- Posted on Thursday, January 18, 2006.
World of Warcraft wasn't a performance monster when Blizzard first released the game in late 2004. Players with modest and even mediocre systems could all get passable frame rates in Azeroth. Blizzard has stated that World of Warcraft will eventually get graphical improvements to keep the game up to date, but those changes aren't coming in the game's first expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. With 8 million subscribers and growing, you don't need to push out advanced graphics and raise hardware requirements just yet.
We revisited World of Warcraft in this new hardware performance guide since many of you will be returning to the game for the opening of the dark portal, or using the expansion as an excuse to upgrade your PC systems. Several generations of video cards have passed since World of Warcraft's initial release. The GeForce 6 series has long been replaced by the GeForce 7 series, and the 8 series is already here. Entry-level video cards have improved in the past two years. The industry's rapid pace of innovation means that you can buy a lot more processing power today for the same amount of money. The game doesn't require the best hardware to run well, but you will get better performance from the latest technology.
It's difficult to create a reproducible benchmark in an MMO with a persistent world. You could spawn your own dungeon instance or find an empty spot hidden away from player traffic, but we wanted to include that foot traffic since it's a major part of the gameplay experience. We decided to use the first 60 seconds of the gryphon flight from The Stair of Destiny to Honor Hold in the Hellfire Peninsula as our benchmark. It's the first flight path you encounter in the new Outland area, and the path is the same every time you take it. One significant variable out of our control is the number of players and monsters we fly over on the path. Frame rates varied at the low-resolution settings but became fairly stable at higher resolution levels such as 1600x1200 and 2048x1536.
Game Settings
You can easily run the game with all the settings enabled on most midrange hardware, but you can disable a few settings to get more performance from less powerful systems.
Graphics
Upgrading your video card will get you higher frame rates and higher resolutions, but you can still get decent performance out of older hardware. We tested the Burning Crusade on 14 different video cards.
CPU
The Burning Legion is very CPU friendly. You'll be able to play just fine on a two- or three-year-old CPU, but getting a better processor can still improve your frame rates.
Memory
World of Warcraft still loves memory. If you're only going to get one upgrade for Burning Crusade, make it an extra 1GB of RAM.
Next: Settings >>
260 Comments
Go back to XP, thats a suggestion. @Geon106 that is laughable. Do a bit of homework next time instead of thinking all hardware is ahead of time because of the year. That and laptops suck for gaming.
yea am i have vista ultimate and am just wondering if it will work for this game? any suggestings
Someone asked if they could play on Vista, yes, i beleive Blizzard released a patch for Vista. I wish GS had tested on older hardware, because i play on my laptop which is the following spec:
AMD Sempron 2800+
NVIDIA GeforceFX Go5200 64MB RAM
512MB DDR RAM
I got it in 2004 so I thought it would play WoW at relativly good graphics, but i have everything on low and a low resolution and it still runs fairly slow.
CPU has almost not pull in this game if you're just a moderate gamer
(Noob question)I got AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ do you guys think its a good performance????
This was a good article. My graphics card will run 90fps at 1600 x 1200. But Gamespot really needs to include more hardware. Like older processors and graphics cards. People still use them and want to know how will they will work with newer games.
is this game nvidia fav cause a 7900GS gets high frames then a 1950pro and i saw alot that the 1950 pro was a bit faster then the 7900GS
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as always, you guys did not include older processors that people are still using.
lolgubbe ... Your, and I quote "intel core 2 duo 1.9 ghz so total 3.8 ghz" is where you sorely mistaken. It looks like you have the E6300 core 2 duo, a good chip but it's a basic C2D chip, nothing fancy. You have 2 cores capable of factory default clock speeds of 1.9GHz each. Perhaps you could apply for a job in Intel's marketing department because even they don't make the mistake of advertising an E6300 as a 3.8GHz chip. Thanks for the entertainment though - it passed the time away whilst waiting for the Supreme Commander demo to be released.
To be honest, I'll really pay attention to extra clouds while fighting, yeah.
or take a close look at ground or water and try to satisfy myself with some glow and tell everybody about it.
after all it's a cartoonish game, super high quality is still a cartoonish game, it's designated as so.
I was goin through all the messages some wankers have written and that lolgubbe is abit of a tossa my computer has
duel core- 400 overclocked x6800
17000 8800gtxs 400 tb harddrive
16000000 millions watts of power
2222220 gb ram
it all water cooled by a fire hydrant outside
you bunch of tossas
I got nothing to say, im happy about my pc, thank you gamespot for the article though would've liked to see how a 2 7600GT's would lol,
Yeah I really need the extra memory, oh well, hopefully this week.
There is talk about using old-spec'd PC's and having WoW run fine in most areas. This is true (in most areas), as long as you have 1G+ RAM, but start 40-man raiding in high level instances, and watch your framerate DROP... hehe 
asus en7900 gs TOP? Really nice card, cheap and fast, yet the 7950 GT is about the same price and a little faster
im getting a new graphics card, the ASUS EN7900GS, its a cheap overclock of the original 7900GS and i have been hearing very good things about it
first off, i'm sorry if my rant about a somewhat useless and non-enlightening hardware guide started all this - though i hope it didn't...
now, here's something all can laugh about.
and i do mean ALL of you, even those claiming to "run a pretty old PC"
my current pc-setup:
amd athlon(tm) processor, 1.40 Ghz(no, not a 2800+ type, the prior model)
some asus motherboard from the same era(what, 4-6 years ago?)
768 mb pc2100 ddr(?) ram(been so long since i checked, i can't even remember)
creative radeon 9600
had a minor hdd malfunction the other day, so i'm now down to an 80G WD caviar ide(possibly eide) at 7200 rpm(not that this makes any difference for wow)
here's the thing, as long as i do my part and stop downloads or other bandwith busters, the game runs just fine in most areas
oh, btw - i'm on a 19" lcd, with max res at a whopping 1200X1086 (up from a 15", so i'm happy 
)
have fun playing whatever you play
oh, lolgubbe: please contact me in your own language - i suspect we either share native language or possibly live in neigbor( never quite sure how that word's spelled - sorry if i've gotten it wrong though) countries...
for the next months i'll be buying parts though, got to get a system that's a bit more up to date 
World of Warcrafts Graphics engine is sorrowfully out-dated. Its got beautiful art, but, honestly, this stuff is like DirectX 8 and early DirectX 9 stuff. Does it need an upgrade? Not yet. They'd lose a lot of players. The only reason it can hit your computer hard, if at all, is because of the persistence. The game is like one big load time. Its not a bad thing, I hate seeing bars go across my screen detracts from the fun overall. But what it has to load off into the distance isn't just what you see, its the whole game. So, think of increasing View Distance as possibly increasing your load time. Whoa, and I never really thought people would still be not getting the whole Hyper-Threading, Multi-Core Processing deal. You don't freaking multiply your clock speed guys. I mean, come on. If you don't know what you're talking about, you shut up, you learn it, and learn it well, and then you use it to add to something. Right now, you're really just taking away from all intelligence abound. D-Ko, your PC is pretty sweet. Its definetly about 2 Generations old though. Not 2 years, two generations.
I'm playing on a pretty old PC
Intel Pentium 4 3.2Ghz
1.5GB of RAM with Geforce 6600 GT
With all settings on high
With the highest resolution (1280X1024)
And I play just fine, no lag, no freeze time, and slow graphic environments.
OMG GUBEE LISTEN TO WHAT EVERYONE IS SAYING U DONT DOUBLE THE DAMN CLOCK SPEED!
Just casue there are two cores doesn't mean double the clock...two cores at one clock, though the clocks are separate, they work dependently, the second core is really to help the other core control and disperse information to other parts of the mother board. Does not mean that the core clock is doubled since if one core goes down, the processor starts to fail. Where is this doesn't work the same way if you have two separate processors, where one can take the work load incase the otehr falls.
e6300 is clocked at 1.8 or so, not 3.7 or 3.8...adn intel is not coming out with processors with that high of clock speed...the fastest clock they have is something like 3.2 or 3.5 on a high end pentium from a few years ago...
its not gubbes complete noobishness that annoys me, its his ignorance and unrelenting fact that he listens to no one on this thread and continues to make a fool of himself
i will have probaly about 80fps on Maximum and 1024x768
AMD64 3800+ 2.4GHz
1GB Corsair (2x 512MB)
Nvida 7900GT (256MB)
250GB Seagate (7200)
Windows XP Live!
i havent play the game as of yet ! ! but there is no doubting the power of making new enemies in the new reality world ! ! !
mua ha ha ha ha !
I actually don't have WOW. I might get it later on but right now I'm just killing time until the Mod of the Year 2006 countdown ends over at Moddb. (http://moddb.com/) Enjoy!
Thanks all for the lengthy responses. And yes, I already did know much of it. I was just saying that maybe lolgubbe ( the idiot he is) was running FEAR on a 1028 x 768 because that is the max resolution for his monitor with settings on full and not experiencing any lag at all. While everyone else has been running it on 1280x1024 or higher with settings on max and experiencing a bit of lag. I know what a monitor is but what I'm saying is resolution has an effect on graphics performance. I'm just saying that maybe lolgubbe is an idiot who should go get a better monitor. These kinds of misunderstandings happen all the time. How do we know we're all running pc's with the same resolutions? No answer needed.
actually intel is starting to get 3.8ghz processors. they only cost the consumer aver a grand or so. but 3.7 is iffy.
Does it really make the world a better place when everybody is constantly taking the pis out of everyone else just so they can feel better? Give people like lolgubble a break.
Any opinion that experiencing the real world makes you any better of a person is completely wrong. The way one person finds entertainment is different than the way another person finds entertainment. Some people find entertainment playing sport. Other people find entertainment experiencing the artistic works that real-world people create.
It is only when any kind of entertainment comes at the expense of the real world that there is a problem with that kind of entertainment. There is no problem with enjoying computers and gaming if you don't make it your entire life. However, if you are able to earn a decent living while gaming, and still enjoy real-world relationships, there is no problem.
As I said, it's just an *opinion*. Enjoying the real world over the virtual worlds created by real, talented, artistic people, is just an *opinion* of what is enjoyable.
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jeffrey123,
In response to your question, the size or type of monitor you're using does not make any performance difference whatsoever. A monitor simply displays the information given it. It is an output device, not a data-processing device.
Having said that, the type and size of monitor you have will determine what range of resolutions you can output into your monitor, and the resolution you choose to display into your monitor will have an effect on the performance of your graphics processing capability. So if you play at a resolution of 800x600, it should (but not necessarily) be faster than 1024x768, which should be faster than 1280x1024, etc, etc... But playing the same resolution on a different monitor will have no impact on performance, regardless on physical size or type of monitor. So running 1280x1024 on a 19inch monitor will have the same performance as 1280x1024 on a 17in monitor. However the 19in monitor will (not necessarily, and depending on opinion) look better because everything is bigger at the same resolution, thus easier to see the finer details of the graphical quality.
You may already know all this, but I thought I'd clarify just in case you had any misconceptions.
Now on the subject of lolgubble, it is true that this character is a nub, primarily because he/she thinks he has a top end computer when the specs he labels fall far short of the best gear out there. Also, a dual core CPU does not ever mean that you can multiply the clock speed by two to determine total clock speed. 1900MHz on two CPU cores, does NOT mean you are running a 3.8GHz CPU. It means you can run two processes simultaneously, each at a speed of 1.9GHz. Besides the fact that, the clock speeds we are using today make very little difference in overall system performance. Our CPU speeds today are so much faster than the other components such as FSB, cache, RAM and hard-drives, that these are actually the larger performance bottlenecks in our PC's. And, it is possible to make a 2.4GHz CPU that runs as fast as a 3.5GHz CPU (compare AMD to Intel for instance, and you'll see AMD regularly squeeze more performance than Intel in their CPU's, using a slower clock rate). A few hundred MHz difference in CPU speed (on a same architecture chip), equates to maybe a few percent performance difference in most cases, whereas doubling your RAM or FSB speed (or RAM or cache size), can have 30-40 percent performance increase. Likewise, halving the cache size on a CPU (to create a "budget" chip) will often mean almost halving the CPU performance, even though the clock speed is exactly the same. Lolgubble doesn't seem to understand this.
Having said that, his computer is actually pretty good, and he should be allowed to feel okay in being proud of his relatively new computer, since not every dull-brain out there wants to spend double or triple the money to obtain 10-20% performance increase. And as he says, he could play most games at top settings. However his graphics card is now a little out-dated for the latest GPU intensive games such as F.E.A.R.
Hope that helps.
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lol i cant even install the game my computer's so crappy! 382 megs of ram, 1.3ghz processor and only 40gb of hard drive space! im a simple 128 megs of ram short (roughly $30) and none of those settings will allow me to install it, but i follow those for WoW anyway and i got a significant increase in speed!
Man my comp is only a year or a year and a half old, but man, the graphics card is SO outdated! I only got a Ati Radeon X300. I gotta question though: can it still run WoW (it doesn't say SE at the back) im only a N00b w/ computers so sorry.
jeffrey123
Yeah different monitors have different resolutions, but it all depends on the quality. if you have a nice 17" it probably can go up to 12x10, where as a crappy 22" will only go up to 12x10, so it wouldn't make too much a diffeence if you have the same resolution.
It's hilarious to read all the posts about what is high-end and what isn't. From what I can see, lolgubbe sounds like either a really big noob or a fool who can't spell. Anyway, I'm not here to jump into the argument, I was just wondering what monitor sizes everyone is using and if it would have an effect on graphics performance. For example, say lolgubbe is using a 17" monitor, then I wouldn't be surprised that he could run FEAR or anything else on full resolutions and everything on max. Say someone like TheSystemLord1, is running FEAR with a 22" monitor on max resolution and everything on max, I wouldn't be completely surprised that he gets a bit of lag. What I'm saying is don't different monitor sizes have different max resolutions? And wouldn't there be different performance ratings? Forgive me if I missed it somewhere but I haven't seen lolgubbe post anything about the type of monitor he's using.
P.S. lolgubbe your pc is nowhere near one of the world's best computers. You make me laugh.
lolgubbe you are awesome your ignorance has ammused me again although i think the novelty will wear off soon. You sound like you are 13 years old and you bought your computer from future shop( or circuit city in the states). Which to me is like buying noname groceries or shopping at walmart for a plasma tv. oh ya here is my system by the way because that is what the thread is supposed to be about
Processor: amd 2x2.0Ghz dual core (i am running linux and 64bit windows on my system)
Ram: 2x1GB
HDD: 1-320 gig one for windows and 1-250 gig one for linux
Vid card: the EVGA Geforce 7600GT (256mb) for some reason i just prefer nvidia to ati
Monitor: 19inch widescreen LCD
I built my computer myself (well put the parts together which is so much easier now then 8 years ago)
WoW looks amazing on it too bad my main is only a 27 orc warrior so I haven't been able to experience most of what WoW has to offer.
P.S. lolgubbe nah its not worth it
i have as i said intel core 2 duo rated @ 3.7 ghz 1 gb ram, nvidia geforce 7600 so u dont have a pc that is better than mine (if u meant that u thinked that your pc beat my pc) because i have a better graphic card, and more ghz u have just more ram but 1 gb ram is fine and enough
