Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft
World of Warcraft isn’t a particularly demanding game, but with over 10 million players, it might be the most relevant.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the apples-to-apples comparison we were hoping for. AMD’s cards cannot run at 5760x1080 in DirectX 11 mode—a surprising misstep given this title’s popularity. As such we’re forced to use DirectX 9 rendering.
Additionally, Nvidia’s GeForce cards don’t support transparent anti-aliasing in DirectX 9 mode, necessitating those numbers be run using an incomparable code path. If it’s not one thing…
With that in mind, let’s see how AMD’s new card performs with 8x MSAA:
The frame rates are incredibly high, and performance never drops below 30 FPS. How about with 8x transparency anti-aliasing, enabled through each vendor’s driver interface?
While transparency anti-aliasing slows things down at 1080p, all of the cards maintain smooth performance. The same can’t be said of our findings at 5760x1080, though. In this case, only the dual-GPU solutions are viable, and even the Radeon HD 6990 struggles with its minimum frame rates. Enabling 8x transparency AA is probably an unreasonable setting, though all of these cards would probably have performed smoothly at 4x.