WoW Benchmarks: Results with the PCGH Settings
In advance: Even at 1,280 x1,024 with 4x MSAA/16:1 AF graphics cards with less than 896 MiByte VRAM are trailing behind - apparently WoW needs a lot of video memory in the settings we chose. Furthermore it seems like World of Warcraft seems to be fond off Texture and Pixel fillrate while it more or less ignores memory bandwidth and the arithmetic performance (GFLOPS) - we cannot explain the ranking of the cards to ourselves any other way. Given the fillrate affinity Wrath of the Lich King is running better on Geforces and the Radeons can't really get within striking distance at setting slower than 8x MSAA (which "traditionally” isn't one of the Geforces' strengths).

Besides the usual suspects we have also tested the Geforce 7900 GTX/512M, the Geforce GTX 275/896M, the Geforce GTX 295 v2.0/2x 896M and the Radeon HD 4870 X2/2x 1G. The latter one isn't scaling perfectly well with 35 to 50 percent but in difference to the other Radeons it doesn't suffer from lags. The Geforce GTX 295 on the other hand doesn't deliver a noticeable SLI performance benefit. Even forcing AFR 1 and 2 didn't result in a better fps scaling and renaming the WoW exe file to "UT3.exe” caused flickering textures when the game was launched. On both dual GPU cards we didn't recognize any micro stuttering or input lags because of the high overall framerate. The 7900 GTX is stable in 1,280 x 1,024 only - anything above that causes freezes. Interesting: The AF of the Geforce 7 is flickering slightly less than the AF of modern Radeon cards with A.I. default. But because of the angle dependence of the GF7 the overall impression of the Geforce 7 is inferior.

As the required video memory s regarded, we run tests with Rivatuner on Windows XP x86 and accordingly we got confirmed what we already expected because of the difference between the Radeon HD 4870/512M and the Radeon HD 4870/1G: Even at 1,280 x 1,024 with 4x MSAA/16:1 AF WoW needs 550 MiByte VRAM already and at 1,920 x 1,200 pixels with 8x MSAA/16:1 AF even 800 MiByte are exceeded. The time when WoW was running on a low-end 3D accelerator is over - (Texture) fillrate and VRAM are important now.

Apropos fillrate: The Geforce GTX 275 is close to its bigger sister the GTX 285: At 1,920 x 1,200 with 8x MSAA you can see the biggest difference - which nevertheless is only five percent. This clearly indicates that bandwidth is secondary for World of Warcraft. This is the only disadvantage (except amount of VRAM) of the GTX 275 compared to the GTX 285. Due to a noticeably higher fillrate (GTex/s) the Geforce GTS 250/1G is only slightly behind the GTX 260-216/896M; the same applies the 9800 GT/512M and the 8800 GTX/768M. The Radeon HD 4870/512M can't really keep the HD 4770/512M at distance because of the same reason - both have 32 interpolators.

Click to select resolution:

  1,280 x 1,024     1,680 x 1,050     1,920 x 1,200