MMO's do not require good hardware?

Strange, your CCC is not the same as mine. Here's my Powerplay tab:



wow.exe is set to high performance under the Switchable Graphics tab though, it is definitely running on the 7970m

 

please double check or post a screenshot of the switchable graphics window, you can't have P5700 in 3dmark11 and 30fps in warcraft, you're most likely using intel hd 4000 in warcraft instead of the 7970M.

 

There might be some other issues going on, but the fact is WoW is just plain more demanding than people assume. I still think I've got something wrong, but not radically wrong at this point.

 

that's strange. have you tried to uncheck the "enable powerplay" flag from the window you posted earlier?

 

You can run wow on a cardboard box...

 

There's "run in an empty zone" and there's "run in Stormwind on ultra with 8x MSAA at 1080p with a second 1080p display running a browser" - one of those is easy, and one is much more demanding but actually represents real world use. I do get something like double the framerate if I turn off the second display and go to an empty zone, but the reality is I need/want the second display and will continue to spend plenty of time in Stormwind.

It still requires ~GTX 570/580 power to run 60 fps in an empty zone on one monitor as far as I can tell. Doing the same with 2 monitors in Stormwind appears to require a GTX 690.

If that is "not demanding" then what is?

 

I would venture to say the 7000 series cards aren't even optimized yet. AMD takes a while to optimize their cards for real world use. Beanchmarks are one thing but optimizing GPU's for specific games is another. Just sit back and relax. Maybe turn your MSAA down to 4 along with tweaking some other settings. Hell, you may even have to deal with 45 FPS while walking through SW. It could be worse.

 

you could try using virtu by lucid lynx so that you can get the hd4000 to display the 2nd monitor and the 7970m to display the game.

AnandTech - A First Look at Thunderbolt on Windows with MSI's Z77A-GD80

it shows that it can be done on desktops, however you have to try it out it if you want to see if it works

 

An easy way to tell if it's using the integrated graphics or not is to just look at the temps. If they rise significantly on the 7970 then it's running like it should.

Also, don't you need a motherboard which supports virtu to take advantage of it?

 

It seems you're just trying to convince yourself that there's nothing wrong with your new laptop. As others have already stated in this thread, much older hardware than yours gets 40-50 frames in Stormwind at 1920x1080 resolution.

If you're just going to believe what you want, then why bother to post here?

 

btw as someone mentioned above i turned off sound and it suddenly turned out to be super smooth ><