The team over at Wargaming is bringing the much-anticipated update to their World of Tanks game engine with the move to enCore RT. Wargaming has partnered with Intel and is using their Embree library (part of OneAPI) to bring ray traced shadows to World of Tanks. This is not full scene ray tracing but a version of hybrid raytracing like we've seen in most games using ray tracing effects, outside of Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX which are fully path traced. While the ray traced shadows are limited only to the shadows on intact tanks there is a really interesting take with this technique being able to circumvent the need for DX12 and DXR as it runs on DX11. The catch with it running on DX11 means that you can run it without the need for extensive driver support or hardware accelerators for ray tracing and that means you can run it on pretty much any DX11 compliant graphics card, so we wanted to see how it does across our test suite.
Testing Methodology
We tested all of the cards using the latest GPU drivers and using the benchmark utility. The benchmark utility only gives out a score rating at the end and doesn't share the actual performance so we used FrameView to capture the performance from the 178 second run of the benchmark while running at the Ultra preset with Ultra AA and Ultra Ray Traced Shadows. Once we had the results from 3 runs, after discarding an initial burner run for loading purposes, we took the average of average frame rates as well as the 99th percentile results from the run. We report our performance metrics as average frames per second and have moved away from the 1% and .1% reporting and are now using the 99th percentile. For those uncertain of what the 99th percentile is, representing is easily explained as showing only 1 frame out of 100 is slower than this frame rate. Put another way, 99% of the frames will achieve at least this frame rate.
Test System
| Components | Z370 |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i9-9900k @ 5GHz |
| Memory | 16GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4 3200 |
| Motherboard | EVGA Z370 Classified K |
| Storage | Kingston KC2000 1TB NVMe SSD |
| PSU | Cooler Master V1200 Platinum |
| Windows Version | 1903 with latest security patches |
Graphics Cards Tested
| GPU | Architecture | Core Count | Clock Speed | Memory Capacity | Memory Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA RTX 2080ti FE | Turing | 4352 | 1350/1635 | 11GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER FE | Turing | 3072 | 1650/1815 | 8GB GDDR6 | 15.5Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2070 SUPER FE | Turing | 2560 | 1605/1770 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2060 SUPER | Turing | 2176 | 1470/1650 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| NVIDIA RTX 2060 FE | Turing | 1904 | 1365/168 | 6GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| ZOTAC Gaming GTX 1660 | Turing | 1408 | 1530/1785 | 6GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1080 FE | Pascal | 2560 | 1607/1733 | 8GB GDDR5X | 10Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1070 FE | Pascal | 1920 | 1506/1683 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| NVIDIA GTX 1060 FE 6GB | Pascal | 1280 | 1506/1708 | 6GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| AMD Radeon RX 5700XT | Navi | 2560 | 1605/1755/1905 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| AMD Radeon RX 5700 | Navi | 2304 | 1465/1625/1725 | 8GB GDDR6 | 14Gbps |
| AMD RX Vega 64 | Vega 10 | 4096 | 1247/1546 | 8GB HBM2 | 945Mbps |
| AMD RX Vega 56 | Vega 10 | 3584 | 1156/1471 | 8GB HBM2 | 800Mbs |
| MSI RX 580 Armor 8GB | Polaris 20 | 2304 | 1366 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8Gbps |
| Sapphire Nitro+ RX 570 4GB | Polaris 20 | 2048 | 1340 | 4GB GDDR5 | 7Gbps |
Drivers Used
| Drivers | |
|---|---|
| Radeon Settings | 19.10.1 |
| GeForce | 436.48 |
1080p RT On VS RT Off
Before jumping into the entire graphics card suite result across various resolutions we wanted to take a quick note and see how the performance of the RX 5700XT and RTX 2060 SUPER scale at 1080p with and without ray traced shadows. It's very clear here that the ray traced shadows in World of Tanks is still quite computationally expensive and as far as I understand this technique is not taking advantage of the RT Cores in the RTX cards so it's just using the CUDA cores.
1080P RT On VS RT Off
Graphics Card Results
1080p
Standard 1080p Performance
1440p
Standard 1440p Performance
UHD 4K
UHD 4K Performance
Conclusion
While we can't really play the game just yet with the ray traced shadows we are now able to get an idea of how it performs across various graphics cards from both NVIDIA and AMD, even though AMD had not updated their drivers to support DXR they couldn't get away from this one. The performance delta between Vega and Navi, showing good performance, continues to grow it seems with even the GTX 1660 besting the Vega 64 even at 4K resolutions where Vega tends to be able to stretch its legs a bit. Even without taking advantage of the use of the RT cores within the RTX Turing cards they do best their competition at all resolutions showing there's more to Turing than just hardware-accelerated ray tracing cores. But truthfully the ray traced shadows in World of Tanks are pretty limited and most people are not going to turn them on since only the tanks are getting the feature, I could see the appeal here for those with the computational budget to keep the frame rate high and still get to see how things are with the ray traced shadows enabled.
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