World of Warcraft Performance Guide
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 23, 2005 12:17 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
The balance between GPU and CPU performance isn't all that matters to World of Warcraft. Memory size is also a very important factor in building a smooth running WoW box. As with any high end gaming box, less than 512MB of memory is simply unacceptable for WoW. However, the requirements here are a little more strenuous than usual. We found that ideally, you need 1GB of memory to have WoW running on a machine that has other applications running in the background. While you can get by with less than that, for the best overall performance, the sweet spot is 1GB. With memory prices at the lowest that they will be for the next few months, making that 1GB or more upgrade is a bit easier now than it was before or than it will be later on.
Blizzard has also done a good job of providing Mac support for World of Warcraft. In fact, the same discs used to install the PC version will work in installing the Mac version of WoW. Unfortunately, Mac WoW performance is nothing to write home about. Performance on a dual G5 2.5GHz with an ATI Radeon X800 XT Mac Edition is less than half of the performance of a single Athlon 64 4000+ and a Radeon X800 XT. The performance on slower video cards is just as disappointing. Blizzard has been active in improving Mac WoW performance, but the gap remains to be nothing short of huge. Mac OS X has never been known as a gaming platform of choice, but Mac users should at least be able to run the games to which they do have access at comparable frame rates to their PC counterparts. Regardless of whether the Mac WoW performance issues are the fault of Apple, Blizzard or the GPU vendors, they need to be fixed if any of the responsible companies actually care about that user base. WoW is quite playable on the Mac - it's just noticeably slower than on the PC.
From an overall standpoint, World of Warcraft is much more demanding of a game than it seems. The game is quite playable on older hardware, and visually, it looks very similar even on DX8 class GPUs, but higher resolutions and getting rid of irritating choppiness when rotating your camera in the world are both enabled through faster GPUs and CPUs.
WoW is generally more GPU limited than CPU limited, but you still need a relatively fast CPU. On the AMD side, the Athlon 64 3500+ continues to be the sweet spot, while the Pentium 4 650/550 is the more balanced choice for Intel folks. And as always, we found that the Extreme Edition is a waste of money.
But if you happen to have a relatively new Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 system, you're pretty much good to go. The biggest need for a CPU upgrade will be lower clocked Northwood and Athlon XP based systems.
As far as GPUs go, the more you spend, the higher the resolution that you can run and the smoother that things will be at that resolution. The ATI vs. NVIDIA decision is really up to you for most GPUs except at the lower price points, where the 6600GT and the 6200 both outclass their ATI competitors.
If you're one of the 1.5 million people who has found themselves addicted to World of Warcraft, you might as well feed your hardware addiction at the same time, right?
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Conspiracy - Thursday, March 31, 2005 - link
I'm running an Intel 2.8GHz 800FSB overclocked to 3.4 and 1GB of memory. I also have a Geforce 6800GT Ultra. Nice setup and can play any game at max rez w/o issues. Even WOW is quite nice. However I did have a lot of issues with disk swapping, mainly in big cities like Orgrimar. I fixed it by setting up a Raid 0 config. I rarely, if ever, get any disk swapping issues. This is a pretty huge key factor with performance IMO.drdavis - Thursday, March 31, 2005 - link
It was great to see the comparison to the Mac as I am a Mac user playing WoW (PowerMac G5 dual 2Ghz with ATI 9800 Pro) as well. I agree with the assessment that the bottleneck is most likely the OpenGL driver. I am curious, it would be nice if a comparison could be made to the PowerMac running an Nvidia 6800 instead of the ATI card. I have been told that ATI never was one for screaming OpenGL performance and Nvidia usually did a better job with OpenGL drivers.eastvillager - Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - link
The only WoW performance issues I have are on Blizzards side of the connection, lol.eastvillager - Wednesday, March 30, 2005 - link
Pinnacle - Tuesday, March 29, 2005 - link
While I commend the intention of doing a performance review on game that are not first person shooters, I think you have missed the point. Yes your enjoyment of warcraft is going to depend on your hardware, but GPU probably has a secondary role to CPU, memory, internet connection speed, LAN speed and probably a host of other items.What I would like to know is something concrete about how much data is moved about while playing the game, and what you guys think the WoW servers should/could be running on to implement the game. Sorry if I sound too critical - I think The Anand Team does a great job!
Brunnis - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
Hey, Anand, did you ever get around to checking that AthlonXP 3200+ system of yours? Every test that you do with that system shows it being EXTREMELY slow. I've never seen an AthlonXP 3200+ doing this bad on any other site... Some results that you've published with that system have even been proven wrong. Most notably the 263kB/s WinRAR result (normal is 380-400kB/s).Just as the results from some of your previous reviews, this one shows the AthlonXP to be clock-to-clock as fast as a Prescott CPU. This is just as rediculous now as it was in your old tests.
Are you really SURE that everything is okay with that AthlonXP system? I'm still not convinced.
jiulemoigt - Saturday, March 26, 2005 - link
Ok I'm confused there is a built in frame counter in wow so benchies should be cake. Oh and approacing the action house isn't video cards probs it's lag from too many people. The numbers are not right I have a AMD64 3200+ that gets more frames than the graph when set back down to the right clock speed, and the FX-55 when paired with a 6800gt is signifactly faster than the graph what did you use to get the frames per sec?Mizuchi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
Wouldn't more memory help with disk swapping?mdk30 - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
"We found a maximum of 3% variation between runs as long as there was no disk swapping that occurred during the benchmark (more on that later)."Did I miss the follow-up to this comment about disk swapping? I just went back through the article again and still can't find anything. I've had annoying stuttering problems with WoW when my drive is working hard, so I was just wondering if there was anything that I could do to minimize that effect.
Mizuchi - Friday, March 25, 2005 - link
Holy crap. I ran the game with default settings, like use high quality textures and shaders and the game looks sooo much better. Guess that's the difference with a DX9 card. I will play on my laptop now, I think. :)Cancelling that order on the Dell. Keeping the RAM. I'm going to find a video card deal and get in... so much more enjoyable with better visuals. Choppy frames is still a problem, but I might get over it.