World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide

[viper007bond]

[citation][nom]Troyroberts[/nom]WOW only uses 2 cores by default. However youc an configure it to "quasi" use more cores. you have to manually edit your config.wtf and change the variable: SET processAffinityMask "3" (3 is the default meaning 2 cores) to the following values for respective processors:i7 Qudcore with Ht- 85Any Quadcore chips with no HT - 15i5 Quadcore which does not have HT as far as I know - 15i5 Dualcore with HT- 5Dualcore with HT- 5Dualcore without HT - 5AMD tricore - 7There used to be a blue post explaining the settings and how to calculate it for different cores. But the old forums got wiped.[/citation]

This hasn't been the case since patch 3.3.2. See:

http://www.wowwiki.com/CVar_processAffinityMask

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]psiboy[/nom]Would have been interesting to see an AMD Phenom X3 or X4 to see whether the L3 cache was more of an effect than the number of cores.... gross oversight perhaps?[/citation]

More like benchmark overload. Cache matters, clearly, based on the existing numbers represented there ;-)

 

[psiboy]

Ah ok... best not to flog yourself with too much data

 

[Guest]

hmmm with DX11 turned on my 5870 is getting worse frame rates than when it's off. roughly 17% less frames. i have no idea what is going on its driving me nuts

 

[Guest]

i dont care bout wow, but i do care bout the obscured amd cpu moodel
faster than 1090t?

 

[sparau]

i recently installed a second 5770 - initially the xfire made wow much worse, until i re-installed windows and got the latest cata 10.12 drivers (any catalyst install would bomb under the old win 7 install, no matter how much driver cleaner or anything else !)

*sigh* - 12 month old w7 64 ultimate edition, can anyone else remember the 6-12 month re-install days of windows 98 ?

anyway - POSS FIX FOR XFIRE ISSUES - windows re-install ! i now get 50-120fps 2x5770, i5 quad.

 

[Bynextfall]

I'm running a 7850 X2 OC'ed @ 3.2 a 4830 1gb oc'ed at 700/1000 and 4gb of ram.. It plays beautiful @ 1920 x 1080 on High. Not sure why but it looks great and getting avg. 50 fps. on good i get around 85.fps

 

[Guest]

lol... poor old me. Here I am with a 17" 1280x1024 monitor, AMD 64 x2 4400, 4gigs ddr 400, and a 512 mb geforce 7200 gs. Not too shabby back in the day, and I still get 30-40 fps with more or less average settings. Yes I do want a new system, but the old girl just won't die and thanks to the economy can't afford one on unemployment. My point being that while WOW may not be the most graphically demanding title out there, for bleeding edge hardware, I think Blizzard deserves credit for building into the game such a wide envelope that those of us of more modest means can still enjoy playing their game, unlike some titles that refuse to even install let alone play. Hell I loaded it onto my first gen Acer Aspire One and can manage to run well enough to do basic stuff like level my leather working.

 

[dEAne]

"..when it comes to gaming, balance is everything." yeah this is true and my card is no longer on it. thanks tom for all of this. quite helpful.

 

[dcarpenter85]

[citation][nom]bwen[/nom]hmmm with DX11 turned on my 5870 is getting worse frame rates than when it's off. roughly 17% less frames. i have no idea what is going on its driving me nuts[/citation]

FINALLY! Someone else who is getting lower performance with 11 than with 9. I have an i5 750 @ 3.2ghz (turbo boost off) and a 5770. I thought I was the only one...anyone else?

 

[cangelini]

[citation][nom]dcarpenter85[/nom]FINALLY! Someone else who is getting lower performance with 11 than with 9. I have an i5 750 @ 3.2ghz (turbo boost off) and a 5770. I thought I was the only one...anyone else?[/citation]

Well, it IS experimental. Hard to say though; I didn't see any trouble on any of the test beds.

 

[dcarpenter85]

[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Well, it IS experimental. Hard to say though; I didn't see any trouble on any of the test beds.[/citation]

I've done some rigorous testing and I'm seeing anywhere from a 10% to 20% drop in performance when dx11 is enabled. This is accross all resolution and graphical settings. I've tried every Catalyst release since 10.3 as well. The DirectX on my system is updated to the latest revision.

 

[nativeson8803]

I love these articles man!

 

[mihaitzateo]

I do not understand why in the CPU scaling test from AMD cpus Phenom X2 and Phenom X4 are not present.
Also it would have been interesting to see how wolfdale cpus (I do not know something like E7XXX series,E 8xxxx and some equivalent quads some with 6MB L2 cache and some with 12 MB L2 cache) are behaving compared with the other cpus.

 

[pinkfloydminnesota]

So you looked so forward to this expansion that instead of playing it, you spent a week researching and writing up this article?

 

[Zeh]

Well written article. I hope we can get to see some sort of benchmark during the first 30 seconds of a 25man raid, even if it isn't so reliable/repeteable, but it'll be a start.
My C2D E6320 used to crawl down to 3~8fps during the first moments of Putricide 25 (with everyone going crazy, and the death knights summoning army of the dead).

[citation][nom]pinkfloydminnesota[/nom]So you looked so forward to this expansion that instead of playing it, you spent a week researching and writing up this article?[/citation]

Cataclysm is going live just today on US, so I don't think that was a problem.

 

[phartindust]

Thanks for the in depth look at WOW. I think this is the first article I have ever seen that bench marked the game.

 

[total waste of time_effort and mone]

Rofl WoW looked shit when it came out and guess what? IT STILL LOOKS SHIT NOW LOL CRAP!

 

[dgingeri]

[citation][nom]sparau[/nom]i recently installed a second 5770 - initially the xfire made wow much worse, until i re-installed windows and got the latest cata 10.12 drivers (any catalyst install would bomb under the old win 7 install, no matter how much driver cleaner or anything else !)*sigh* - 12 month old w7 64 ultimate edition, can anyone else remember the 6-12 month re-install days of windows 98 ?anyway - POSS FIX FOR XFIRE ISSUES - windows re-install ! i now get 50-120fps 2x5770, i5 quad.[/citation]

This is pretty typical for Crossfire setups. Something about the way the installer puts things in place but doesn't remove them. AMD's programmers need to go back to school.

On the other hand, I have dual GTX 470 cards, and when I put the second one it, it allowed me to use SLi with only a reboot after recognition. (Installed card, booted up, OS recognized card, wouldn't enable SLi, reboot, could enable SLi. All good.) Nvidia has some really good programmers.

Although, we need programmers on games that can make the engines start to use GPGPU FP calculations (CUDA, OpenCL, DirectComputer, etc.) instead of using the regular FPU. This should help out performance no matter which video card is in use. Even the slowest integrated graphics with GPGPU capability is faster than the CPU FPU with parallel calculations. There has only been minimal use of this so far. I want to see more.

 

[stevemachine17]

I am surprised no SLI or Cross-fire tests were done. I have a GTX 460 1 GB, I was curious how my SLI component would perform, as I've heard before that WoW does not scale with multi GPUs.

 

[Kodiack]

I decided to use /timetest to get some CrossFire results myself. There's more information in the link, but I've found that with DirectX 11, Catalyst 10.11 and fullscreen mode, CrossFire offers a significant increase in FPS.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1305770941

Just some food for thought.

 

[nebun]

[citation][nom]jimslaid2[/nom]I'm sure the lack of this title utilizing AMD CPU's is just programming that is geared around the Intel CPU's. Shame on you Blizzard for playing favorites.[/citation]
not true...AMD can't keep up...it's a fact

 

[nebun]

welcome wow geeks...your systems now need upgrading, lol

 

[geekguy]

[citation][nom]haftarun8[/nom]... In other thoughts, I wish they would add CryEngine-like motion blur as well as depth of field (and not just blurring the background, but i.e. actually narrowing focus on targeted objects during combat to add a nice foreground bokeh lens blur, when you zoom in close to your character, etc... more how a real camera works). And how about higher res textures, waaay higher poly count, and perhaps tesselation. Blizzard, are you listening? It's not 2004 anymore...[/citation]

Well, in the meantime you should try other mmo's (no names so I won't start something else here) that currently use it I'm saddened by the fact that Tom made WoW it's choice for mmorpg benchmark... but I can understand the reason. Readers FTW . I hope it's not the fact that u guys lack experience with other mmo's . The article was good, but it only shows the limitations of the title sadly. U can't get honey from rocks .

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]geekguy[/nom]Well, in the meantime you should try other mmo's (no names so I won't start something else here) that currently use it I'm saddened by the fact that Tom made WoW it's choice for mmorpg benchmark... but I can understand the reason. Readers FTW . I hope it's not the fact that u guys lack experience with other mmo's . The article was good, but it only shows the limitations of the title sadly. U can't get honey from rocks .[/citation]

Well the article was about wow more than the hardware part. It wasn't intended as a test of sli scalability or something, but merely of performance in this specific title. You can't do a wow test without using wow.