By: Jarno Kokko Mar 20, 2008

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?

First of all, yes, World of Warcraft is considered to be a very much CPU limited game, so the conventional wisdom is that "the video card does not matter", and to a degree, that is true. But I want to play it at a high resolution, with 1600x1200 or 1920x1200, with 16xAF. At those settings, when a raid full of people open up on some fat boss, the video card does matter. With high end cards getting cheaper every day, which card would my Troll pick?

Reason for the test: Self-interest

I actually ran into this question myself. My old home system with a rusty Athlon64 X2 4600+ and a Radeon X1900XT is rapidly getting old. When flying around the Shattrath city in the evening, with dozens of players around, the framerate can dip down to around 20-30fps, and that just doesn't cut it for me. I know I need a faster CPU, but I also play other games, so I wanted to go for a high end card - but it also had to be the best card for World of Warcraft.

As my time and available hardware was limited, I narrowed my field to  GeForce 8800GTS 640MB,  GeForce 8800GTX 768MB and  Radeon HD 3870X2 1GB. Numerous articles all over the web told me how these cards match up in popular first person shooters, but nobody could tell me which one was best at the weekly farming expedition to Illidan for some Warglaives - so I found out, and wrote this small article.

Unfortunately I didn't have a G92-core  GeForce 8800GTS 512MB on hand, but I expect it to perform very close to the GTX. I also didn't have the time nor the hardware to conduct a full-blown benchmark test with a wide matrix of hardware, so I decided to use my current review system with  Athlon64 FX-62 (2.8Ghz) as the platform. I knew that an older Radeon HD 2900XT could manage about 40fps in Shattrath, and around 50-55 while flying around the rest of the Outland areas, and I also knew that the this pair already was CPU limited - if I overclocked the system to 3.0Ghz, the framerate improvement was linear. Still, I wanted to know if there was any difference between the top cards.

Setting up the test

To get rid of the 60fps cap I obviously disabled vsync. The rest of the in-game settings were at maximum, with the in-game LOD setting disabled. Initially I tried to use the new /timetest command added to World of Warcraft in the last content patch, but I quickly found it to be outputting crap. The minimum framerate indicated was useless, as it showed that dip down to 5-10fps you get every time you move from one zone to another and printed that as the minimum. While that's technically correct, you see that dip only few times every evening, and it hardly matters. It also displayed completely wrong maximum framerate, indicating 66fps at the end of the timed flight path, while I personally had witnessed FRAPS showing framerates well over 100fps.

As the internal benchmarking command gave unusable results, I decided to just monitor the general framerate while flying around different areas, specifically Shattrath City (the worst case scenario) and flying from there around Zangarmarsh, Blade's Edge Mountains and Netherstorm zones. As it was essentially impossible to set up a repeatable benchmark, I just resorted to noting down where the framerate hovered when flying around.

ATI Radeon HD3870X2?

First up was a shiny new  ATI Radeon HD 3870X2 1GB. Surely this monster would run the game better? Initially that was not the case as performance using Windows XP, Catalyst 8.3 and game set at 1600x1200, 16xAF, no AA was almost identical to a Radeon HD 2900XT. I also tested the "Catalyst A.I." setting, turning it off and effectively disabling one GPU on the card - still getting same performance, even in special cases flying around areas where there was hardly anything on screen. Then I recalled that Cat 8.3 on the XP had reportedly given trouble with HD 3870X2 in some reviews, and moved to Vista.

On Vista, things actually worked as I expected - there was a notable performance boost in less busy areas - and it went away when the Catalyst A.I was disabled. While using XP I managed to hit 60fps only in special cases, and usually stayed around 40-50fps, using Vista Catalyst 8.3s the HD 3870X2 could top 110fps in special cases, clearly demonstrating two GPUs at work. Still, it stayed under that magical 60fps in most places, and could only manage around 40fps in city setting, same as the older HD 2900XT. A slight improvement, but still in most areas held back by the CPU.

NVIDIA offerings

Moving on to NVIDIA hardware, I dropped in the good old  GeForce 8800GTX 768MB, still sticking with Vista. I pretty much expected still to be held back by the CPU and get the same results as with the HD 3870X2. I was pleasantly surprised when that was not the case as there was a big jump in performance. Shattrath City flew by at around 50fps, and as soon as I moved out to other areas, the framerate danced between 60 and 80fps, peaking at over 120fps in extreme cases - and most importantly, it hardly ever went below 60fps.

GeForce 8800GTX 768MB

GeForce 8800GTS 640MB

Fiddling around with the CPU frequency I determined that the game was still CPU-limited most of the time as performance moved up and down with the CPU clock, but there was a noticeable difference when compared to the HD 3870X2.

To further refine my findings, I switched to a  GeForce 8800GTS 640MB, the cheapest of the three cards tested, and found that the performance was comparable to the Radeon HD 3870X2. About 40fps in the city, and not quite maintaining 60fps+ in other zones. Close to the GTX level, but still noticeably slower.

So, the king of the hill in this test is the venerable  Geforce 8800GTX 768MB. I offered consistently better performance than 8800GTS 640MB, HD 2900XT or HD 3870X2. While both HD 3870X2 and 8800GTS got close to the GTX, they couldn't consistently keep the framerate over 60fps.

CPU usage of ATI vs NVIDIA?

While I was unable to test further with different CPU models due to time constraints, these tests pretty much told me which card to buy. It appears that at this time, when playing World of Warcraft at 1600x1200, 16xAF, no AA, the high end ATI cards manage to push less frames than the top NVIDIA offering, even while all tested cards were limited by the CPU most of the time. This would, in my opinion, indicate that NVIDIA is the superior option for those of us spending far too much time playing WoW. I can't be sure if this is due to the driver eating up more CPU cycles for ATI, or due to some obscure detail specific to the World of Warcraft game engine and the GTX, but the result of this quick practical test stands.

It may well be that if you repeat this test on a 3Ghz+ overclocked quad core system, the difference goes away and all cards can comfortably push over 60fps, making the comparison moot, but in this context there is a difference between these high-end cards. Anyone spending most of their time playing World of Warcraft and seeking to upgrade their video card, while sticking with a midrange dual core system should consider  NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB as offering the best WoW performance at this time, being capable of breaking that all-important 60fps even with a bit slower CPU. In second place, 8800GTS and HD 3870X2 both perform well, but they consistently miss my personal benchmark, 60fps+ in most areas.

Granted, WoW is very much a special case - most other games today are limited by the video card performance. In many other benchmarks the HD 3870X2 offers impressive figures, often topping the 8800GTX when both GPUs are in use. I just don't think it's the best choice "for the Horde" at this time - and with millions of gamers spending most of their gaming hours with WoW, that has to count for something.

And me personally, I have a cheap 8800GTX on order, and now if you excuse me, I'll have to get back to World of Warcraft...

Update, 6th of April

Since writing this story, I have finally purchased a new card for my own home system. I ended up picking the new GeForce 9800GTX, mostly due to the poor availability of 8800GTX locally. It turned out to be a great choice as well - while re-doing the tests with it, using the FX-62 setup, it gave almost identical results. In most of the cases it matched the older 8800GTX, while slightly surpassing it in some special cases.

I also tested the GeForce 9800GTX in a WoW raid setting at home with a shiny new Core 2 Quad Q9550 to go with it, and I'm happy to report that even in the most lag-inducing AE nuke happy fights, with a quite massive set of 209 installed UI AddOns, I have yet to see the framerate to dip below 45fps - clearing trash at Mt.Hyjal has never been this smooth. Elsewhere, over 95% of the time the system is running solid 60fps+ at 1600x1200. Also, as a bonus, Crysis turns out to be playable on this new system as well! :)