World of Tanks engine has ray tracing with support for DirectX 11 GPUs

Wargaming will add ray-traced shadows to the World of Tanks engine on Tuesday. The technology was developed in collaboration with Intel and offers support for all DirectX 11 GPUs, including laptop GPUs and Intel’s integrated graphics.

Wargaming says it will add “several new techniques” to the Core engine on Tuesday, which have been used in World of Tanks since March 2018. These techniques also include a ray tracing technique, which has been applied in collaboration with Intel. That should lead to better shadow quality with all video cards with DirectX 11 support. The technology must also work on laptop GPUs and the integrated GPUs in Intel processors. It is not clear what the impact on game performance will be.

Wargaming announced last month that the addition of ray tracing was planned for World of Tanks. At the time, the company announced that this technique would be applied in the next update of the game, which should be released in October. The developer says the technology will be added to World of Tanks “soon”. Raytracing has now been added to enCore, a demo of Wargaming’s Core engine; players can test the impact of the Core engine on game performance.

Wargaming uses Intel’s Embree library. This is a collection of various ray tracing kernels, which are currently mainly used for offline applications, including 3D graphic design and animation film making. Embree is completely open source and free to use through the Apachee 2.0 license. Wargaming has added the technology in collaboration with Intel in the World of Tanks engine. Together with Intel, the company has previously added multicore technology with support for concurrent rendering, allowing the engine to perform calculations on all usable cores simultaneously. According to Wargaming, applying that technology took less than a week at the time.

Currently, the technology is only used to implement realistic shadows, but in theory it can also be used to enable realistic reflections and global illumination. However, Wargaming reports that this will require ‘processing billions of rays’, and that it is still impossible to do this in real time with current hardware. There are GPUs with extra cores for ray tracing in the form of Nvidia’s RTX GPUs, but that is a hardware solution, while the ray tracing implementation by Wargaming is software.