Come across any 6970 reviews w/WoW benchmark?

Promii said:
I play at 2560x1600 and am not entirely satisfied with the performance of my 4870X2. It does appear to scale to the two GPUs but not terribly well and I get a bit of stutter. I would like to go single GPU with my Sandy Bridge upgrade but I'm torn between a 6970 and a GTX580. I would like the best I can get out of a single GPU but the GTX580 seems to be asking almost $200 more for <10% better fps.
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I'm gaming at about the same resolution you are.

For higher resolutions, the 6970 makes even more sense due to the fact it has the 2GB of RAM. Still not as fast as the 580, but for the money difference....hell, I am going to buy the 6970.

I switch AMD/Nvidia every generation, I have no loyalty to either brand. But people who think the 580 is worth $200 over a 6970 are crazy. Pure unobjective fanboyism.
 
Promii said:
I play at 2560x1600 and am not entirely satisfied with the performance of my 4870X2. It does appear to scale to the two GPUs but not terribly well and I get a bit of stutter. I would like to go single GPU with my Sandy Bridge upgrade but I'm torn between a 6970 and a GTX580. I would like the best I can get out of a single GPU but the GTX580 seems to be asking almost $200 more for <10% better fps.
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I'm not sure how alike we are but i normaly get 2-3 video card upgrades per cpu upgrade. I had a q6600 also but moved to a 9550 when my friend bought an i7 system.

I would go with a 6970 and spend extra on the cpu/ ram and then when 32/28nm cards come out upgrade. Its what i plan on doing but i'm going sledgehammer if the performance is on par.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Hard drive, get a small SSD and install WoW on it.
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Running WoW on my OCZ Vertex which I originally bought to fix this issue. No help unfortunately.
I just ordered 4 more gigs of memory and I really really hope this fixes the problem. :-/
 
Dark12 said:
Running WoW on my OCZ Vertex which I originally bought to fix this issue. No help unfortunately.
I just ordered 4 more gigs of memory and I really really hope this fixes the problem. :-/
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I had similar issues with my AMD system running Win 7 64bit with 8 Gig of 1333 DDR3 Ram, 965 BE 3.4 Ghz processor and Nvidia 295 GTX Graphics card. I upgraded the card after uninstalling the driver to an ATI 6970HD and initially it fixed the Staggering issue. Then it started again.

I used Drivercleaner Pro and found after scanning NVidia drivers that the system still had a number of Nvidia driver registry records.

From here I removed all Video drivers (even the ATI one). I then ran a clean using Drivercleaner Pro on all NVidia and ATI Driver references. I then reinstalled the latest ATI driver and restarted my machine. Then I renamed the Config.wtf and Launcher.wtf files in the WTF folder in the World of Warcraft install folder to Config.old and Launcher.old. I launched WoW and adjusted the Graphics settings to my preferences and now it runs perfectly and smooth on Ultra settings. No staggering at all.

I don&#8217;t believe your issue is a hardware issue. The hardware you have is more than enough to run WoW at good graphics settings without staggering. I think it is more likely that your issue is driver related and given that you have changed a lot of hardware there are probably some legacy drivers either still installed or not cleanly removed that are conflicting with your current graphics card.

I know one thing though. Your Hard Drive is very unlikely to be the culprit. Replacing the Hard Drive with an SSD drive will only improve load times and not in game performance as after loading content the content local to your computer is run through RAM (both system and Graphics RAM) and not the Hard Drive itself. If load screens are too slow for you by all means replace your Hard drive but it won't fix the staggering issue.
 
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Got my 6970 installed last night and wow runs like butter. Everything on ultra even shadows and 8xaa. Was in STV on my 85 flying around getting 85 fps. Then ran a 5 man heroic and was super smooth. Havnt been in a city with it yet didnt have time last night but it crushes my 5870 at 2560x1600.
 
Thanks for the feedback about how the cards work with wow, I'm contemplating switching to Amd solely due to the fact that I have three monitors and don't want to run a second card just for the side monitors.

As a side note, it seems that mgulbran is only good at typing "..." :p
 
Just tagging onto the end of this thread, but I installed my 6970 (replacing a 5830) and when playing WoW (Cata) it runs fine most of the time (only been in a busy city and was getting 40 - 120fps) however...

When I go flying just above a city and pan either up / down or left / right the background is very very jerky the FPS *seems* fine (haven't found a FPS monitor for cata). Not sure if this is the wow graphics engine or something I've missed on the settings.

Specs -
i3 3.2 overclocked to 4.2
Crossair 4GB DDR3 ram
6970 2gb - stock drivers from CD (will be upgrading with correct version - tried the latest and they didn't work)
HP 2510i monitor

On a further note I will be taking delivery of a MD230X3 (samsung thin bezzel 3 monitor setup) next week, so any comments on setup / system spec (CPU?) appreciated.
 
faxfan said:
When I go flying just above a city and pan either up / down or left / right the background is very very jerky the FPS *seems* fine (haven't found a FPS monitor for cata). Not sure if this is the wow graphics engine or something I've missed on the settings.
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Assuming you're talking about Orgrimmar (or whatever alliance city people hang out in these days) then that is pretty normal. Hundreds of people at the bank or auction house or just standing around, all of those textures need to load.

Going to an SSD would probably make the biggest difference in reducing the jerkyness as your system struggles to load all of those textures simultaneously, after that your RAM and CPU would likely have the largest impact.
 
Seriously getting an SSD is a big help for WOW & other MMORPGs. Even though game data is loaded into memory there are still plenty of times where data has to be loaded from the HD.

Intel has a nice report on this showing off what SSDs can do for gaming. Now of only they would get their damn G3 drives out already.
 
Makeroflostsouls said:
I get over 60fps in the citys with my setup np.
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Yeah... you're not even running an SSD, so I can guarantee that you're experiencing the same stuttering as the previous poster when you go into a highly populated area. The previous poster wasn't talking about how much FPS you get once the initial rush of texture loading is complete. Don't let that stop you from patting yourself on the back though.
 
How many years before SSD's actually start going standard?
Maybe all the platter drives will be selling off crazy cheap, like $50 for 3+ TB kind of thing.

$200+ for 100 GB or whatever SSD's are down to these days, not really worth it.
Might be worth it for ~60 GB to fit your OS and WoW on there.
 
I'm running a raid 0 setup if you didn't read my sig.. Why I said with my setup. With my 6970 I have no issues with fps at all in wow any more. I dont belive a SSD is needed to run wow at over 60fps.
 
Makeroflostsouls said:
I'm running a raid 0 setup if you didn't read my sig.. Why I said with my setup. With my 6970 I have no issues with fps at all in wow any more. I dont belive a SSD is needed to run wow at over 60fps.
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Raid-0 doesn't do much for the kind of disc access you will see when playing WoW. You're not throughput limited, you're loading multiple textures simultaneously and on-the-fly. That favors drives with low access times and drives that do better under high-load, basically exactly what you get with an SSD. Before SSD's became commonly available, World of Warcraft was one of the only games that was actually faster using server/workstation SCSI drives than consumer drives such as the raptor, because the disc access can really come in some intense bursts (such as flying into a populated city or panning your camera around near one). The videocard is irrelevant. You actually have to load the texture before your card can render it.
 
I added another 4 gig of memory to my rig this week and still notice no difference in this choppiness. It is as if every 10-15 frames skip. like even at 60fps it just doesnt feel right.
I just dropped some MORE cash into this problem by ordering a 6950 a few days ago. I am very stoked to try this thing out. I will post when its installed to let you guys know if it fixes the choppiness/stuttering.
 
Dark12 said:
I added another 4 gig of memory to my rig this week and still notice no difference in this choppiness. It is as if every 10-15 frames skip. like even at 60fps it just doesnt feel right.
I just dropped some MORE cash into this problem by ordering a 6950 a few days ago. I am very stoked to try this thing out. I will post when its installed to let you guys know if it fixes the choppiness/stuttering.
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Before you drop anymore cash if you don't already have an SSD then buy the cheap Intel 40GB drive, run it as a secondary drive in your system and install WOW onto it. That should show you some serious performance boosts. This is probably the best upgrade you can do to a system running WOW.

EDIT, ok just read that you said you were running on an OCZ drive.
 
Dark12 said:
I added another 4 gig of memory to my rig this week and still notice no difference in this choppiness.
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Unfortunately World of Warcraft is a 32-bit application and it is NOT large address aware either. That means the program is not capable of using more than 2 gigabytes of ram under any circumstances, even when running on a 64-bit OS. So a RAM upgrade won't do much unless you also upgraded to faster RAM at the same time.
 
You can modify the WOW application to be large address aware. This requires a modification of the EXE. I use this because it is necessary for eyefinity setups which can otherwise run out of memory in crowded locations and crash at high resolution/graphic settings. I'm not sure if it has any other performance benefit, but it's worth trying.

Post that it is legal: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1658706617?page=6#101

LargeAddressAware patch program: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112556
 
nat559 said:
You can modify the WOW application to be large address aware. This requires a modification of the EXE. I use this because it is necessary for eyefinity setups which can otherwise run out of memory in crowded locations and crash at high resolution/graphic settings. I'm not sure if it has any other performance benefit, but it's worth trying.

Post that it is legal: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1658706617?page=6#101

LargeAddressAware patch program: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112556
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I used to do that, but it is a bit of a pain since you have to revert back to an old EXE every time a patch is released. Even then, this only allows it to use up to 3gb, upgrading your system from 4gb to 8gb isn't going to do much.
 
nat559 said:
You can modify the WOW application to be large address aware. This requires a modification of the EXE. I use this because it is necessary for eyefinity setups which can otherwise run out of memory in crowded locations and crash at high resolution/graphic settings. I'm not sure if it has any other performance benefit, but it's worth trying.

Post that it is legal: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1658706617?page=6#101

LargeAddressAware patch program: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112556
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This is definitely going to help me out. I just got my Eyefinity 5760x1080 setup working in WoW last night and I did have one of those crashes while running at Ultra. I'll have to test this out after work today and see if I can play crash free.
 
Crispy002 said:
That doesn't make it any less pointless. To the end user, it doesn't matter if a card can do 100fps or 110fps in the game, there is no difference. Since just about every card in the last 2.5 generations can max WoW with crazy fps, .
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That statement is really misleading and false. With the rig in my sig on an i7 920 @ 4.0 GHZ with 6 GB of DDR3 on a GTX 280 I can only run 2 x AA, ground clutter and shadows both turned low or the game tanks into the low double digits fps wise. Get into a raid or a large PVP battle and the game can easily bring a modern PC to it's knees. Turn up max view distance and max shadows and lots of ground cover and the game becomes unplayable.

My philosophy is always buy way more video card then I think I'll need so I can pick up any game off the shelf without having to check the SYS reqs.

I'd gander 2 reasons WoW isn't reviewed. First hard as hell to bench, too many variables to be consistent. Second even though close to 14 million people play it it ain't an FPS which seems to be all video card reviewers know how to bench..

I had my hands on a GTX 295 for a while. In SLI WoW ran great with everything cranked, took some tweaking but ran great. Back to 280 and it's turn down settings.

A new GTX 580 has my name on it come tax refund time.
 
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