The impending wave of Warlords of Draenor content is upon us, but Blizzard is now sharing what things have been changing and even added ‘under the hood’ of the game engine itself.
This Battle.net blog is the ”first in an ongoing series” planned to expose the coding side of WoW. It’s really a technical breakdown for those who care about such things.
For instance, the tinkerers have removed Multisample Anti-Aliasing (MSAA) and have instead decided to go with Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing (CMAA). ”This change is going to allow us to bring some overdue technological advancements to World of Warcraft over the course of the next few years’”we’re thinking long-term with this change.”
”One reason MSAA remained viable for WoW over the past decade was that the GPU had the time and resources to handle it. WoW has been a CPU-bound game for much of its lifetime, but during the Warlords development cycle, we endeavored to change that. A lot of that work involved analyzing the flow of data through our code and making sure we work on only what we need to for any given frame,” explained Blizzard.
”The outcome of all of this is that more than ever before, World of Warcraft relies heavily on a GPU that previously was largely free to handle things like MSAA. We explored a number of options to reconcile this increased GPU demand with the game’s anti-aliasing needs, and ultimately decided to embrace CMAA as our anti-aliasing technology for Warlords of Draenor. As with anything that can potentially change the look of the game, we vetted removing MSAA through our engineering and art teams before coming to the conclusion to swap it for CMAA.”
”CMAA provides solid anti-aliasing at a fraction of the cost in memory and performance. It also integrates well with technologies we have planned for the future, and helps us bring those to the game sooner. We also support FXAA (Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing), an even lighter-weight solution, as an option for our players using DirectX 9.”
Check out the Engineer’s Workshop: Engine Evolution in Warlords of Draenor blog on Battle.net for more.
