Any benchmarks/FPS tests for MMORPGs?

How come there aren't any Frame per Second tests for MMORPGs or RTS games? Seems like all the sites forget that First Person Shooters only represent a portion of all the games.

With World of Warcraft and many other MMORPGs claiming several millions subscribers and hundreds of thousands concurrently online, I would think it would be useful if someone did some graphics test on them.

For example, will a nvidia 7600gt run WOW at full graphics setting at 1280 resolution without noticable slowdown???

Well, MMORPGs don't really lend themselves to benchmarking for a few reasons...

First of all, most of them are not video card limited at all. WoW for instance, is one of the easiest games on a videocard. A 7900 GT at high resolutions is overkill for WoW.

There are some MMORPGs harder on the videocard, like Galaxies or EQ2, and some better graphics are coming, but in general developers will make system requirements as low as possible compared to, say, first person shooters because it's subscription based and they don't want to limit their market.


Secondly, MMORPG framerates are more limited by your internet connection bandwidth and how busy your server is... which is why it's difficult to benchmark. You could bench it twice a day with the same hardware and get different framerates because more or less people are on the server at those times.

If it's not a consistant, repeatable result, then it doesn't really lend itself to benchmarking.

Hope that answers your question.