Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft (DX9)
Platform potential seems to make a ton of difference in WoW. I ran my GeForce GTX 560 Ti review using an overclocked Sandy Bridge-based configuration, and that system demonstrated all kinds of separation between cards. Here, however, a Gulftown-based build running at the same 4 GHz suggests there’s a ton of congestion.
The Nvidia cards are least-constrained by processor performance, and they consistently best all of AMD’s cards. This is exactly consistent with what we saw in World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide.
When it comes time to turn on anti-aliasing, though, the Radeon HD 6990s take the smallest performance hit. Even still, you can run Cataclysm at 2560x1600 with 8x MSAA on a Radeon HD 6950 and still average more than 60 frames per second. There’s really no reason to buy such a high-end card for this fairly mid-range title.
Incidentally, World of Warcraft is the other game where AMD’s beta driver exhibits a flickering/shimmering menu screen at 1680x1050.
