World of Warcraft video settings?

[hammond]

For anyone familiar with the ingame video settings, what should my rig be set at to run the game with optimum FPS? I do notice shadows maxed drop the FPS some.

AMD Phenom X3 8400 / Triple Core 64 bit @2.1ghz
3 Gigs DDR2 667 MHZ PC2-5300 RAM
600 Watt OCZ PSU
BFG Nvidia 8800GT OC 512DDR3
320GB HD 7200RPM Serial ATA-300
22" Samsung LCD

 

[bhowell]

During the short time I played WoW, and this applies to any game really, I disable anything I really don't need to play the game. I like high resolutions, but shadows, reflections, grass/tree animations, etc aren't really necessary in most games. Don't get me wrong, they look nice, but in most cases gameplay is just fine without them.

 

[pr2thej]

Lower shadows and ground clutter, then play around with draw distances. If you hit ctrl+R and then remove your UI with ctrl+Z then you will see a fps counter in the bottom centre. Try flying across Dragonblight and see if you can maintain a good 40fps.

As long as you arent playing on crazy resolutions you should have it running very well, the game engine is 4 years old.

 

[amdfangirl]

and make sure you disable vertical snyc

 

[Kraynor]

The way I normally start off is set Spell Detail to maximum (because you need it for seeing the fire you have to stay out of), shadows to 1 up from minimum (cause they're nicer than default), ground clutter to minimum, and start messing with draw distances.

Personally I don't mind the lack of visible grass if it means higher frame rates when you're playing. After a while you stop noticing the lack of ground clutter (until you reset your graphics settings and go 'holy crap, grass!')

 

[kogashuko]

I was fighting with this the other night with my quad core 4850 x2 setup. I found that running at 1920X1080 I couldnt really turn one major thing down and have it effect fps. I was still getting around 25-40 no matter what (without drasticly reducing them). Then I found out how CPU dependent wow is. I downloaded that little ATI program that lets you shut down unused backgrounds stuff with one click. Now my FPS are 60-40 and 30 in stormwind when it is packed. FRom what I can tell the video card makes little difference at all and neither does a quad core cpu.

 

[Guest]

I was fighting with this the other night with my quad core 4850 x2 setup. I found that running at 1920X1080 I couldnt really turn one major thing down and have it effect fps. I was still getting around 25-40 no matter what (without drasticly reducing them). Then I found out how CPU dependent wow is. I downloaded that little ATI program that lets you shut down unused backgrounds stuff with one click. Now my FPS are 60-40 and 30 in stormwind when it is packed. FRom what I can tell the video card makes little difference at all and neither does a quad core cpu.

Um - any chance you could tell us what the name of the ATI program you're referring to is? Also, does that only help you if you have an ATI video card, or does the program help you with any unnecessary background OS operations regardless of what your video card is?

 

[Kraynor]

AMD Fusion is the one he's referring to. It's designed for PCs with AMD CPUs, but I've heard a little hacking it can be used on Intel systems. Video card doesn't matter.