Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm
After my World of Warcraft: Cataclysm performance story, I started getting more feedback on including World of Warcraft in our regular graphics card reviews, so here it is. Also, I wanted to do some follow-up work on multi-card scaling, since that wasn’t working as intended when the game launched. I’ll go into more depth on that in the following page.
As far as standard single-card performance goes, the results here align pretty closely with what we saw in that prior Cataclysm-oriented piece. The difference is that we’re running the game as it ships—in DirectX 9 mode (rather than with the experimental DX11 code path, which improves performance further). As in that piece, though, Nvidia’s cards do really well—the GeForce GTX 570 and 560 Ti take the top two spots across the board.
AMD’s Radeon HD 6950 trades blows with the GeForce GTX 470 in third place, and the rest of the field falls in below those two cards. It’s worth noting that if you’re rocking a Radeon HD 5870, it climbs to fourth-place at 2560x1600, just under the Radeon HD 6950. Again, the value of Cypress is still very apparent.
I went ahead and added Radeon HD 4870 X2 numbers here as well, for anyone with an older DirectX 10-class board. As you can see, the old flagship is still capable of running with the big boys, even at 2560x1600 at Ultra quality. And—oh, I guess that gives away the big news about multi-card scaling, doesn’t it? At any rate, the 4870 X2 does have a bit of a problem at Ultra quality using AMD’s latest beta driver…
