While not officially confirmed, users of the World Of Warcraft Shadowlands Alpha have discovered that this new update will include support for DirectX Ray Tracing and Variable Rate Shading, two of the most popular technologies in the latest generation of graphics cards.
The implementation of DirectX ray tracing would only apply to shadows, while Variable Rate Shading could be applied to particles or the game terrain. It seems that the Alpha files will not contain these implementations, even though support is built-in, because trying to enable them will immediately crash the game.
It will be interesting to see if this implementation is part of a certification for DirectX 12 Ultimate, or if they are even preparing a World of Warcraft version for the Xbox series X with all the latest technologies on board. There are still no official words from Blizzard, so this is all just speculation.
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands comes this year 2020 for Windows and Mac. There is no exact launch date yet. You can purchase this expansion in advance by clicking here.