New graphics cards appear on the market every few months, and every time a new piece of hardware is announced, dozens of hardware sites run their battery of tests on the new card, comparing it to the competition. But what if your gaming diet isn't all Crysis, CoD4 or Half-Life 2? What about... World of Warcraft?
I use Windows XP / Vista in a dual boot scenario with a single 7800GTX, and XP gives me nearly twice the framerate that XP gives. Vista may be faster with other setups but I'm just posting my experience.
The story didn't mention it, but I did also test 8800 series on the XP. The difference between XP and Vista in this case was almost unmeasurable.. 3-4 fps or so. However, I threw the XP results out as HD3870X2 could not give me a comparable result due to driver issues.
In the case of WoW, Vista/XP doesn't matter, at least on NVIDIA. Not sure if ATI could give better performance on XP - but on Cat 8.3 the 3870X2 never used two GPUs on XP with WoW.
I am running the NVIDIA GeForce8800GTX 768MB on the following system spec using Windows Vista Ultimate and I get comparable numbers to his test. I have actually run Kara at 120fps. Now I have to admit, I installed and uninstalled Vista 3 times since release and reverted back to XP twice. Drivers have become more stable and SP1 helped immensly. My Vista Experience Index is now 5.6.
Choosing a Card for World of Warcraft
Linear Mode
