World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, announced at BlizzCon 2019 a couple of days ago, is the latest installment in the popular Warcraft franchise. The game is slated to launch next year and in the meantime, the engine team could be working on adding visual enhancements, like Nvidia's ray tracing (RTX) technology to it. This was revealed by Blizzard duo, Michael Bybee - Senior Game Producer, and Patrick Magruder - Lead Software Engineer, in an interview with MMO-champion. Though, at this point, details about the type of ray tracing feature that may be implemented in the game weren't disclosed.
Nvidia has been actively pushing ray tracing technology into more games since this, in turn, will increase the adoption of its RTX graphics cards. Radeon's Navi-based GPUs provide better value in traditionally rasterized scenarios which makes it almost essential for games to feature ray tracing so that the relatively higher price of RTX GPUs can be justified.
The engine team may also be looking to implement other modern features like DirectX 12, and multi-threading so as to utilize multi-threaded CPUs better. Overall, it seems that the team may be trying to leverage all such modern technologies to make the game as polished as possible.
Source: MMO-champion
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