Shadows of the Lich King
Shadow Performance Outland benchmark figures are from this location - all graphical sliders at maximum, LOD off, vsync off, at 1600x1200. YouGamers did a quick benchmark session with the Wrath of the Lich King beta build 3.0.1.8714 with some common gaming video cards. We also re-tested some of these configurations with the latest build currently available (3.0.2.8885) to confirm that the results are still valid. Benchmarking was perfromed by standing in the same location at Shattrath City and Warsong Hold while switching between different shadow levels. The results illustrate the performance hit that the new shadows bring, but it should be noted that these framerates not by any means extreme figures. For example, GeForce GTX 280 can push to well over 100fps even with level 4 shadows in many specific places, yet it can dip to sub-30fps momentarily in busy places when you are rapidly panning and a lot of objects with complex shadows enter your field of view. So consider these to be typical figures where your framerate would mostly hover while soloing and expect the framerate to fluctuate within 10fps of these figures most of the time. Northrend areas look better as the terrain, buildings etc. are slightly more complex and have slightly better textures. On the flipside, you pay for it with a slight performance hit when compared to Outland areas. Still, if your system can manage a busy view of Shattrath with dozens of players in front of you, it can handle Northrend - at least without the shadows.
Wrath of the Lich King Beta - Shadow Performance
Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB RAM, Windows Vista 64-bit, using WOTLK beta build 3.0.1.8714 extShadowQuality 4 - the pratical maximum - highlighted
The result are pretty clear - anything short of something like ATI Radeon HD 3850 won't be able to run the new shadows at the current practical maximum (extShadowQuality 4) as the framerate dips to sub-30fps. Thankfully these cards are reasonably priced these days, and any high end card can comfortably push the load at level 4 while being mostly limited by the CPU.  On the other hand, a mid-range card from couple of years ago (GeForce 7600 GT) is a whole another story. It can handle things fine with the old mixture of pre-calculated terrain shadows and simple blob shadows for characters, but as soon as the dynamic character shadows are enabled, framerate crashes to around 20fps, and it keeps going down as the shadows are bumped up. In fact, Wrath of the Lich King might end up selling quite a few new video cards. If you are looking for a new one to enjoy the new shadows, anything short of GeForce 9600 GT or Radeon HD 3870 is probably not a good idea - both are widely available at sub-$140 (sub-€100) prices and will move the new shadows just fine. If you play at ultra-high resolutions (1920x1200 and up), then consider something a bit more beefier - Radeon HD 4870, GeForce 9800GTX+ or one of the GTX260/280 series cards. Also if your CPU is getting old, just upgrading the video card might not give you everything as the CPU performance is ever-important for the engine used in World of Warcraft. While Wrath of the Lich King with the new shadows actually puts some stress on the high end video cards, ultimately things are often held back by the CPU. As you can see from the benchmarks, the framerate is the same on the top cards regardless of the shadow setting (up to level 4), indicating that the Core 2 Quad 2.66Ghz CPU is the bottleneck! To compare different cards to the Radeon HD 3850 that we found to be the practical minimum, you can use the Futuremark ORB as a nice guide - the videocard list sorts out all the modern (DX10) cards - including many laptop chips - and their 3DMark Vantage scores. Anything scoring under 3000 points in this list (HD3850 scores 3066) probably won't be able to use the new shadows in Wrath of the Lich King beyond extShadowQuality 1 level (character shadows only).
UPDATE, 6th September: Latest beta build, 3.0.2.8905, has changed and improved the different shadow levels, so the benchmark figures should be taken only for comparing relative performance. A quick re-test indicates that the new build has increased the framerate on shadow levels 4, 5 and 6 noticeably. Regardless, the conclusions presented are still valid - you just get a bit better performance at high visual settings.
SLI/Crossfire? Mac?It should also be noted that no reasonably priced system today can run the level 5 shadows at a high resolution with playable framerates. A very fast CPU with a Multi-GPU setup might fit the bill, but our SLI/Crossfire testing was aborted when we noticed that the dynamic shadows exhibited major flickering on multi-GPU configurations - and there was no meaningful performance increase. We'll return to multi-card testing later for the full review of Wrath of the Lich King to see if the engine has been fixed in this regard. Performance on the Mac platform is still a question mark, as the OpenGL version of the engine currently doesn't support the shadows properly. Again, development is still ongoing, and I'm sure the plan is to have the shadows also on the Mac by the time the expansion launches. I doubt the performance figures change much, so any Mac user hoping to enjoy the new shadows should have a Mac Pro with a serious videocard, and that's a very tiny target audience and probably explains why the OpenGL renderer has been a lower priority at this point.
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