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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Add Global Illumination and ray traced AO instead of this nonsense…
Shadows lol! no wonder why RTX gets a bad name with such a pathetic implementation. I bet the average gamer is soooo going to notice this sht.
I have never palyed wow, never will.
Nobody cares.
you do since you commented.
This looks like the least impressive Raytracing implementation seen to date.
It certainly is wasted on a 16-year old game with kiddy graphics.
I had doubts we’d see something less impressive than Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s implementation but here we are.
Yeah it’s crazy almost like they uploaded the wrong pics, I mean if it looks worse or not even on so what is the point? If this really is ray tracing ON no one is going to bother use it at the performance cost and with it looking the same or worse(My opinion).
Unless I am on drugs I prefer the screens with [ Off ] and that is not right for any ray tracing show case it should be the opposite.
Dead horse.
this game is AMD SPONSORED no DLSS 2.0
All i see is just barely shadows being softer.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/8129c4e09db5aa1ee5379fb7572a6c08f8b4f60d76f20078201b5cedcadb7d91.jpg
No, they are not, you can see the difference in the trees shadows, but honestly, I think it looks better with the original and RTX off. the shadows are more defined, while RTX on the shadows are blurred and smudged.
In real life shadows are blurred and smudged, they are never fully crisp. Still a very subtle effect though compared to RT GI and reflections..
Lol this is what happens when you spend your life playing virtual games.
Shadows in real life are much sharper than that.
Same image, 100Fps less
So shadows are blury now. Totally worth 20 to 30 fps drop 😀
Even some of the most impressive Ray Tracing games don’t look all that much different from the option being turned off. Not impressive enough to want the FPS dip. Perhaps next gen games company’s will really make some ray tracing masterpieces. But as of now.. still feels so gimicky. Control looked incredible. But still… it looked almost the same with it turned off.
Not Quake II RTX.
These shadows are absolutely possible with conventional shadowmaps. Completely absurd use case for ray-tracing.
HAHA dem RTX shadows turned into directx 10 shadows LOL