World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide

Test Hardware And Setup

All of the graphics cards used in this piece are set to their reference clock rates for the sake of keeping things as even as possible. The only notable specs that vary come from Sapphire's Radeon HD 4670 with GDDR4 memory (most models actually included GDDR3) and Asus' GeForce 8500 GT, which comes overclocked from the factory. With that said, the performance numbers of that card are low enough that we left the higher clock rates in place.

Our benchmark sequence will likely become the topic for debate in the comments section, so I'll address it in as much depth as possible here. Testing in WoW is tricky business. The environments that put most stress on your system are generally going to be busy cities and hectic raids. Neither of these makes for a repeatable benchmark (you try talking nine or 24 other guys into running through and then wiping on the same fight sequence one hundred and some odd times for the sake of a performance evaluation).

So, I went for the next best thing--a point-to-point flight path in Twilight Highlands, one of the new zones opened up in Eastern Kingdoms. After manually watching the frame rate counter and flying over most of the old world content, I'm pretty confident that this is "as good as it gets" for repeatable testing. Just keep in mind that you are likely to see frame rates drop when you get into gnarly raid encounters or when you cram into a city packed with toons ready for a Cataclysm leveling race.

And don't laugh at my UI. The focus is on benchmarking here. I literally transferred my toon over to Echo Isles and started testing.