The new World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor is fast approaching and many players are gearing up to play the new region and all it has to offer. Blizzard have been busy though with a little more than just the addition of the Draenor region though; they’re actually working with the coding underneath the entire game to make sure it stays up-to-date.

A new blog series, Engineer’s Workshop, aims to help players understand what changes Blizzard are making to the engine of the game. First is anti-aliasing; Blizzard’s replaced multisample anti-aliasing in favour of the newer CMAA, Conservative Morphological Anti-Aliasing. The aim of the upgrades is to bring WoW firmly into the modern-day era of technological advancements in gaming say Blizzard, “We’re thinking long-term with this change.”

The reason they are dropping MSAA is due to World of Warcraft’s changes meant that it had moved away from being CPU-bound, freeing up the GPU, allowing it to handle MSAA. But an increased demand on the GPU means that Blizzard have had to change strategies.

“We explored a number of options to reconcile this increased GPU demand with the game’s anti-aliasing needs, and ultimately decided to embrace CMAA as our anti-aliasing technology for Warlords of Draenor… It also integrates well with technologies we have planned for the future, and helps us bring those to the game sooner.”

CMAA means that performance cost has also been reduced which means that they’ve been able to add new graphical things such as a new shadowing technique and soft particles. It’s also just the start as Blizzard explore more ways to make the best of higher-end graphics cards.

Engineer’s Workshop “Engine Evolution in Warlords of Draenor”: [x]