Shadowlands Alpha Receives Ray Traced Shadows

If you’re a fan of ray tracing and World of Warcraft, well, the ongoing Shadowlands alpha has received ray tracing.

According to Wowhead from user Jaydaa, you can enable the option in the Advanced options in the settings menu. It looks like you’ll have the option to enable it at three settings: Fair, Good, and High.

If you’re unfamiliar with ray traced shadows, the tool tip text reads

“Improves shadow quality with ray tracing, which produces shadows with more natural softness, greatly increased precision, and from additional light sources.”

Fair quality will give you the effect with reduced resolution from directional light sources. Good quality will provide the effect with reduced resolution from directional light and logical light sources. High quality will provide full resolution of directional light sources and local light sources.

If you have an RTX card from Nvidia, you should be able to enable this effect. This means that anyone without an RTX card – such as a GTX Nvidia card, or any AMD card – will not be able to run this effect. In case you missed it, check out Robin’s thoughts with the Shadowlands alpha so far.