It appears that the alpha build of World of Warcraft Shadowlands has some technical features. According to its code, the game’s engine supports both DXR and raytraced shadows. Moreover, there is also support for VRS (Variable Rate Shading).

Unfortunately, these new graphical features are not fully implemented yet. As such, the game crashes the moment you enable the Ray Tracing Shadows. VRS is also not working at the moment. Still, the good news is that Blizzard has already added these features to the engine.

In case you weren’t aware of, Variable rate shading is a mechanism to enable allocation of rendering performance/power at varying rates across the rendered image. Via this setting, the game can reduce rate shading with little or no reduction in perceptible output quality, leading to better performance.

It will be interesting to see whether the final version of Shadowlands will work with these new graphical/engine features. Since these three features are also part of DirectX 12 Ultimate, Blizzard may be also preparing Shadowlands for an Xbox X Series release.

Below you can find an image, captured by Reddit’s LemonKing, showing these new features.

Stay tuned for more!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved - and still does - the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the "The Evolution of PC graphics cards." Contact: Email