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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Mizuchi - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
I have a generic laptop that I bought from Hugebee Corp (forgot the name of their smaller retail online storefront) that seemed to be an ECS model with a P4 2.8 GHz w/HT, 1GB mem, 5400 RPM drive and 9600 Pro. I'll see how it runs at it's native res, 1280x800 (WSXGA I think), and see if it's smooth enough.As for settings with my 2500+ XP Barton, 512MB, 7200 RPM (8MB Cache), 9700 Pro system, I'm running 1280x1024 with LOD, Shaders enabled (sub options off), and everything else min or off. These settings seem to run the fastest. Getting ~60 FPS normally... I guess I am fretting too much over crowded areas and upon landing from flight.
For reasons unknown, the game runs choppier at lower resolutions. I went as far as restart my system with the lower res saved for my next log on and it still seemed choppier, just to prove that something was wrong. My monitor drivers are installed and working and it runs at 60 Hz at all supported resos...
BopTop - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Finally some benchmarks on MMO's. I'll agree with the previous posters, although I don't play it, I would also like to see EQ2 broken down.As an aside, I've read there's also been an issue with Intel's speedstepping cpu's to cause players to alternatively speed up and slow down ingame. This has actually led to accusations of speed hacking and bannings. Would be interested to know if this is a legitamate bug or a cover-up excuse.
Kouri - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Great article, it's very difficult to bench WoW.Too bad you don't have any mobile GPU benchmarks. I've been trying to figure out how to get the best quality/performance ratio out of my Dell Inspiron 9100 (/w a Radeon Mobility 9700 128MB) for a while now. Just going outside and doing normal quests you can get away with a lot of the higher quality settings, but going into cities or encountering a large number of players will get you killed (I think having lower texture settings really helps here).
ElFenix - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
thanks for throwing in an AXP!darfur - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
This is just to the person who asked why their AA doesn't work in game. You need to disable the full screen glow effect, then AA should work just fine.Aikouka - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
"Oh, one more question. Why don´t you write anythink about the command rate (1T or 2T) you used - it´s quite important! And if I remember correctly a tRas of 10 is not optimal for NF4 boards. I think its 7 or so. Possibly there are similar problems with the P4-setup."#25, I noticed on my Soltek SL-K8AN2E-GR motherboard with Mushkin PC3200 that the tRas makes about no difference whether it's set at 8, 9, 10 or 11. The difference in memory benchmarks was quite negligible. However, command rate (going from 2T to 1T made an obvious difference.)
One thing I'd like to comment on ... for WoW, I upgraded from my old GeForce FX 5200 to a MSI GeForce 6600GT, and let's say that WoW acts WORSE on my 6600GT. I did raise the graphics settings, but even then, the card has no problem handling them. What it tends to do is this:
www.aikouka.com/wow_crap.jpg
The screen is flipped horizontally and then rotated 180 degrees, not to mention a ton of textures are missing. This is one of the "better looking" WoW screw-ups that I get on my new card, and what's even better is when I get the beautiful stop error x8E on nv4_disp.dll :P. It's quite annoying.
Gholam - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
By the way, there's another repeatable scenario that you can benchmark on: flight. Take a bat/gryphon/whatever, preferrably along one of the longer paths, and measure the FPS as you go from point A to point B. Since the path is the same, results should be more or less comparable - players running by below fall into the margin of error :)Malladine - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Ok, i take that back. It did slow down noticeably when large numbers of people were around, say 100+AH was usually ok, but tping into IF took 30 secs to become smooth, i assume due to loading all the gfx
Malladine - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
Before quitting a month or so ago, I ran this game from release @ 1600x1200 with everything maxed out and it was always smooth.AMDXP300+
1gb PC2700
9800 non pro
digit - Thursday, March 24, 2005 - link
my bad, just checked, pci-x 16 slot, sorry