How much VRAM does World of Warcraft really need for 1680x1050 highest settings?

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EricFX1984

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How much VRAM does World of Warcraft really need for 1680x1050 highest settings?

some people are saying that the GTX460 768mb will lag way behind the 1gb version in highly populated areas/large raid parties

ideas?
 
My ATI 4870 512mb has no issues maxing out everything at that resolution.
 
At 1680x1050 I think you would be just fine with only 512mb VRAM. I ran WoW on dual 4850's in crossfire and even at 1920x1200 the 512mb VRam didn't really seem to be holding me back at all.

There are other variables involved however. Using Anti-Aliasing will also eat into your available VRam so if you are trying to run high levels of AA in conjunction with a high resolution you might run into issues. To this end you can try using the "Edge-Detect" custom AA filter which will use the stream processors on your card to help with AA calculations, taking some of the burden off of your cards memory subsystem.
 
If you use AA in dalaran you will be well over 1gb texture memory, let alone 768.
 
tvdang7 said:
prob 256mb is enough the game is pretty old.
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the issue is that the game uses a really old engine, which they have just kept increasing features and quality on a engine that was never meant to do have this much stuff going on

WoW can really slow down some fast setups
 
OP: is this assuming Cataclysm + said raiding? Supposedly with DX11 on there is a performance increase but this was only hearsay. I think once Cata is released there should be more info on the matter. Traditionally though, if you had a strong enough video card pre 4.0 patch, a good CPU does help too.

Surprisingly, I run 25man raids rather well with my current setup @ 1920x1080 with just some bare essential mods (A boss mod, classtimers mod, TukUI, Omen Threat Meter). I only run into problems with Sindragosa and thats dipping into the 30's for some reason, otherwise I'm about 50-60-ish FPS. My system specs are in my signature.

If you do play other games though, read the benchmarks for other opinions as well. I am in the market for a new card too, but waiting til Black Friday for a deal.
 
I still have my 8800GTS G92 with my new rig (waiting on my 6850s to show up at my door). Coming from an E8400 and 2x2GB DDR2 memory I noticed a gigantic performance improvement in my new rig (i7 930 @ 4.2GHz and 3x2GB DDR2 memory). Teleporting instantly loads me into the world whereas before I'd have to wait several seconds for my computer to catch up and load everything (my character would be stuck there while waiting). Loading the game for the first time also takes a much shorter time. When people say the game is heavily CPU oriented I believed them, but I didn't think it would make that huge of a difference. I will see how my new video cards impact performance later today though. I may have to disable CrossFire from what I hear though. :(
 
you are going to see more framerate loss due to cpu than you will to your gpu. wow really only utilizes 2 cpu cores, so a high clockspeed proc is mandatory if you want to max out settings. im running a c2q q8200 at stock 2.33 and in populated areas, 25 man raid settings my fps drops from average 80 to around 25. i am running a gtx460 1gb oced to 800/1600/2000. according to afterburner wow never pushes my gpu past 50%, even when the frames start to drop.
 
tvdang7 said:
prob 256mb is enough the game is pretty old.
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haha, for the basic install of the game on a low res, sure. For 1680x1050 at max settings and AA, as the others have said, you'll eventually eat into the 1GB range. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
haha, for the basic install of the game on a low res, sure. For 1680x1050 at max settings and AA, as the others have said, you'll eventually eat into the 1GB range. ;)
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i forgot what program i used back in the day but it measured the vram usage . im willing to bet it doesn't use more.
 
I love how the wow haters always say WoW is super easy to run and does not need much. The game itself is VERY cpu dependant, more so than GPU. But as said here already.. Its an old engine that was never ment to be patched and patched and patched with upgrades. Dal can bring the most current PCs to there knees with everything turned up and aa/af on. also the areas with tons of trees also slow me down enough to notice.

SLI/Crossfire also really hurt performance on WoW.
 
oMek said:
SLI/Crossfire also really hurt performance on WoW.
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That's just simply not true.

At the moment there are two different graphics modes.

D3D9ex - Default mode and currently the only mode you are able to select in-game.
D3D11 - Experimental mode that you have to edit a config file or enter a command manually in-game to enable. This wasn't even in the game until the 4.0.1 patch was released on October 12th so it is still very new, and again, still considered experimental by Blizzard.

Crossfire works great in D3D9ex all the way up to 4 GPUs. This has been the case for quite some time and is still the case. EXAMPLE

Crossfire was initially completely broken in D3D11 mode (again, still experimental) yet it took AMD less than 24 hours to come out with a crossfire profile that addressed the issue. The 10.10 profiles contained even more fixes for Crossfire in D3D11 mode. Despite that, the few reviews of the 6870's that have included results for World of Warcraft generally have used old drivers in conjunction with D3D11 mode which resulted in extremely poor performance. EXAMPLE

But the fact that it doesn't work when using old drivers on an engine that is less than a month old and that you can't even enable in-game anyway because it's still experimental isn't particularly significant. Almost all of the effects are still present in D3D9ex it's just less efficient using Shader Model 3 instead of 4 or 5, etc. Give it a month or two and AMD should resolve any remaining issues. There have already been 2 updates specifically addressing this in the past several weeks, you can believe AMD pays attention to a game that has 12 million players.
 
GotNoRice said:
That's just simply not true.

At the moment there are two different graphics modes.

D3D9ex - Default mode and currently the only mode you are able to select in-game.
D3D11 - Experimental mode that you have to edit a config file or enter a command manually in-game to enable. This wasn't even in the game until the 4.0.1 patch was released on October 12th so it is still very new, and again, still considered experimental by Blizzard.

Crossfire works great in D3D9ex all the way up to 4 GPUs. This has been the case for quite some time and is still the case. EXAMPLE

Crossfire was initially completely broken in D3D11 mode (again, still experimental) yet it took AMD less than 24 hours to come out with a crossfire profile that addressed the issue. The 10.10 profiles contained even more fixes for Crossfire in D3D11 mode. Despite that, the few reviews of the 6870's that have included results for World of Warcraft generally have used old drivers in conjunction with D3D11 mode which resulted in extremely poor performance. EXAMPLE

But the fact that it doesn't work when using old drivers on an engine that is less than a month old and that you can't even enable in-game anyway because it's still experimental isn't particularly significant. Almost all of the effects are still present in D3D9ex it's just less efficient using Shader Model 3 instead of 4 or 5, etc. Give it a month or two and AMD should resolve any remaining issues. There have already been 2 updates specifically addressing this in the past several weeks, you can believe AMD pays attention to a game that has 12 million players.
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my 4870x2 ran like garbage with both GPUs turned on... traded that for a single gtx285 and it was 100% better. I again decided to try crossfire out and bought 2x 5870s and that also ran WoW like garbage with crossfire enabled.

Unless something changed in 4.0.1 that has to do with xfire or sli...
 
oMek said:
my 4870x2 ran like garbage with both GPUs turned on... traded that for a single gtx285 and it was 100% better. I again decided to try crossfire out and bought 2x 5870s and that also ran WoW like garbage with crossfire enabled.

Unless something changed in 4.0.1 that has to do with xfire or sli...
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Not sure why you experienced such bad results. I've run my 4870x2's for over a year and 4850's in crossfire for a year or so before that. WoW is the main game I play, by far, typically between 50-80 hours a week. Given the time investment, If the cards didn't perform absolutely beautifully I would ditch them immediately and without hesitation. Thankfully that has not been the case.

Do you run in windowed mode by chance? Windowed (maximized) is functionally identical to Full-screen mode but will force the use of only a single GPU.
 
GotNoRice said:
Not sure why you experienced such bad results. I've run my 4870x2's for over a year and 4850's in crossfire for a year or so before that. WoW is the main game I play, by far, typically between 50-80 hours a week. Given the time investment, If the cards didn't perform absolutely beautifully I would ditch them immediately and without hesitation. Thankfully that has not been the case.

Do you run in windowed mode by chance? Windowed (maximized) is functionally identical to Full-screen mode but will force the use of only a single GPU.
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When I was running the 4870x2 I tried everything I could think off. Blizzard support told me that WoW does not support SLI/Xfire, and while it will work it can cause random problems. I got the best performance from it in window mode like you said (single gpu).

But to be fair I did not give the 5870 xfire setup enough effort before I sold it.

Could just have been my luck, who knows. There are tons of posts on the blizzard forums about xfire/sli and people crying about it.
 
Just loaded Dalaran at 1680*1050 4xAA and after 5 minutes at Eventide I was at 1197mb of texture ram.
 
Just wanted to point out this GTX580 review from this morning that included World of Warcraft results.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_580/20.html

The GTX580 was a very strong performer, but you'll quickly notice it getting smacked silly by the 5970.

Given that the 5970 uses under-clocked 5870 GPUs, it wouldn't even surpass the performance of a single 5870 never-mind a GTX580 if crossfire wasn't functioning properly.

Crossfire in WoW - working as intended.
 
GotNoRice said:
Just wanted to point out this GTX580 review from this morning that included World of Warcraft results.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_580/20.html

The GTX580 was a very strong performer, but you'll quickly notice it getting smacked silly by the 5970.

Given that the 5970 uses under-clocked 5870 GPUs, it wouldn't even surpass the performance of a single 5870 never-mind a GTX580 if crossfire wasn't functioning properly.

Crossfire in WoW - working as intended.
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Not sure what you are getting at. The 580 stomps all over the single 5870 in all WoW tests on those charts. Further, it beats the 5970 at all but the highest resolutions. At resolutions where the 5970 beats the 580, "crossfire" scaling gives a dismal increase of 25%. Note that I'm calling 5970 crossfire
 
Furystrike said:
Not sure what you are getting at. The 580 stomps all over the single 5870 in all WoW tests on those charts. Further, it beats the 5970 at all but the highest resolutions. At resolutions where the 5970 beats the 580, "crossfire" scaling gives a dismal increase of 25%. Note that I'm calling 5970 crossfire
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WoW is an extremely CPU limited game and that fact should come as a surprise to no one who is familiar with the game. Faster GPUs always tend to show the greatest benefit at higher resolutions in most games anyway.

You can get a 24" Monitor for ~$150 these days. If you're stuck at 1680x1050 or less, you're probably not in the market for crossfire in the first place.

The 5870 is slower than the GTX480 in WoW so I fully expected it to be slower than a GTX580 also, I was never trying to claim otherwise.

I'm not sure how you can derive Crossfire scaling numbers from those results since there is no equivalent to a single-GPU 5970 on that chart. 5870 comes close but the gap would be smaller since the 5870 has a higher clock than the GPUs on the 5970.
 
GotNoRice said:
I'm not sure how you can derive Crossfire scaling numbers from those results since there is no equivalent to a single-GPU 5970 on that chart. 5870 comes close but the gap would be smaller since the 5870 has a higher clock than the GPUs on the 5970.
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I must have misunderstood the first part. As for crossfire, I still dont think that the scaling in WoW looks good according to those charts if you consider that a 5970 is actually two 5870s in crossfire, albeit anemic ones.
 
oMek said:
When I was running the 4870x2 I tried everything I could think off. Blizzard support told me that WoW does not support SLI/Xfire, and while it will work it can cause random problems. I got the best performance from it in window mode like you said (single gpu).

But to be fair I did not give the 5870 xfire setup enough effort before I sold it.

Could just have been my luck, who knows. There are tons of posts on the blizzard forums about xfire/sli and people crying about it.
Click to expand...

Things change. Blizzard added SLI support to WoW about a year ago now and I still remember how it instantly gave me a dramatic boost to performance. It's been working great since then. I ran a quick test using Nvidia SLI meter and Afterburner and it's showing high utilization, with both my 460s sharing equal workloads.

With Blizzard adding features regularly, including DirectX 11 support for new special effects, lighting, and water effects, ever increasing view distances, animated ground clutter, and higher texture resolutions, you can be sure what you knew about WoW 2 years ago no longer applies.

Enabling DX11 is the way to go if your card supports it. It helps frame rates quite a bit in areas with lots of shadows and effects, especially the new water effects.
 
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