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.
- Welcome To The World...Of Warcraft: Cataclysm
- Test Hardware And Setup
- AMD: High-End Cards At Ultra Quality
- AMD: Mainstream Cards At Good Quality
- Nvidia: High-End Cards At Ultra Quality
- Nvidia: Mainstream Cards At Good Quality
- DirectX 9 Versus DirectX 11
- AMD And Nvidia: Anti-Aliasing Performance
- CPU Scaling: Intel
- CPU Scaling: AMD
- Patch Notes: 4.0.1
- Detail Presets: Five Options From Which To Choose
- Textures: Texture Resolution
- Textures: Projected Textures
- Environment: View Distance
- Environment: Environment Detail
- Environment: Ground Clutter
- Effects: Shadow Quality
- Effects: Liquid Detail
- Effects: Sunshafts
- Effects: Particle Density
- Performance Conclusions

1. Chris is a closet WoW-player
2. Really bored
With that said, i really do hope to see more of these articles, albeit with a more demanding title on the bench, even if it's from a "lesser" developer/publisher combo.
PS: I do hope ppl appreciate my sense of humor
i7 Qudcore with Ht- 85
Any Quadcore chips with no HT - 15
i5 Quadcore which does not have HT as far as I know - 15
i5 Dualcore with HT- 5
Dualcore with HT- 5
Dualcore without HT - 5
AMD tricore - 7
There used to be a blue post explaining the settings and how to calculate it for different cores. But the old forums got wiped.
1. Chris is a closet WoW-player
2. Really bored
With that said, i really do hope to see more of these articles, albeit with a more demanding title on the bench, even if it's from a "lesser" developer/publisher combo.
PS: I do hope ppl appreciate my sense of humor
And why only Corei CPUs? Where are all the Core2s? 75% of Intel users still use Core2s and 775s!
It's a little easier to talk about WoW since I've been playing it for way too long, but I definitely want to see us doing more comprehensive coverage of demanding titles on launch day. It's all a matter of trying to convince the software guys to give a hardware site early access to the game. That's the hard part
It's worth noting, however, that Nvidia told me SLI support required hardware cursor to be enabled. It didn't seem to make a difference in getting SLI working, though. According to the company, it filed a bug report after I submitted my initial testing results a couple of weeks back and they confirmed SLI wasn't scaling.
I wonder if you have any info on another general statement that may not apply to WoW . . . that more than 4GB of memory doesn't help games. The three WoW PCs that I run have too many differences to prove the point, but I get inexplicable relative frame rates on an 8GB 64-bit Windows 7 machine with a 5750 compared to a 4GB 32-bit WinXP machine with a 5870. While this could be due to different Intel cpus, mobos, chipsets, etc, I keep thinking getting the OS, Ventrilo, various Logitech and Zboard drivers, Norton, etc out of WoW's address space allows WoW to run as freely as possible. Any thoughts?
The number is calculated with binary addition, you can specify which cores you want WoW to use by setting the affinity mask to the binary number that represents the cores used:
core0 - 1 (2^0)
core1 - 2 (2^1)
core2 - 4 (2^2)
core3 - 8 (2^3)
core4 - 16 (2^4)
core5 - 32 (2^5)
Add these numbers up to get the affinity mask that suits the processor:
Dual core - 3 (11)
Tri core - 7 (111)
Quad core - 15 (1111)
Hexa core - 63 (111111)
Using binary numbers as boolean values for each core (right to left) will convert into the affinity mask needed to use those cores.
Add it.
This game is massive and has been for years and yet every new CPU, RAM, HDD and GFX review completely ignores it (I do understand that it's hard to benchmark WOW but still something could of been worked out) it's about time Tom's works out some way to do benchmarks with it and include it.