I have been searching for this article for quite sometime. Kudos to you. I have yet to find a site that has done benchmarks on MMorpgs (even though the fps may be hampered by connection). Thank you.

All I can say is I'm extremely impressed by Xbit Labs' recent articles. Very enjoyable read, 10/10

Thanks for a very useful article... I'm trying to determine which VidCard I should buy to play WoW on a brand new 1920x1200 LCD.

Questions:
- Where and how did you test the framerates ? I find those vary a lot between populated areas (Dalaran), the country side, and raids with 25 people creating lots of wisual effects. Raids are by far the hardest on the vidcard and the CPU - I find that WoW is quite CPU-bound too, but assume that was not an issue with your config.
- Also, how did you determine FPS ? On my old PC, the stated framerate was patently false, ie it would say 10 fps when I know I was getting less than one and the game was unplayable. That might have been because the bottleneck was my very old CPU (single-core Athlon XP 2800+), and not the vidcard.
- Were all in-game setting set to max ? I assume yes ?

Again, thanks and congrats.

The Warhammer Online tests must have not been done in active RVR, In Forts or heavily populated keep battles i will drop to 15 FPS with a slightly stronger system than used.

Core i7 @ 3.8
OCZ ddr3-1600 (7-7-7-20)
9800GTX SLI

Same for when i used to play WoW.

Testing MMO\\\'s out of heavy combat can be misleading, so avoiding those areas as u stated to maintain conformity isnt a true test how the game will really perform in a populated area. who plays where there no action?? for sure not me.
Good article, i would have liked to see some if just subjective testing in RVR so give a true idea of GPU load.

-Toast

Indeed, if the tests were not done in a raid setting, they are worthless. I don't care if the scenery is displayed @60 or 20 FPS, I do care whether I'm getting more than 20 FPS during an all-out fight. 20 FPS seems to be the cutoff point for a guaranteed perfectly smooth gameplay, with room for a few hungry addons.

I don't think "scenery" performance is a good indicator of "combat" performance: the intensity and visual effects seem very different.

Very good article, I am also glad that you did this article of comparing MMO's on midrange cards.

I also understand that it is almost impossible to do a raid instance unless you have a good Kingship or guild that will assist you with such a feet, which will increase the length of time to compile such an article.

One nit to pick: if you're going to include a high-end Nvidia solution, it's only fair to include a high-end ATI solution. This review should have included a 4890 or at least a 4870 from ATI.

very usefull review, im glad you guys also tested Eve with it.