Ray-tracing Coming to World of Tanks
Ray-tracing is coming to WoT. Wargaming Studio in collaboration with Intel has developed a solution that will enable us to enjoy the technology on every DirectX 11 compatible PC, including PCs with graphics cards that do not support ray-tracing.
Wargaming Studio along with Intel Advanced Rendering Engineering team have developed a solution that enables us to enjoy ray-tracing in games without the need for a GPU that supports this technology. According to the developers, compatibility with DirectX 11 is all it takes. The technology will be used to obtain high quality shadows in World of Tanks.
- World of Tanks will support ray-tracing technology,
- Wargaming and Intel have jointly developed a solution that will enable us to enjoy realistic shadows on DirectX 11 compatible PCs; no graphics cards will be required that support the technology,
- Ray-tracing in WoT can be tested in a demo version.
The introduction of ray-tracing will be the next step in the development of WoT after Wargaming changed its game engine to its own EnCore technology in March last year. The 1.4 update, which introduced support for multi-core processors, also provided a solid foundation for this technology. The new solution was developed thanks to the Intel Embree library, which is part of the Intel One API. It allows the CPU to perform fast, multithreaded BVH constructions and the GPU generates ray-tracing in shaders. The card itself does not need to support this technology. The principle of ray-tracing in WoT can be found in the developer diary entry devoted to this issue.
“Ray tracing is a true revolution in video game graphics that is happening before our eyes—and we at Wargaming are among the revolutionaries. Creating shadows based on ray-tracing together with Intel is just the beginning. You can already check the fruits of our labor by downloading the demo app," says World of Tanks' graphic design manager Bronislav Sviglo.
Ray-tracing is a demanding technology, so it will not be enabled by default. The players will choose whether to use it or not. The future decision is made easier by the World of Tanks encore RT demo app, which enables us to test our hardware and see the differences in graphics with our own eyes. It can be downloaded here.
