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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SDA - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Nice, thorough article. I was surprised at how competitive the 6600GT was with higher-end cards in WoW... looks like it'd match or outperform the X800 Pro across the board. Thanks to the CPU scaling section, I can come to a fairly safe conclusion that this isn't because of other system bottlenecks.I tend to agree with #2/7 on LOD. If LOD isn't invisible or damned near it, I disable it immediately. It hurts my brain to see a blob morph into a tree.
Question on widescreen: how does WoW generate the widescreen picture? That is, is it horizontally stretched or vertically clipped relative to the 4:3 image, or is it actually the same with more added on on the sides?
sbuckler - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Why is my northwood cpu too slow? - you never tested with one so how do you know? Going by previous comparisons it's probably faster then a similarly clocked 5 or 6 series pentium.EODetroit - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Oh yeah, #2 is right, to be harder on the video cards, turn "Level of Detail" off. Its a feature that replaces far away textures with low detail ones, and subs in the high detail textures on the fly as you get closer. Keeping high detail textures on regardless would have been a more interesting test.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
EODetroit1280 x 768 is the resolution I used, it's a widescreen resolution that some folks have been using because of its 15:9 aspect ratio.
Take care,
Anand
EODetroit - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Nice article, its practically the first of its kind, since almost no one looks at MMORPGs even though they can get really low framerates at times. I heard EQ2 is the most graphically intensive game on the market, bar none, you might look into testing it too.WoW is now my game of choice, replacing Enemy Territories (I'm a FPS guy at heart, but WoW is fun and I'm hooked). I'm hoping that when Battlegrounds comes out, it'll be like ET on crack, except taking months to max your character instead of minutes.
One thing... on Page 4, you list the one of the resolutions you tested as "1280x768". Is that accurate or was it really 1280x960 or 1280x1024, which seems more likely.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Woodchuck2000Ask and ye shall receive, the first page has been updated :)
Take care,
Anand
segagenesis - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Minor points... I would add that using LOD causes a noticeable level detail change ass you walk along, you can see the obvious detail changes. I keep it *off* even if it reduces performance because otherwise mountains/trees/stuff look like they are morphing as you get closer to them :PAlso, in large areas like the barrens setting the terrain distance to 100% makes a difference compared to Teldrassil as you showed. I still get 30 fps which is fair enough for a 9800 pro at max detail.
Woodchuck2000 - Wednesday, March 23, 2005 - link
Any chance of picture rollovers? I'm finding hard to spot some that many DX8/9 differences scrolling up and down!vetonveton - Thursday, April 29, 2010 - link
I have pen intel{R} pentium{R} 4 CPU 3.00Ghz 2.99Ghz..... RAM: 1 GB.... grafic:96 MB!! Can i play WOW on this??? please guys,I need a quick answer!