World of Warcraft Performance Guide
In PC gaming, first person shooters get all of the attention. The releases of Doom 3 and Half Life 2 were accompanied by a swarm of hardware upgrade guides all over the net, including those published on AnandTech. If you were waiting for Doom 3 or Half Life 2 before upgrading your machine, you had every ounce of wow accounts at your disposal upon their release. The same type of attention is rarely cast on other genres of games in the PC world for a handful of reasons. For starters, FPSes are the most likely to have builtin benchmarking tools, making our ability to present you with performance data infinitely easier. There's also a good deal of emotional attachment to anything that comes out of id Software, Epic Games or Valve, given their history with PC games in their own way, they are the developers who brought the cheap wow accounts or Legend of Zelda. But reasoning aside, there's much more to PC gaming than just FPSes; the best, most recent, example of an extremely successful nonfps is none other than Blizzard's foray into the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing realm World of Warcraft.
MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft, rely on hordes of subscribed users (hence the massively multiplayer aspect); otherwise, they lose a big chunk of their appeal. World of Warcraft has been particularly successful in this respect. Earlier this month, Blizzard announced that WoW had reached over 1.5 million subscribers wow power leveling , with over 800,000 subscribers in North America alone. At any given time, there are over 500,000 users logged into one of Blizzard's many WoW servers at a speed of adoption never before seen in the MMORPG market. But as we saw with the introduction of Warcraft III, anything Warcraft from Blizzard is not only well done, but turns to gold upon release. Given the tremendous market penetration of WoW, we felt that it was time to take a look at its performance demands. But unlike Doom 3 and Half Life 2, there is no static element of wow power level everything takes place in an everchanging online world. The result is that finding a repeatable benchmark to run is fairly difficult...but not impossible. As a MMORPG,
World of Warcraft doesn't depend on the razorsharp reaction time of a fastpaced first person shooter; instead, you spend most of your time walking around performing quests and battling at a much slower pace, in a much larger, more interactive world. As such, there are two scenarios when performance in WoW becomes an issue when a lot of characters are present on the screen, and simply rotating the camera in the world. The former is a virtually impossible scenario to use as a benchmark, as you can't reliably get a bunch of people to do the exact same thing at the exact same time in a repeatable fashion, but the same can't be said about scenario 2. The world of Warcraft is truly enormous and in order to prevent overcrowding, there is a large number of servers for you to choose on which your character may play each server has a complete copy of the Warcraft world. Even on the highest populated servers (one of which we conducted our test), there are many areas where you can go that are devoid of any player controlled characters making them ideal for benchmarking.
