Testbed and Methods

We are going to investigate the performance of mainstream graphics accelerators in MMORPG using the following testbed:

• Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor (3.2GHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI);  
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard (Intel X58 Express chipset);
• Corsair XMS3-12800C9 (3x2GB, 1333MHz, 9-9-9-24, 2T);
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250GB, Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer);
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL 1000W power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600@60Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 64-bit;
• ATI Catalyst 9.6 for ATI Radeon HD;
• Nvidia GeForce 186.18 WHQL for Nvidia GeForce.

The graphics card drivers were configured in the following way:

ATI Catalyst:

• Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
• Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
• Other settings: default

Nvidia GeForce:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Threaded optimization: Auto
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-GPU performance mode: NVIDIA recommended
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Other settings: default

The list of benchmarks includes nine of the most popular MMORPG:

• Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
• Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach
• Eve Online
• The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria
• Lineage II: The Chaotic Throne
• Perfect World
• Requiem: Bloodymare
• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
• World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game. As usual, we used only standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified manually in any way. We are going to look at the performance of eight mainstream graphics cards on ATI and Nvidia GPUs from different price segments:

• ATI Radeon HD 4850 (RV770, 625/625/2000 MHz, 800 sp, 40 tmu, 16 rbe, 256-bit, 512 MB GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 4830 (RV770, 575/575/1800 MHz, 640 sp, 32 tmu, 16 rbe, 256-bit, 512 MB GDDR3)
• ATI Radeon HD 4770 (RV740, 750/750/3200 MHz, 640 sp, 32 tmu, 16 rbe, 128-bit, 512 MB GDDR5)
• ATI Radeon HD 4670 (RV730, 750/750/2000 MHz, 320 sp, 32 tmu, 8 rbe, 128-bit, 512 MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (G200b, 576/1242/2000 MHz, 216 sp, 72 tmu, 28 rbe, 448-bit, 896 MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 1 GB (G92b, 738/1836/2200 MHz, 128 sp, 64 tmu, 16 rbe, 256-bit, 1024MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT (G92, 600/1500/1800 MHz, 112 sp, 56 tmu, 16 rop, 256-bit, 512 MB GDDR3)

The ATI Radeon HD 4670 is represented by the above discussed Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition with the video memory frequency increased to its nominal value of 1000 (2000) MHz.

We ran our tests in the following resolutions: 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and 1920x1200. Everywhere, where it was possible we added MSAA 4x antialiasing to the standard anisotropic filtering 16x. The only exception here was the Age of Conan game because of extremely high requirements it set for the graphics subsystem. Performance was measured manually with Fraps utility version 2.9.8. To ensure higher precision and repeatability of results we ran the test three times and took the average of the three for the performance charts.

Note that the peculiarities of MMORPG gaming genre make it extremely difficult to get steadily repeatable results. Moreover, performance in these games often depends more not on the graphics adapter performance, but on the population of the server, response time and other network-related parameters. We tried to minimize the influence of these factors, however, we urge you not to consider the performance numbers obtained in this test session to be the universal truth. They should merely give you a general idea of what to expect.