Rendering/ScreenEffects

This page covers information for the various full screen effects that exist in World of Warcraft.

EffectGlow

This fullscreen effect controls both the bloom-style glow effect used by the game, and player state driven blur effects like inebriation.

To apply the effect, the game creates 4 new render targets:

• RT 0: Already exists, and holds the output of rendering the given world scene

• RT 1: Created by passing RT 0 through the FFXBox4 shader (2x2 box blur)

• RT 2: Created by passing RT 1 through the FFXGauss4 shader (4-tap gaussian blur)

• RT 3: Created by passing RT 2 through the FFXGauss4 shader (second pass)

• RT 4: Created by passing RT 0 and RT 3 through the FFXGlow shader (both targets are sampled)

The blurred render targets (RT 1, RT 2, and RT 3) are sized at 1/4 of the width and 1/4 of the height of the original render target (RT 0).