On November 23rd, World of Warcraft celebrated its 14th birthday. Since its release in 2004, it’s become the world’s most popular subscription-based MMORPG, one of the best-selling games of all time, and cemented its position as the leader in MMO design, with gameplay that keeps players returning year after year. It’s also the king of MMO stories, thanks to a wealth of accumulated lore, and incredible cinematics, like the latest from Battle for Azeroth:
World of Warcraft also keeps things fresh with major changes, sizeable updates, and world-changing events. On December 11th, Blizzard will launch the game’s latest update, Tides of Vengeance which, in addition to new story and gameplay elements, includes DirectX 12 changes that enable higher utilisation of your GPU, giving you much improved performance in the game’s most demanding moments.
As Blizzard’s Ryan Anderson, Engine Lead for World of Warcraft, explains, “DirectX 12 has enabled World of Warcraft to reduce the CPU cost of rendering, thereby improving framerate on NVIDIA GPUs.”
Multithreading improvements alleviate CPU bottlenecks at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, enabling more of the GPU’s power to be utilised . At 3840x2160, however, virtually all games are GPU-bound
Thanks to Blizzard’s DirectX 12 optimisations , GeForce RTX GPUs deliver incredible performance in World of Warcraft at the highest detail levels, at the most popular resolutions, giving you the definitive experience. And expect that experience to get even better: Blizzard tell us that they have additional DirectX 12 optimisations planned for future patches.