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Shadows of the Lich King

Shadows of the Lich King

WTB: New Shadows

So, you are in the Wrath of the Lich King closed beta and want to see the new shiny shadows yourself? As things are still very much unfinished, the shadows are not yet accessible using the Video Settings menu in the user interface. To turn the shadows on, you need to type in a console command.

x in this case is a number between 0 and 6, with 5 and 6 being officially "unsupported and experimental". Here is a quick clip to show the different modes.

Level 0 (old shadows)

Level 1 (character shadows)

At extShadowQuality 0, the new shadows are disable and everything looks just like it used to look in World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade - blob shadows under characters, precomputed rough shadows for terrain. Great performance on anything even remotely resembling a gaming PC and can be played at minimum settings on almost any PC that can boot up Windows XP.

extShadowQuality 1 is the lowest of the new settings. Player characters, NPCs and monsters get dynamic shadows, but they are drawn only for those objects that are reasonably close to the player. Terrain shadows remain the same as before - precomputed and very rough. Almost no performance hit on modern systems and still playable on a three-year old gaming PCs with DX9-class video cards.

Level 2

Level 3

extShadowQuality 2 adds full dynamic terrain shadows to the character shadows of the lowest setting - buildings, trees, rocks etc. all get real dynamic shadows. Dynamic terrain shadows at this setting are low resolution, and true dynamic shadows are drawn up to medium distance away from the character, while the rest of the visual area gets "semi-dynamic" shadows (more on that later). Noticeable performance hit on all tested systems, major loss of framerate on older mid-range cards.

extShadowQuality 3 is same as 2, but the resolution of the shadow maps is increased. Almost same performance as with 2.

extShadowQuality 4 is the maximum setting for normal use - full dynamic shadows with high resolution shadow maps. Again, performance is very close to the level 2 setting. Level 2, 3 and 4 all use "split" approach to rendering the shadows. You get true dynamic shadows on everything up to a point - a point that is fairly close to your character. To avoid clear visual defects further away, major objects such as trees get shadows that are created using the same dynamic shadow routine, but they get updated only very rarely.

You can see this for a moment when switching to level 2, 3 or 4 from any other level as intially only the dynamic area of your view gets shadows, then after a moment also the distant trees and other major objects are "filled in" with slightly lower resolution shadows.

This is a great compromise and looks fine when actually fighting monsters or otherwise moving on foot, but it's not flawless. When flying above the terrain the updates to the shadows in the "far" section of your view is so slow, that there is often a noticeable "seam" in the view where the shadows become proper dynamic shadows. Some objects also get no dynamic shadows until they enter the "close" section of your view. This issue is fixed at the highest setting, but at a terrible cost...

extShadowQuality 5 extreme setting - full dynamic shadows with high resolution shadow maps, drawn all the way to the horizon. Every non-terrain object you see, gets a dynamic shadow. Unplayable on older hardware and major resource hog on all tested configurations with framerate hovering around 20fps with high end video cards. Officially this is considered to be an "experimental" mode, but it would be a shame if Blizzard decides to remove it when Wrath of the Lich King goes live - it's very pretty, and ensures that the shadows are future-proofed for next generation hardware. This mode also removes the "seam" issue with the shadows when travelling, caused by the split approach of the level 2-4 shadows.

Note that the shadows at the level 5 setting are currently bugged in the cities of the old world (Orgrimmar etc.) - you just get a set of "floating" shadows around you that do not properly update. I'm sure this is a temporary issue and will be resolved before the end of Beta.

It is also possible to set the extShadowQuality variable to 6, but this setting is currently same as 5, with the note that it sometimes causes display corruption. It is rumored that it's supposed to add translucent soft shadows. As the top two modes are "extreme" and "experimental", it is possible that they will be gone by the time the expansion is finally released. Alternatively it is plausible that the 5th and 6th level would stay in, but "hidden" behind a console command to avoid performance issues with low end systems. In any case, with the current beta builds, setting extShadowQuality to 5 or 6 turns any current video card into fine-grain mincemeat.

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