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

[necrolust]

I have an HP off-the-shelf desktop that I bought in November for work/home:

AMD Athlon II 635 Quad @ 2.9GHz
8GB DDR3
HD 4200 (integrated)
250w PSU
Using a 23" LCD at 1920x1080

I recently started playing WoW again. I want better performance, and the ability to use my 40" LCD as a second display. So, I have an HD 6870 and a 650w Corsair PSU in the mail. I can't overclock and I'm obviously not replacing mobo on a two-month-old system. Did I just buy a GPU that would provide the same performance as a lesser model due to limitations from my other components? I'm not scheduling real life around raids or anything, but it's nice to have a smooth gaming experience with pleasing visuals, and my priority isn't building some gaming beast system right now.

 

[Guest]

OMFG Lads you did an awesome job but sadly I have to say I'm extremely disappointed in the following comment (That's not to say you can't get playable frame rates from a processor from AMD. But wow--they turn in significantly lower average frame rates in Cataclysm. Like, even the fastest unreleased six-core CPU gets pegged at 60 FPS with a GeForce GTX 480 under the hood. Thinking the problem could have been with our graphics card, we even swapped in a Radeon HD 5870 and saw the same ceiling at 59 frames per second. You can get more performance for about $150 less from a dual-core Core i3-530. Sad.)

I'm so pissed off after spending loads of money on my new PC the game is lagging like hell and I totally blame the Hexa core 3.2ghz that I bought.

 

[mihaitzateo]

Well I think you need to set the cpu affinity.
No ideea if WOW use more than 2 cores very well on windows xp,windows vista/windows 7 with directx 11 and directx 11 mode enabled (and cpu affinity set to proper value also) might give you better frame rate.

 

[teryon]

It's seems to me, It will be useless to upgrade my 8800GT, to a GTX460, without upgrading my old C2D e6700, what do you think ?

 

[Guest]

Hey,

I've got some performance issue in WoW.

I'm paying on:

CPU: C2D E4600 2,4GHz @ 3,2 GHz
MB: Gigabyte P35-DS3L
GPU: HD5770 1GB
RAM: 2x 1GB GEIL Ultra DDR2 800 MHz
OS: Windows 7 64-bit

And thing is that, without spikes during raid I have to play with all shadows/sun shafts/liquid details/particle density at low or disabled.

Everything else on fair.

Resolution 1280x1024.

Only thing I can think of is that 2GB memory is too low. This week I will put one more set of 2x1GB memory.

Or maybe CPU is issue for such low performance?

 

[TopGun]

Is there any possible way to do an update to your World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide article including the GeForce 560 Ti, Radeon HD 6950, and Radeon HD 6950 w/ BIOS flash to a 6970?

Also, what would be the difference (if any) between using a i2500k and an i2600k besides the small difference in processor speed (and price)?

 

[tim83]

Cant believe there still aint any 560ti cards in this test. Wen in fact that is prob one of the most used cards out there for upgraders.

 

[chuck44]

world of war-craft is gonna come to a screeching halt now that all the major telecoms have capped there service if you have unlimited download service enjoy it while you can because those that have not capped there service will. and the overages are quite nasty.

 

[Guest]

@Tuxboxer

The reason you see the same performance from 8gigs in a 64bit windows vs 4gigs in a 32bit windows is because the wow.exe is a 32bit executable and is only flagged to use 4gigs of memory space. You can switch this flag by first making a back-up of the wow.exe (may need it for future patches but I never have). Then get NTCore's 4GB patch (add a dot com to NTCore and go to utilities and you will find it there)and patch wow.exe. That's it! The game will now use more than 4gb of ram with the game. There are blue posts as well saying they will not ban anyone modifying the executable in this way in case you are worried. They simply do not want to have to distribute two separate executable's so use only the 32bit memory addressing.

 

[rancur3p1c]

Wow, why is nobody wondering about how going from 3 cores to 5 doesn't make any difference but from 5 to 6 does on the AMD processors? This smells of pandering to Intel from Blizzard, just like how the Blues were talking the forums about how Intel was better because it had "turbo" which made a core overclock so that it can accomplish more work at once!! Wow so fast!!!


This is a pretty poor review.

 

[Guest]

Old thread, I suppose -- but my G73JH laptop with i7 740QM and ATi 5870 gets about a 10fps boost from running DX11. It's a visible difference.

 

[prudhvirazz]

@chris Angelini, May I request you to update this article? This article seems to be outdated. I would be grateful if you can update this article. I am planning to build a new Desktop for Warlords of Draenor.

 

[Nefos]

what budget are you thinking of?
my HD 7770 can play it with a x2 265 (WoW has high need of CPU) at 60fps in ultra at 1280*1024
if you have anythinng better, it will run perfectly