M17x R4 - 3630QM - 7970M - World of Warcraft performance

Hello all,

After figuring out all my sound and video card problems (thank God), I started installing my Steam and Blizzard games and giving them a whirl. Again, for reference, my CPU is 3630QM (3.2GHz with Turbo boost) and my GPU is 7970M.

With the latest 7970M drivers, my 3dMark2011 score sits at a healthy 6500 with no overclocking. I can play games like Skyrim, Max Payne 3, etc. at max detail settings without any hiccups and at very high frame rates.

In comparison, my desktop (with a core i7 960 OC'ed to 3.8GHz and a 480 GTX card) has a 3dMark2011 score of 6000 (500 less than my M17X) and plays those games equally well as expected.

The difference comes with only one game - World of Warcraft. With all settings at max (Ultra), sitting in Orgrimmar with vSync turned off I get about 60-65 FPS with my M17X laptop. On the contrary, with the exact same settings and the exact same location I get about 90 FPS on my desktop. To be clear, I did a fresh install on both computers, both computers have 64-bit client and DirectX 11 enabled.

To be quite honest, I'm baffled by this. I know WoW is a CPU intensive game, unlike the modern games where GPU is a far tighter bottleneck than CPU. However, are laptop processors like 3630QM still that much behind their desktop counterparts like even an oldie core i7 960? Is this expected, or maybe AMD cards don't play quite well with Blizzard games?

Anyone else playing WoW here? What results are you guys getting with your M17Xs?

 

I would rather say that this will be radeon drivers problem with all blizzard games. I didnt try wow on my m17xr4 but diablo 3 runs terrible on radeon cards. Its playable but not so fluent and nice like on even weaker geforce cards

 

Dno but you got the lowest end CPU so maybe that's bottlenecking something :S

 

Both of the suggestions are accurate, it could be the CPU bottlenecking it or it could also be the drivers on the AMD card.

 

It's well known 7970m gets smashed by gtx680m on Diablo 3, don't know who to blame though, Blizzard or AMD.

In this case though I'm more inclined towards the CPU. On turbo boost, i7 960 can go as high as 3.8GHz whereas 3630qm will only go 3.2GHz, that's about a 20% increase in speed which might explain the roughly 20% drop in FPS since they have the same number of cores.

Anyways, I'm still interested in hearing what other people with M17X R4s are getting on WoW with max settings in crowded areas...

 

the fps sounds about right.. even though wow is an old game.. they've improved the graphics a lot over the years

with ultra settings.. in crowded areas my fps dips down to the 50s sometimes on my R4.. i also have an i5 3570 desktop with 660ti overclocked and get similar fps drops in crowded areas..

this has always been an issue in wow since vanilla. there are people with high end systems that experience similar fps drops in crowded areas as well.

 

675M here and away from crowded areas I can get well above 100fps. Crowded areas are mixed bag of results, anything from 50 back up to 100's. Just depends when and where in Azeroth. All settings maxed out.


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Do you have vsync off in WOW or the driver panel?