Developed by Wargaming and Intel, the tech improves the game's visual fidelity on any PC supporting DirectX 11 and above
Introduced in March 2018 as part of Update 1.0, the Core graphics engine significantly improved the visual fidelity of World of Tanks. Wargaming is continuing its efforts to develop the in-house engine further with the next version of Core supporting highly realistic ray-traced shadows.
Anyone can take a peek at the graphical future by downloading the World of Tanks enCore RT demo app right now.
Ray-Traced Shadows tech allows for physically correct soft high-quality shadows that were previously unavailable in games. Working closely with Intel Advanced Rendering engineering team, Wargaming specialists developed a solution that allows the CPU to perform fast multi-threaded BVH construction and the GPU to perform ray tracing with compute shaders. The real strength of this tech is that it doesn’t require hardware that supports ray tracing; any DirectX 11 graphics card will do.
Not only does the new WoT enCore RT feature Ray-Traced Shadows tech, it is also based on Update 1.6 of World of Tanks; in comparison, the 2017 version is based on Update 1.0. One of the main changes since Update 1.0 was the introduction of concurrent rendering (introduced with Update 1.4), which was developed in collaboration with Intel and provided a strong foundation for the implementation of Ray-Traced Shadows tech.
Take a look at the video where those behind the ray tracing tech explain how it works: