The ‘Engineer’s Workshop’ over at Blizzard has just blogged their latest technical update for World of Warcraft, letting us know some of the new shiny visual options coming in Patch 6.1. We get HBAO+, CMAA, MSAA and SSAA+CMAA.
That all totally made sense to you I can tell, but for the knuckle-dragging ‘what’s a RAM?’ types out there, the World of Warcraft engineers break it down and give some teasing in-game sample shots.
HBAO+ is Nvidia’s screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) method that’s for higher-end graphics cards, and can alter how dark and light surfaces appear in the game. It needs a DirectX11 capable GPU. The team are also returning MSAA as an anti-aliasing option, as well as adding SSAA for DX11 cards.
”Also in Patch 6.1, we’re implementing a lighting makeover with the introduction of per-pixel deferred point lights. This allows for accurate point lights that can affect all of the objects in the game world. This creates realistic lighting from sources like campfires and torches, and illuminates the world in a more realistic way than ever before,” reads the blog on Battle.net. ”The number of point lights supported varies by hardware, with high-end video cards allowing for the best quality lighting.”
All these fancy new visual upgrades are available to test out now on the Patch 6.1 Public Test Realm for World of Warcraft. Check out the full Battle.net blog update for more info and comparisons.
