What would I need to max out World of Warcraft at 1920x1200 ?

Well, a i7 at 3.6GHz w/o HT, and a video card like a GTX275 and higher should do it without lag. But I'd say this is probably the minimum, if not, an engine limitation due to its age.
 
My I7 at 3.65 and 5850 can't keep it over 60fps min at all times. I'm usually around 90 on max, but it dips down into the high 40's with some chop when rendering huge view distances. I don't think there's any way around that.
 
#1 priority should be your CPU. WoW loves a good CPU and will always continue to benefit from a faster CPU. For example, I recently upgraded from a Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz to a Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz and the difference was noticeable.

#2 is your Hard Drive. WoW does not hold back when it comes to loading textures. If you run into a zone with a bunch of people, you will be loading all of their textures at the exact same time. That is one of the reasons for people's poor performance in places like Dalaran. This is also why World of Warcraft has traditionally been one of the few games that actually ran better on Workstation/Server drives than consumer drives even including the Raptor. With SSD's available now, there couldn't be a better match. WoW LOVES an SSD. I'd even go as far as to say that unless you are running a really slow CPU currently, getting an SSD would be the single biggest enhancement to gameplay. No stuttering as too many textures attempt to load, and even things like getting back into an instance lightning fast after you DC make the game much more enjoyable.

#3 is your RAM. You need to keep in mind that WoW is a 32-bit program and is NOT Large Address Aware, meaning that it will NEVER use more than 2GB of ram. If it tries, it will simply crash (this is actually a problem many people have when they run at max settings). With that in mind, you are going to want the fastest ram possible but not necessarily a large amount of it. If you had a choice, for example, between 6GB of fast DDR3 vs. 12gb of slower DDR3, you would absolutely want to pick the 6GB.

#4 is your Videocard. WoW is pretty lenient when it comes to videocards but at the same time also scales amazingly well with a good one. It does not "support" Crossfire or SLI but works with both technologies anyway. You will want to make sure your videocard has enough ram so that you aren't bottlenecked at your native res with your desired level of AA. I recently upgraded from 4850's in Crossfire to a 4870x2, and noticed a difference, but I believe that was mainly due to my 4850's only having 512mb RAM and I was paying the price for that at 1920x1200 w/ 12X CFAA. Having a good videocard DOES come in handy when the shit is hitting the fan in places like ToGC25.
 
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Be weary young one. Whatever you do, DONT VISIT YOUTUBE AND START SEARCHING FOR WOW AND EYEFINITY. You'll start drooling, then thinking, then deciding and before you know it you'll have purchased a 5870, or two or a 5970 + some extra monitors :D

That being said, I was getting pretty decent framerates at 1920x1200x2aa /w all details on very high with a 8800 GTS OC 640MB a while back. However, there is a an ultra high quality settings now with wotlk eh? I forgot the exact 'wow options terminology' for the new graphics detail setting, but, I was running second to highest with smooth frame rates 40+. So you don't really need that powerful of a video card and at the time my cpu was only an E6600.

If you want the Ultra High settings /w a constant 60 fps and 16xaa + 4xaa or greater, I'd say you looking at a 5870 or nVidia equivilent minimum. I've found wow to be a pretty smooth game though even at 40+ fps.
 
WBurchnall said:
Be weary young one. Whatever you do, DONT VISIT YOUTUBE AND START SEARCHING FOR WOW AND EYEFINITY. You'll start drooling, then thinking, then deciding and before you know it you'll have purchased a 5870, or two or a 5970 + some extra monitors :D

That being said, I was getting pretty decent framerates at 1920x1200x2aa /w all details on very high with a 8800 GTS OC 640MB a while back. However, there is a an ultra high quality settings now with wotlk eh? I forgot the exact 'wow options terminology' for the new graphics detail setting, but, I was running second to highest with smooth frame rates 40+. So you don't really need that powerful of a video card and at the time my cpu was only an E6600.

If you want the Ultra High settings /w a constant 60 fps and 16xaa + 4xaa or greater, I'd say you looking at a 5870 or nVidia equivilent minimum. I've found wow to be a pretty smooth game though even at 40+ fps.
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No serious wow player would play with a multi-monitor setup, the display borders would cut the screen to much and break up what you can see.

That said, a small (20-40gb just for WoW) SSD, 2GB of fast RAM, best processor you can buy, and anything above a GX275 can probably max out at 1920x1080 np with no drops unless the engine itself lags.
 
x3sphere said:
Interesting that the 5970 gets better min FPS across the board. I thought WoW did not use CrossFire.
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It definitely does. The 4870x2 and 5870 are dead even which is how they are in most benchmarks, so scaling is pretty good.
 
x3sphere said:
Interesting that the 5970 gets better min FPS across the board. I thought WoW did not use CrossFire.
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there is no developer support required to utilize an SMP technology, it relies entirely on the hardware vendor's drivers (be it nVidia or AMD)

really surprised to actually see WoW performing worse than FO3 and L4D on modern hardware (never played the game, but have seen it, was my understanding that its a DX8 game, guessing they've made some updates over the years)

based on those benches, to the OP, I'm guessing your minimum 60 FPS wouldn't be possible, although consistently high performance shouldn't be a problem (I'm guessing you want 60 FPS for vSync?), given that the 5970 isn't hitting 60 FPS minimum @ 1680x1050, and scaling is generally a game of diminishing returns, 60 FPS min @ 1920x1200 maxed isn't gonna come cheap

BitBoys Oy:
HA!
takes me back :eek:
 
@Supertag: 60fps where?

I upgraded from a Q6600 @ 3.6 3870x2 to the system in my sig in stages. Swapping the 3870x2 to the 5870 gained me about 10fps in Dal (I pick a spot in Dal as my benchmark on a busy night).

Upgrading to the i7 gained me another 20fps or so. Upgrading to the X25-M's only help when running around Dal. I don't get a severe loss of fps when all the textures from 100 players are loading, more just a tiny stutter for a second or two, fps still drops, but the game play is noticeably better.

This is all at 1680x1050, standing still in Dal I get from 50-65fps. Just out of curiosity I hooked my PC up to my TV and ran at 1920x1080 and there was a loss of about 3-5fps standing in the same spot. (Which seems to be in line with the benchmarks linked).

There is an increase in fps while raiding, but I don't remember what my fps was before I upgraded. For the most part, if I ignored the fps meter I probably wouldn't know that it was dropping.

What fps are you getting now with what hardware?
 
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