World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

This title must be known to everyone. The very abbreviation WoW has almost become a synonym for “massively multiplayer role-playing game” in the same way as Sound Blaster used to denote every sound card. Due to its tremendous popularity, the product of Blizzard Entertainment has become a huge social phenomenon that leaves no one indifferent. World of Warcraft is a huge and detailed world just as you can expect from Blizzard.

The game is no masterpiece of 3D graphics, but its engine is being constantly modernized and complemented with modern technologies while the original graphical style conceals most of visual defects. A huge advantage is that the game can be launched on almost every graphics card with support for hardware T&L.

The latest, second add-on Wrath of the Lich King was released on the 13th of November, 2008, and sold 2.8 million copies in the first 24 hours. This number alone is the best evidence of the huge popularity of the game. Besides gaming innovations, the add-on features improved visuals. Particularly, there is now a new shader that imitates ice surfaces. There are new fire effects and more realistic shadows. It is rather hard to find out the true performance of a graphics card in World of Warcraft because the network adapter can affect the frame rate greatly due to the dense population of WoW servers. So, the numbers below should be viewed as approximate.

Wrath of the Lich King can be a demanding application at the highest graphics quality settings but there are only two cards that can’t run it fast when FSAA is off: Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GT. The former has a higher bottom speed, which may be indicative of a high load on the GPU’s computing resources. The texture-mapping resources are utilized as well: the GeForce GTS 250 is better than the Radeon HD 4770/4850.

Nvidia’s solutions enjoy a bigger advantage when we turn on 4x FSAA although ATI’s RV770- and RV740-based products are good enough even at 1920x1200. Moreover, the Radeon HD 4770 even has a higher bottom speed than the GeForce GTS 250. The performance of World of Warcraft varies wildly and depends not only on the graphics card’s capabilities, so it is good to have some reserve of frame rate. The best choice is Nvidia’s GeForce GTS 250 or, better yet, GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, especially if you plan to play at high resolutions with 4x FSAA.