World of Warcraft and a computer upgrade

Post Reply New Topic

actually its this one:
here

Good to have 256MB, but the GPU itself is still not all that speedy. I'm not sure whether the one you have supports DirectX 8.1 or 9.0 (they made them both ways), but that can make some difference, too.

If you're not sure that the bottleneck is the graphics card, here's a good test. Check your framerate in a few different places, which range from quiet to moderately busy. Now get into your game video settings, and drop the draw distance and shader effects significantly. Repeat the test with the new graphics settings. If your framerate went up, the bottleneck is probably your graphics card. You can either enjoy your game with the new settings and higher framerate, or upgrade to a faster card and get a little more detailed graphics without becoming lagged.

I'm assuming that your BIOS is set to support 8x AGP, that you have a recent version of your graphics card's driver, and have DirectX 9.0 installed. If not, you might try fixing those things, they are all free and likely to make a measurable difference in framerate.

an extra gig of memory won't do anything, wow uses less than a gig of memory, even a gig is overkill.
if you are using the onboard video off of your mainboard than that is your main , you need a good video card, that is the only thing that would give you more perfomance in wow

"World of Warcraft still loves memory. If you're only going to get one upgrade for Burning Crusade, make it an extra 1GB of RAM."

-- Gamespot WoW Hardware Guide, at http://www.gamespot.com/features/6164252/index.html

If you run WoW at lowish resolution, without any add-ons, without chat programs like Ventrilo, and do not have any other programs open while running it, 1GB may be fine. But right now, using just a browser (plus XP processes, and stuff which sits in my system tray, like antivirus and webcam), I'm using over half a gig, plus close to 400MB of swap file -- around 900MB total. If I tried to play WoW over that, and only had 1 GB, lag would be a definite possibility.