World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade hardware performance guide

By: Sarju Shah and James Yu - Posted on Thursday, January 18, 2006.

World of Warcraft wasn't a performance monster when Blizzard first released the game in late 2004. Players with modest and even mediocre systems could all get passable frame rates in Azeroth. Blizzard has stated that World of Warcraft will eventually get graphical improvements to keep the game up to date, but those changes aren't coming in the game's first expansion pack, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. With 8 million subscribers and growing, you don't need to push out advanced graphics and raise hardware requirements just yet.

We revisited World of Warcraft in this new hardware performance guide since many of you will be returning to the game for the opening of the dark portal, or using the expansion as an excuse to upgrade your PC systems. Several generations of video cards have passed since World of Warcraft's initial release. The GeForce 6 series has long been replaced by the GeForce 7 series, and the 8 series is already here. Entry-level video cards have improved in the past two years. The industry's rapid pace of innovation means that you can buy a lot more processing power today for the same amount of money. The game doesn't require the best hardware to run well, but you will get better performance from the latest technology.

It's difficult to create a reproducible benchmark in an MMO with a persistent world. You could spawn your own dungeon instance or find an empty spot hidden away from player traffic, but we wanted to include that foot traffic since it's a major part of the gameplay experience. We decided to use the first 60 seconds of the gryphon flight from The Stair of Destiny to Honor Hold in the Hellfire Peninsula as our benchmark. It's the first flight path you encounter in the new Outland area, and the path is the same every time you take it. One significant variable out of our control is the number of players and monsters we fly over on the path. Frame rates varied at the low-resolution settings but became fairly stable at higher resolution levels such as 1600x1200 and 2048x1536.

Game Settings

You can easily run the game with all the settings enabled on most midrange hardware, but you can disable a few settings to get more performance from less powerful systems.

Graphics

Upgrading your video card will get you higher frame rates and higher resolutions, but you can still get decent performance out of older hardware. We tested the Burning Crusade on 14 different video cards.

CPU

The Burning Legion is very CPU friendly. You'll be able to play just fine on a two- or three-year-old CPU, but getting a better processor can still improve your frame rates.

Memory

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.