World of Tanks is one of the most popular online games going right now, so it’s notable that it’s soon going to embrace advanced ray tracing – so soon, in fact, that the test can be snagged from the official site right now. Using the enCore RT engine, this WoT update primarily aims to improve shadows around the very thing you will be looking at most often: tanks.

What’s interesting about this ray tracing update is that it doesn’t require special hardware, such as NVIDIA’s RTX graphics cards. It instead relies-upon Intel Embree ray tracing kernels to offload BVH (bound volume hierarchy) work to the CPU so that the GPU can use more of its resources to improve shadows. Intel’s Embree isn’t new, but it does seem to be gaining adoption at a rapid pace lately.

With the 1.0 update of WoT that was released in early 2018, Wargaming overhauled the graphics engine, but didn’t stop its work there. It seems like the company knew about the oncoming demand for ray tracing, and began its preparations for it right away. Things were greatly helped by the decision to leave Windows XP and DirectX 9 in the dust. Furthermore,You can buy Cheap WoT Gold at z2u.com by using the code “Z2U” for a 3% discount.

Because ideal ray tracing techniques are computationally demanding, tricks have to be used to speed the performance up in real-time games. So, instead of bouncing a hundred or more rays off of a single pixel, models in games are simplified so that the end result will be a rough estimate of what it should look like. With Embree, BVH is done on the CPU to separate triangles into boxes, which are then broken down into even smaller cascading boxes. The GPU will then dig into those so that it can figure out where a light ray’s ultimate destination should be.

What this ultimately means is that instead of needing to consider ray tracing for some 50,000 or more triangles per single tank model, BVH helps reduce the possibilities to a few dozen boxes per tank. Once a triangle is found to intersect with the light source, the (mostly) accurate shadow will then be rendered. Because so few rays are bounced, noise will occur, so a denoiser is implemented to give a suitable end-result.

Unfortunately, Wargaming did not reveal any more details, but we are certainly looking forward to it, especially since it brings Intel to Ray Tracing game and works on any graphics card.