WOW TBC - Poor Performance on Windows Vista : World of Warcraft General Discussions

I finally got around to installing World of Warcraft on my Windows Vista Ultimate machine to give some basic performance samples of how it runs. I haven’t really played World of Warcraft in months, I had to sign up again and endure over 1 gig of updates just to get it running, talk about annoying. It seems like I just downloaded the entire game again, why not just start fresh! In all seriousness, this game has grown, the installer is 5 CD-ROMs, so even if all 5 were full 700MB CD-ROMs, after expansion, this game has installed two gigabytes of game updates. That’s pretty incredible. Thank God for high speed Internet connections.

I have to say that the performance results are pretty disappointing. The test machine is a 2.5Ghz Pentium 4, with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB Radeon 9600 video card. This same machine stayed regularly in the 40fps range with Windows XP installed. Now, sitting around in Orgrimmar, it’s struggling to stay above 20fps, regularly dipping into the teens. The scary part is that even standing idle, my CPU usage is pegged at 100% and 60% of my RAM is used.

I flew over to Brill and they framerates rose to the 40s while there were no other players or enemies on the screen. CPU Utilization also fell down into the 70s, but we all know that’s not how you play the game. The settings for World of Warcraft are the default for my system. 1024×768, 24bit color, 50% Terrain Distance, 50% Environement Detail, Low Anisotropic Filtering, low Terrain Texture, High Texture Detail, High Spell Detail Level, 60% Weather Intensity, Level of Detail is checked, All Shader Effects Enabled except Smooth Shading, Trilinear Filtering enabled, Vertical Sync enabled and Hardware Cursor enabled.

I will note that I am playing in Windowed Mode, I use two monitors so playing in full screen is a pain, but the performance is still pretty bad. If you consider the recommended system for this game, an 800Mhz P3, 512MB of RAM and a 32MB Video Card, it’s pretty hard to swallow these numbers. Obviously Windows Vista is the culprit.

Currently, I am installing it on a 1.73Ghz Core Duo laptop with 1GB Ram and a 256MB Geforce Go video card in it. I will update this article with the results of that testing.