With ray tracing being all the hype nowadays, it’s no surprise that everyone wants a piece of the cake. As such, Wargaming just announced this week that it’s demoing ray tracing in World of Tanks. And the best part is you don’t need an Nvidia RTX graphics card to use it. In fact, you can use any recent graphics card that supports DirectX 11, which includes even integrated laptop GPUs. The World of Tanks enCore RT Demo is available now.
“Intel One API is like a big collection of libraries,” Bronislav Sviglo, World of Tanks render team lead, says to PCGamesN, “and we’ve only used one of them, it’s called Intel Embree. It’s used for offline rendering, and it has like a lot of built in features. So it can implement ray tracing with different types of surfaces, but we don’t use that. We only use the part that constructs BVH. So basically it’s the multi-threaded to BVH construction part of this Intel Embree library. That’s part of the Intel One API toolkit.
The ray tracing implementation isn’t quite as extensive as those found in DirectX 12 games with DXR. World of Tanks’ ray tracing is limited to using a software-based implementation that’s meant to improve shadow quality and doesn’t handle further lighting effects. The technique works by tracing a straight line between a visible point on objects and the central light source (the sun) and seeing if there are any interruptions. If there are, a shadow is displayed, and if there aren’t, no shadow is displayed. And if you want to buy World of Tanks Gold, visit z2u.com, a professional online in-game currency store.
Intel made the news recently with tales of ray tracing acceleration on its upcoming Intel Xe graphics cards. These claims proved to be based on bad data, as Intel later clarified, led astray by dodgy machine translation. But while denying one tacit mention of ray tracing, Intel purposefully shed light on another: that it will support ray tracing in the professional market with Xe and libraries such as Embree.
The demo currently offers four Ray Tracing effects: Off, High, Maximum and Ultra. While these effects are not enabled by default, you can manually enable them. This demo can run on all DirectX 11 compatible graphics cards, and does not require an NVIDIA RTX GPU in order to enable the RT effects.