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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biegstvo - Tuesday, July 8, 2008 - link
CPU seems to make a difference. I only have a 1.8 Ghz, and it's slow, but I'm not sure how much that has to do with the fact that it's a Celeron, with it's cut down cache, etc. If I got a 1.8Ghz P4, or even 2.* Ghz, would that help a lot?(I realize socket 478 is old, but I still have [cheap] room ahead of me even in this outdated format.)
edeus - Monday, October 31, 2005 - link
It would be good to know if there was raid on this test machine - as CPU tests may have been skewed because of it.shady28 - Saturday, January 7, 2006 - link
This article should be updated in some way. With the advent of battlegrounds, the biggest performance hits come in battlegrounds where there are 30-40 vs 30-40 other players. The front lines can easily have 60 people PvPing, plus a dozen or more NPCs thrashing around.
I can say unequivocably that a Radeon 9600Pro is incapable of dealing effectively with this. I seriously doubt anything below a 9800XT can give you even moderately good framerates in those circumstances. I'd also like to see something showing any differences in 512MB cards vs 256MB vs 128MB in games like WoW and EQ2, since those games have tons of textures and constantly have to reload new textures as you move around in-game (both for the landscape, and textures on other players representing their armor and weapons as they come into visual range).
xinc - Friday, May 6, 2005 - link
To poster 50.Yes, when ram comes into question, it would be more beneficial, to have at least 1gb of ram to avoid lag issues.
Graphical quality wise, my laptop sucks for detail, and frame rates are mediocre at best (I use default settings for details etc), however with 1gb of ram, I am lag free when passing by the auction houses in Orgrimmar, and Iron Forge.
Thanks to Anand & Co. for performing these tests... at least it gives us as the general public an idea of how to spec a "WOW gamebox"
Now my question to anyone reading these comments, and who would know more about performance... would you choose either a Geforce 6600GT or a Geforce 6800? (not GT just 6800)
it's about a $80 premium for the 6800 where I live in Canada. Thanks for any help.
Solanio - Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - link
I'm running it on a Mac with all settings set to max, highest refresh and all shaders on and I'm noticing hardly any lag*. But I haven't been able to compare it to a PC yet.People even complain about lag in open channel when I'm not suffering any. - But again, what seems 'normal' to me might seem slow to others. I'll know better when I'm able to compare.
I have a G5 dual 2GHz with 2 G RAM and the 6800 Ultra DLL NVIDIA card connecting via DSL.
I do have to say though that visually the game is beautiful and I'm really enjoying it.
*(The only time I notice lag is when I log on at peak times, there's sometimes an initial second of jump and then now and then rarely when entering an area like Goldshire, when there are a bunch of characters and I've been off somewhere else, like Westfall - but that is rare and it only happens for a moment and then everything is smooth).
bluebob950 - Tuesday, April 12, 2005 - link
what model 6600gt did you use in your test?Anemone - Monday, April 11, 2005 - link
2gb for the more intense raids helps noticeably on the Intel side of things.$.02
matbe - Tuesday, April 5, 2005 - link
Great article! It's hard to test mmorpg performance but you succeeded. Must be a first, at least with such reliable tests! Again Anandtech impresses me. Would love to see a test of the more graphics intensive EverQuest2 too!DPOverLord - Monday, April 4, 2005 - link
Ram wise does this mean if we plan on building a computer it makes more sense to buy the ram now then later?drdavis - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link
OK, followup to the Mac post. I was looking through the Mac support forum on the WoW community site. The FPS rate drop is a known issue that was introduced and a fix is in the works. So, hopefully Blizzard will have it soon!See http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=w...