World of Warcraft with DirectX 11: Performance-Boost
The performance will significantly increase, as our benchmarks prove. For our tests, we used an AMD Radeon HD 5750 which was able to go up by 15 per cent as regards frames per second. The rendering of some scenes even speeded up by 20 to 60 per cent. The reason for this kind of boost might be the compute shader but we haven't yet been able to gain further information from Blizzard.


World of Warcraft with DirectX 11: Status Quo
Not only the Beta but also any other World of Warcraft now unofficially supports DirectX 11 and improved graphics. The latter doesn't even depend on the API that is used! Blizzard added so called sun shafts that prettified the lighting a little. Furthermore water and lava have been beautified: The water now uses transparency effects, environment reflections, and swell when characters pass through it. Also the lava looks more real since pixel shaders now do the surface rendering. In the course of the new Patch 4.0.1, Blizzard also refurbished the graphics menu which is now more well-arranged than before.

In Order to activate the unofficial DirectX 11 Support, you have to add the parameter "-d3d11" to you WoW-shortcut on your desktop. Now, the game will add the line "SET gxApi "d3d11"" to a file called "config.wtf" ("\World of Warcraft\WTF"). If you are confronted with stability issues, you can switch experimental DirectX 11 off by removing this exact line.