the rendered image. Via this setting, the game can reduce rate shading with little or no reduction in perceptible output quality, leading to better performance.
It will be interesting to see whether the final version of Shadowlands will work with these new graphical/engine features. Since these three features are also part of DirectX 12 Ultimate, Blizzard may be also preparing Shadowlands for an Xbox X Series release.
Below you can find an image, captured by Reddit’s LemonKing, showing these new features.
Stay tuned for more!
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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“Blizzard may also preparing Shadowlands for an Xbox X Series release.”
There’s no way WoW will ever release on consoles.
Never say never. They would have to simplify the inputs but anything is possible.
Features like that to old, junky and ugly game…
This game already runs like crap.
Have you tried it with DX12? Runs well with it and the game looks good on newer expansions. Sadly the gear on your characters still look like painted textures on skin
Opposite perf for me using DX 12, well, DX 12 has been like that with me in general, in having a high end rig.
Yea in other games i get worse performance with DX12. In WOW i gained 20-30 fps depending the area
The fact that they are only just now considering one console port, means that their total active subs and revenue on PC for WoW, has been at an all time low. This doesn’t come at any surprise to me, because Blizz have been letting down WoW users for years, from lore to gameplay mechanics, to general loot.
It’s no wonder their sub counts have been on a rapid decline, vs the other two big MMO’s out there, so they somehow feel they need to forgo fixing what they broke, and instead try mustering a new userbase, that doesn’t know how they’ll let them down as well.
Don’t misunderstand me, in thinking I’m pulling a HZD style “Sony left us”, no, this is about Blizz ignoring the mistakes they’ve made in the past, that they continue to make. They need to work hard to earn back their OG users trust, not forget us and focus on a new audience, that screams “I’ve lost, and I don’t care”.
After 16 years of basically laughing off the idea of a console version of WoW, the reality of its demise, will now make a console version a reality. This is where WoW will go, to finally die its long overdue death.
One last desperate breath on consoles, before laying it to rest within a few years of limping along like an old tired dog, on its last leg.
A console version is coming. Of that you can be sure. This is no longer Blizzard. It’s Activision, wearing the Blizzard mask. I think people forget this. Blizzard was absorbed and digested, long ago.
Everyone here should know what Activision is capable of in the name of money.
You know what’d make for a nasty stab to the OG fans of the game (like myself)?, updating the games visuals drastically, just so they can appeal to the console audience, because they know it’ll look dated af to them, and we’ve been asking for an update in a new engine/visual quality for years now.
Lipstick on a pig.
It won’t release on consoles, lmao.
I’m quite impressed Blizzard is still improving both visuals and performance.