World of Tanks Ray Tracing Demo Released

The latest update for World of Tanks is a pretty big deal, at least when it comes to rendering. The update adds ray tracing to the game, but most importantly, it doesn’t rely on Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Now, I’ve said this a million times, ray tracing isn’t an Nvidia feature. Their RTX cards are just the only dedicated accelerators for RT. Ray Tracing is a feature of DX12. Now, this is where it gets complicated. This new demo features ray tracing that also runs in DirectX 11! Basically, it’s their own implementation of the technology and was created with Intel, albeit, it’ll still work on AMD CPUs, this is purely a software thing.

World of Tanks

What this means is that the CPU does the ray-tracing calculations before passing the numbers on to the GPU to render just like any normal graphics process. It’s a clever workaround, and I bet we see developers get really damn innovative and efficient at finding more ways over the coming years.

The demo features four ray tracing modes; off, high, maximum and ultra. I’m not sure how you can have ultra after maximum, but they do. You can download the World of Tanks enCore Ray Tracing Demo here, which is basically a benchmark. It’ll work on any DirectX 11 graphics card so that obviously includes AMD and Nvidia cards. I bet it also helps pave the way for the upcoming Intel GPUs too. Keep in mind, the RT setting isn’t on by default in the benchmark.