Yesterday, we reported on the new Ray Tracing effects tat World of Tanks will be getting. And today, we are happy to report that a new demo for World of Tanks is currently available. This new demo features these DirectX 11 Ray Tracing effects that players can experience themselves on their systems.

As we’ve already reported, Wargaming will use Intel’s Embree library to utilise CPUs so it can create a BVH construction. BVH stands for Bound Volume Hierarchy. In order to optimize the ray tracing calculations, Wargaming will use Bound Volume Hierarchy so it can distribute the triangles to specific boxes. The CPU will basically sort the triangles into boxes with four to eight triangles in each. Then it takes two boxes and puts them in a larger box and it repeats this process until a tank unit is made of huge boxes.

The EnCore engine within World of Tanks utilises Intel Embree to offload BVH (bounding volume hierarchy) tasks from the GPU to any available CPU core. BVH is a geometric structure that minimises ray tracing complexity through the use of cascading groups, and is currently executed courtesy of your graphics card. However, in an attempt to reduce GPU load and put multi-core CPUs to good use, Intel Embree will instead use any going cores within your CPU for this task.

This is done by using the Embree library made by Intel, which Wargaming collaborated with to implement this form of ray tracing. The Embree library is open source and contains methods for further levels of ray tracing, such as global illumination and more realistic reflections. However, these features would require significantly more rays to be traced along more complicated paths than those for shadows only. That means that it cannot realistically be implemented without turning the game into a slideshow. The shadows will also only be traced from working tanks to minimize the performance impact.

This seems like a case of expectation versus reality.  When we think of ray tracing, we expect far more than just improved shadows, but, nevertheless, we cannot fault Wargaming. Their implementation for improving the shadows is indeed, technically, done through ray tracing and should certainly make it look a good bit better. Stay tuned to z2u.com and we will be the first one to inform you all the latest. Besides, our website also offer Cheap World of Tanks Gold for players.