quick question: video card for wow cataclysm?

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makmatsu

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 25, 2007
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res: 1680x1050

which card would be the better chocie, a 5770 at $140 or gtx 460 768mb at $170?

basically I just got an asus 4870 (the one on amazon for $130), but the HSF is a POS, even at 25% fan speed it has an annoying whine to it
in wotlk the load doesn't go beyond low 80%, GPU temp hits about 58 C with fan at 25%, but I can't tolerate that whine noise
I've had a 5770 in the past before and it ran great and was real quiet, but considering the performace of the gtx 460... I'm undecided...

I'm not considering aftermarket HSF for the 4870

thanks
 
I'd go with more power. I'd go with the GTX 460.

For better feedback, give us these details:
motherboard
cpu
power supply
ram
 
IRSmurf said:
I'd go with more power. I'd go with the GTX 460.

For better feedback, give us these details:
motherboard
cpu
power supply
ram
Click to expand...

this, though those prices your quoting aren't the best I have seen. if your budget is tight a 5700 or 5600 would work though. but the rest of your specs is needed
 
Valset said:
this, though those prices your quoting aren't the best I have seen. if your budget is tight a 5700 or 5600 would work though. but the rest of your specs is needed
Click to expand...

I wouldn't be comfortable recommending anything less than a 5770 for Cataclysm at 1680x1050. I mean, sure, a 5600 could run it but I'd greatly prefer playing WoW with the graphical settings turned up.

The big questions are:
1) Can his PSU handle it?
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...n-of-graphics-cards-compared/Practice/?page=2
(If it can handle a 4870, it can certainly handle a GTX 460 or 5770)
2) Is his motherboard SLI capable? Is this of any interest to the buyer?
If the board is NOT SLI capable, I would be more apt to recommend a 5770 now and a CFX 5770 later. If the board is SLI capapble, this reinforces my recommendation for a GTX 460 as the upgrade path would be very simple.
3) Is the CPU the bottleneck? WoW has a monstrous CPU bottleneck, possibly the worst of any game. If he's running anything less than an i5, I'd have a hard time recommending anything more powerful than the 5770 just for WoW. And SLI / CFX dreams are out the window.
 
IRSmurf said:
2) Is his motherboard SLI capable? Is this of any interest to the buyer?
If the board is NOT SLI capable, I would be more apt to recommend a 5770 now and a CFX 5770 later. If the board is SLI capapble, this reinforces my recommendation for a GTX 460 as the upgrade path would be very simple.
Click to expand...

If this dude can't even handle the noise of a single 4870 then Crossfire/SLI is probably not his cup of tea.
 
WoW does not work with SLI or Crossfire

Well, it runs, but you get less fps than just a single card since it doesn't use more than 50% power per card in SLI or Crossfire.
 
thanks for the replies

No, I also don't intend to SLI or crossfire (yea, I hate noise, and WCing is out of the budget for now).

Yes, my CPU/ram is a bottleneck for me right now, I'm using a E5200 at 3.0ghz with 2gb on xp x86...
I used to play with a Q6600 at 3.0ghz with 4gb ram and vista 64, 9600gt and it was buttery smooth at max settings.
I do intend to update the CPU/mobo in the near future...

The PSU is a BFG LS450 and can handle the 4870, 5770, gtx460 no problem.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the 460 because blizzard has been steadily updating graphics every expansion, and as much as I liked the 5770, I think the 460 has a lot more going for it.
Now the only caveat will be how the new 6800 series will perform (and at what price...)
If the new 6800 series kicks ass then I suppose I'll go to my back up 4670 and chug along at medium settings until the reviews start coming out.
I was just hoping there'd be people in the cata beta who're also into computer hardware could give some feedback.
 
Wait 12 days for the 6000 series. There is sure to be something worthwhile in that release. If not, GREAT buy one of the same cards your looking at for less. :)
 
zyzeast said:
WoW does not work with SLI or Crossfire

Well, it runs, but you get less fps than just a single card since it doesn't use more than 50% power per card in SLI or Crossfire.
Click to expand...

That is straight-up wrong. WoW works with crossfire just fine, and even supports all the way up to 4 GPUs. You might not see high GPU utilization while your standing in orgrimmar or w/e but when the shit hits the fan in a 25-man raid I've seen it hit 90%+ utilization on all 4 GPUs.
 
err no, i get 30 fps in dalaran with one gtx 460, i get 25 fps in dalaran with 2x gtx 460s in SLI.
 
zyzeast said:
err no, i get 30 fps in dalaran with one gtx 460, i get 25 fps in dalaran with 2x gtx 460s in SLI.
Click to expand...

yeah i get 30 fps in dalaran also on my gtx 460, with only about 20% gpu utilization. wow has me confused. ive been wondering what my cpu utilization is in dal, but when i minimize wow it stops using the cpu heavily. is there any addon or something that displays CPU utilization?
 
herfalerf said:
yeah i get 30 fps in dalaran also on my gtx 460, with only about 20% gpu utilization. wow has me confused. ive been wondering what my cpu utilization is in dal, but when i minimize wow it stops using the cpu heavily. is there any addon or something that displays CPU utilization?
Click to expand...

I am pretty sure you could probably just open task manager and watch it while running the game in a window. Even easier if you have multiple monitors.
 
WoW is largely CPU/HDD oriented.

Moving from a single hdd to raid 0 made my load times almost non-existent.
Overclocking i7 920 2.66ghz--->3.2ghz resulted in a 5 fps gain in dalaran.
Overclocking i7 920 2.66ghz--->3.8ghz resulted in a 9 fps gain in dalaran.
4870 (med shadows) ---> 5870 (high shadows) resulted in a 5 fps gain, despite the fact that the 5870 is about twice as powerful as a 4870.

Outside of dal I'm locked at 60fps with the exception of 25 man raids which tend to hover around the 50 mark in a boss fight.
 
The WoW engine is frustratingly CPU limited. If you're upgrading for WoW, start there.
 
when I run wow in windowed mode, my gpu goes from 90% + to around 50. also it loses the software overclock.
 
I noticed much better performance with a better CPU and a SSD with WoW folder on it. My load times sped up and everything ran very smooth. CPU speed and quality plays more into it than anything else though. A quality video card helps no question (more so during big player events like BGs and Raids).

Also another thing to keep in mind is if you are running lots of third party interface mods , they are not optimized for performance but for looks and function. Considering that into your list.
 
Godmachine said:
I noticed much better performance with a better CPU and a SSD with WoW folder on it. My load times sped up and everything ran very smooth. CPU speed and quality plays more into it than anything else though. A quality video card helps no question (more so during big player events like BGs and Raids).

Also another thing to keep in mind is if you are running lots of third party interface mods , they are not optimized for performance but for looks and function. Considering that into your list.
Click to expand...

QFT
I spent literally $400 trying to get WoW to run smoothly on my rig by upgrading my CPU and Harddrive. I still kept getting this damn random skipping.
In the end I found out it was a poorly coded UI mod flooding. After disabling it, my game was much better.
 
I've read that all things being equal, ATI cards for whatever reason tend to run WoW a bit better than the Nvidia ones. Like, if the Nvidia card edges out the nearly-equivalent ATI cards in other benchmarks, the ATI squeezes out a bit better performance versus its counterpart in WoW. I can't remember where exactly, but something about the minimum frame rate being a bit less spastic with ATI.

Not terribly useful information, maybe someone else has a link to the runs-slightly-better-with-ATI article I vaguely remember from about a year ago.

I say that as someone who runs a 285 card who's looking to the next gen of ATI 68xx cards this November. Been with Nvidia for multiple generations but looking to switch things up.

Honestly everyone else is correct, WoW relies far more on CPU and HDD speed ... I did a lot of testing when I was overclocking my i7 920 and it definitely responds well to CPU speed bumps.
 
for CPU's, has anyone noticed if wow prefers intel or amd? (or basically which ever one clocks the highest?)

I did have SSD's for a while, but the lack of space made me sell them.
I'm wondering if those new seagate momentus XT hybrid drives will affect the performance as much as SSDs...
 
makmatsu said:
for CPU's, has anyone noticed if wow prefers intel or amd? (or basically which ever one clocks the highest?)
Click to expand...

I don't think there's an inherent preference (like logic or vendor detection) but in my opinion AMD's chips are cheaper to go wide (quad core etc) at lower clock speeds which is not what you want. But if you go with a Phenom II X6, it has a turbo core like Intel which is what you want. WoW is horribly single-threaded. It offloads only a bit (sound and other minor things) to the second core. Two cores hardly gets you anything, four cores gets you absolutely zero (assuming no apps are causing load in the background). So the Phenom II X6 is about $270 from newegg. Not bad and it's a 3.2ghz chip. You really do want to play the dumb mhz wars for WoW.

I did have SSD's for a while, but the lack of space made me sell them.
I'm wondering if those new seagate momentus XT hybrid drives will affect the performance as much as SSDs...
Click to expand...

I run my E8600 at 4.25ghz (dual core intel). Video is 5970. Dal is still slow because of all the hi-res player models running around. All that being said, the biggest gain I saw even when overclocking/underclocking was the load times and minimization of stutter by running WoW off an SSD. WoW is pretty smooth on my box until you have an asset pop in. There'd be an annoying pause followed by a zone pop in or some player flying by. The SSD pretty much kills that and also the load time is really nice when you're switching characters and checking on auctions.

Also what a previous poster said about UI is so true. If you disable (or temporarily remove) all your mods, it's like having a brand new computer. It loads and plays so fast. Because the UI is on the main game thread. :(

All this isn't an issue now if you put some money into your box, you'll play at max settings (or even more with AA tricks) for not a lot of money. But since Cata seems to bump up the assets quite a bit, these optimization and performance threads might become more relevant.

Remember when they introduced shadows in 3.whatever? Suddenly WoW benchmarks were on the web again. I have a feeling that Kittyclysm benchmarks will make front pages of the various tech/gaming sites when it hits. Maybe 4.0.1 is the engine upgrade too?
 
drsproinky, thanks for the feedback

Yea, when I had Q6600, the 4 cores never maxed out with wow, so this time around I was thinking I'd pick up a cheap i3 530 system and clock it to 4.0+ghz and I think that'll actually smooth things out big time.
Along with a Gen.3 intel SSD 160GB if it performs as good as everyone is speculating... but the cost is gonna be real high I bet.

The shadows.. yes, that feature consumes a ton of resources, and I never cared for my shadow changing direction and what not, I've been playing it at minimum since it was introduced.
I don't run too many addons, personal preference of mine is to KISS (xperl, bartender, cooldowns, recount, omen)
I guess there is a new (and MUST have) addon called gear score that everyone and their mom uses to judge a player... fun stuff:rolleyes:
I'm just sad they dont have something like trinketmenu anymore, one of the best trinket mods imo...

I do hope some reviews come in for that 6XXX stuff next week.
 
Revdarian said:
http://www.digitalstormonline.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=8504

It explains how to force proper SLI for WoW for anyone interested.

It also explains how to force multicore processing for WoW (scroll down to a post by Dhevil)

Cheers!


EDIT:
With multicore processing, you will be able to use all your 4 cores, quite useful on certain areas.
Click to expand...

Tight!
Thanks!

EDIT: Darn. Doesn't seem to have made a difference for me. I was getting 30fps in one place, then i used the command and restarted. Still the same.
 
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like i just pmed you, forcing SLI or using the default SLI profile for me i get less than 20 FPS in dalaran at 1920x1200 with max setting and my 23948724927349 addons. but if i force single GPU for wow i get about 35 fps in dalaran right now on my new gtx 470s.

so as far as i am concerned, wow does NOT take advantage of SLI at all, it only decreases your fps when you have SLI turned on.
 
Dark12 said:
Darn. Doesn't seem to have made a difference for me. I was getting 30fps in one place, then i used the command and restarted. Still the same.
Click to expand...

They've made quite a few changes to multi-core support in the last year and I'm pretty sure almost all of those commands are now redundant or no longer supported. You'll notice a lot of those articles are over a year old. We're also a week or so away from another huge batch of changes when the 4.0 patch hits, which is supposed to bring more improvements.

Right now WoW takes advantage of 3 CPU cores by default without any tinkering.

zyzeast said:
so as far as i am concerned, wow does NOT take advantage of SLI at all, it only decreases your fps when you have SLI turned on.
Click to expand...

You're basing that off little more than your own personal experience when the numbers show otherwise. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...est-DirectX-11-graphics-card/Reviews/?page=10

There are countless people who run WoW with SLI and don't have the issue you are describing. On many systems people won't see an increase if you're bottleneck was already your CPU with just one card. The overhead of Crossfire/SLI might actually hurt performance in that situation, but that really has nothing to do with Crossfire/SLI working properly or not. It works fine and you certainly will see an increase in any situation where the GPU becomes the bottleneck. Also not sure why you are putting so much emphasis on your FPS while standing in Dalaran.
 
because it's the only place that can stress my system, if you are saying my 3.6GHz i7 is bottlenecking gtx 470 SLI to 20 fps, then alright ...
 
seagate momentus is not faster than a ordinary harddrive atleast according to the 2 reviews i read.
i run 80gb intel g2 for windows/games and 500gb wd black for storage. ssd really helps the loading times

cpu intel is faster by far but more expensive.

i dont know what gpu is quite though, my 5870 is crazy loud
 
makmatsu said:
drsproinky, thanks for the feedback

Yea, when I had Q6600, the 4 cores never maxed out with wow, so this time around I was thinking I'd pick up a cheap i3 530 system and clock it to 4.0+ghz and I think that'll actually smooth things out big time.
Along with a Gen.3 intel SSD 160GB if it performs as good as everyone is speculating... but the cost is gonna be real high I bet.

The shadows.. yes, that feature consumes a ton of resources, and I never cared for my shadow changing direction and what not, I've been playing it at minimum since it was introduced.
I don't run too many addons, personal preference of mine is to KISS (xperl, bartender, cooldowns, recount, omen)
I guess there is a new (and MUST have) addon called gear score that everyone and their mom uses to judge a player... fun stuff:rolleyes:
I'm just sad they dont have something like trinketmenu anymore, one of the best trinket mods imo...

I do hope some reviews come in for that 6XXX stuff next week.
Click to expand...

Depending on how customized you have x-perl (it gets pretty crazy in that department if you invest the time) it can slow down a chunk your overall fps. Omen is a weird beast , sometimes depending on the release it does quite well , other times it causes a performance hit because its pooling for updates to often from players for threat.

Gearscore is by far the worst mod ever created for WoW and causes huge performance issues in big cities/raids. But because people now feel its "required" and that a simple inspection won't due its something players force on each other now. If you disabled Gearscore I'm sure you could squeeze some performance in because it doesn't have to pool for players within your radius and there collect score total for inspection.

Turn off the shadows completely , don't run them min .. even then they take up resources in any zone with a larger than raid sized group. I didn't run any of those features I went for straight up speed because reaction time in WoW is everything. I was a DK and MT'd also I did a fair amount of arena's. If you really raid and take it seriously enough start dropping the eye candy off when you need to and you can save time , money and possibly make all the difference in intense moments (which considering you are a healer is always).
 
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gearscore is retarded for a number for reasons, the least of which is the negative performance hit.
 
The problem with wow is that you do need to tinker, because all in all sure they have done improvements but they still work properly with dual cores at most.

And the low fps zones it is usually because each character/item is pretty much like 1 rendering thread that first goes through the cpu, so the multi core command just let's the game know that you want it to run "n" extra rendering threads.
 
Wow pvp is about gear and team combos. And not being a dumbass.
 
Revdarian said:
http://www.digitalstormonline.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=8504

It explains how to force proper SLI for WoW for anyone interested.

It also explains how to force multicore processing for WoW (scroll down to a post by Dhevil)

Cheers!


EDIT:
With multicore processing, you will be able to use all your 4 cores, quite useful on certain areas.
Click to expand...


Like multicore support, all the code is working in an up to date install. There is no reason to edit any files anymore.

For the record, SLI works great for lower end systems. I ran BC with 2x 7600gt in SLI. With 1 card I averaged around 30fps medium settings. With 2 I easily ran close to 50-60 medium/high. It was a very noticeable when I turned up view distance. Keep in mind that this was on an X2 +3800. If I tossed another 4870 in my current setup, I doubt I would see any change.


http://www.digitalstormonline.com??
Why would you trust a forum where people use wallpaper as signatures..
 
Well i linked there, but it was also at Elitist Jerks, which i took as an "ok"...

Also the thing that i have seen it actually work... but well, maybe it has been indeed changed in the newest patchs.
 
WoW likes three highly OC'd cores and it's happy, but right now is not the right time to upgrade, wait till Cata comes out and see if more then 3 cores are really used.
 
fattypants said:
The WoW engine is frustratingly CPU limited. If you're upgrading for WoW, start there.
Click to expand...

WoW is only limited on a dual core as far as I have seen. My [email protected] was maxed out a lot the time, my Q9400 goes between 20-70% (Standing in Dalaran right now, it's at 21%). The only thing it maxes out anymore is my GTX285 from the massive AA levels (Flying around Northrend, ~80% GPU core, 793/1024MB VRAM, CPU still ~20-40%) . FPS is always a solid 60 unless in Dalaran, at which time the VRAM will generally be close to 100% used, but nothing else is that high. Darn AA!

If you dont want to run AA at high levels (8-16x, transparency, etc), GTX460. If you want to use high AA settings, 5770 since it has more memory. Without AA, both cards will be around the same :)
 
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