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

World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide
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Ready for the launch of Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion tomorrow? Is your PC? We test 24 different graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, CPUs from AMD and Intel, and compare DirectX 9 to DirectX 11, showing you which settings to use.

I've been waiting for this day ever since downing The Lich King.

It's the way of things, isn't it? You clear all of the end-game content from one expansion and circle around in a holding pattering until new fights, new mechanics, and new gear become available. Sure, some folks gravitate toward PvP (What you PvP for? Honor f$%king rewards?). Others knock out achievements in their spare time. But I enjoy raiding. So when the end-game content is clear, it's all about anticipation of what's next.


The Burning Crusade was 'meh' (aside from the pre-nerf Kael fight). I enjoyed Wrath of the Lich King a bit more. But the original World of Warcraft remains my favorite iteration of the game. And now, with Cataclysm, the action returns to Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor. We're back to the original storyline (I had always wondered when we'd see Grim Batol opened up), and we even get to fight Nefarian and Onyxia again. To be sure, Cataclysm looks to be the closest thing to vanilla WoW since 2007.

But that doesn't mean the game looks the same. Blizzard's own in-house development team continues to improve the 3D engine with revamped water and lava rendering, the addition of sunshafts, and an experimental DirectX 11 code path that we'll demonstrate to have a major impact on performance.

In other words, what you thought you knew about the way this game taxed your PC is changing.

I always chuckle a bit when I see folks talking about World of Warcraft as if it were the lowest common denominator of PC gaming. Yes, it's in Blizzard's best interest to make this massively popular title as accessible as possible to its millions of subscribers. But there's a gaping difference between the most entry-level settings WoW supports and the lushest options it offers. Cranked up to Ultra quality, this game can actually bring a number of respectable graphics cards to their knees. I have the benchmark results to prove it, too.

So, before the game goes live for everyone to enjoy, let's have a look at the detail settings you might want to use. I have 12 different cards from AMD, 12 cards from Nvidia, enough processors to show that cores, clocks, and cache do matter here, and a direct comparison between the DirectX 9/11 code paths.

The best news of all is the these game engine changes went into effect for everyone with patch 4.0.1. So, you can dial in the settings you want to use now and simply enjoy Cataclysm tomorrow.

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  • 1 Hide
    silverblue , 6 December 2010 19:57
    MMOs sport some fantastic visuals. Aion probably leads the pack of the ones I've played, though this update can't hurt for WoW. I also hear that Lineage II is getting a substantial engine update, hopefully before Aion gets its for version 3.0. GW was also very nice.
  • 1 Hide
    nesters , 6 December 2010 20:07
    Feel sad about AMD framerates. >.> Hopefully, Bulldozer will change that.
  • 1 Hide
    dillyflump , 7 December 2010 07:03
    nestersFeel sad about AMD framerates. >.> Hopefully, Bulldozer will change that.


    If you look at the performance of AMD it's not that bad, your forgetting that intel 6 core has hyperthreading so effectively running twelve threads instead of six.
  • 1 Hide
    noble , 7 December 2010 18:41
    I have a feeling that AMD fans are left out in the cold a bit.
    Why didn't you try some Phenom X4s to see if the L3 cache helps at all ? Do you think that this level of performance is normal considering performance in other games ??
    Is it as you say a lack of horsepower or lack of optimisations from blizzard's end ??
    In the end of the day which AMD CPU & GPU combo would you recommend for those who insisted on staying on AMDs side and not change platform ?
    I can't help but say that having read the article hoping to get some answers regarding a possible CPU/GPU upgrade to play the game, in the end I got more confused.
  • 1 Hide
    silverblue , 7 December 2010 20:56
    It could all be Intel-optimised. I'm still not convinced about compilers after the uproar a few months back.
  • 0 Hide
    uruquiora , 9 December 2010 17:45
    dillyflumpIf you look at the performance of AMD it's not that bad, your forgetting that intel 6 core has hyperthreading so effectively running twelve threads instead of six.


    no game is threaded for 12 threads anyways...
  • 0 Hide
    kd_09 , 24 December 2010 01:40
    My cousin has an amd quad 9500 with 3gb ram running vista 32 - he's been having terrible trouble when raiding in WOW with fps really going down to almost a crawl - his gpu was an nvidia 8400 so we upgraded this to the radeon 5670 1gb - we saw improvements outside of raiding but is still struggling when raiding. I tried the 5670 in my old dual core 6300 and saw a 20 fps increase over the 4650 I usually have in there.
    Also in raids the dual core intel is far better than my cousins, even with the 4650 in it.

    Am still a little confused as to how to run WOW in dx11 ( which the 5670 supports ) - I cannot open the wtf file to modify it and am unsure exactly how i add it to the command line on the icon. - Could someone please spell it out for me as am fairly new to this kind of thing!
  • 0 Hide
    noble , 18 January 2011 20:34
    Right click the file and choose -> open with, then select notepad or wordpad, add the line needed, save and close it.That's it.