MR x1300 will run WoW but with bad fps?

Hello everyone,

The other day I was browsing through some reviews about Ati Mobility Radeon x1300, and I found this review:
link: http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/evga/7300gs/7300gs_3.htm
The thing that puzzles me is the comparison between 7300 GS and x1300 when tested with World of Warcraft! The framerates that x1300 produces seem pretty bad to me...

Quote:
WoW with resolution 1024 x 768: 27.89 fps
WoW with resolution 1280 x 960: 17.49 fps

In a big surprise the 7300 GS soundly beats the X1300 in WoW. 1024 x 768 was barely playable on the X1300, but it was much smoother on the 7300 GS. Apparently NVIDIA has paid a lot of attention to WoW performance here, and considering this might very well be the killer app for this type of card, the investment by NVIDIA here is well spent. Enabling anti-aliasing at even 1024 x 768 caused the framerates to drop well below 20, and made the game fairly unplayable. Resolutions higher than 1280 x 960 also caused performance to drop significantly."

I remeber reading from the forums here that MR x1300 should run WoW smoothly, can someone clarify this for me please?
1. Is the review that I read really accurate and x1300 can barely run WoW?
2. The cards used in the review are not for notebooks, so is there any difference between the desktop and laptop version of x1300?

Any help would be appreciated

EDIT: had to edit the quote because the copy/pasted chart looked messy

 

That does NOT sound right. The X1300 should be scoring 40-50 fps in a low game like that. My friend's Intel Extreme graphics 2 can play WOW without hiccups at all.

 

Agreed, system in my signature runs hi rez widescreen with all on med to high better than or equal to that.

 

That's on max settings with 4XAF so it doesn't really seem that surprising. These cards generally have crappy bandwidth so 4XAF and higher resolutions are going to kill performance. It could have been played in an area with high traffic as well which would again lower performance.

 

how is 27 and 17fps barly playable in wow? Its not a game were you need lightning fast reflexs. I dont have enough ram for wow yet on my laptop (its coming this week) but if I let it sit and cache for a couple minutes in ironforge, I can move around rather smoothly (I have a x1300 too)

 

Well that's an average framerate. Sure if it was rock solid at 27FPS and didn't dip below that it would be fine but that figure means that there's going to be an awful lot of times when its significantly below 27FPS which is going to be very choppy. 20FPS and below really isn't playable. An average framerate of 17FPS is never going to be smooth as you're going to be in single digits a lot of the time. An average framerate of around 40FPS is what I would call comfortable as this means it won't be dipping below 30FPS (the threshold at which things start to look bad) too much. A framerate of around 30FPS can be fine as long as it doesn't dip below this, but that is something just not possible on a PC.

 

Thank you everyone for your replies,

After hearing your opinions I can finally put that odd review about x1300 not running WoW behind me, and go buy a notebook that I've had my eyes on

Thanks again guys

 

weee... see next post by me ^^

 

Thanks jeffmd for the detailed info.
I play WoW on a Taiwanese server and since everything is in chinese and everyone speaks only chinese, I guess I wont have to worry too much about getting a group to go to any 5+ man instances (I study chinese here but it´ll take at least a year or so before I´ll understand anything )
So, all in all I´m sure x1300 will be enough for me

 

I need to change my post.. I screwed up and didnt realise that having the settings windowed and maximised checked means it was ignoring the resolution box. I was actually running the game in 1680x1050 when I was getting 17fps! I deselected windowed and when the game went down to the 1200x800, my fps poped up to like 38fps. Everything ran a ton smoother, and when running around in AV with 20+ mounted peeps onscreen, it never droped below 20fps. I do miss the clarity I was getting at 1680x1050 though.. man I should have realised it was a bit to sharp. ^^

This is on a x1300 of course.

 

I think what nVidia paid attention to was their drivers. The review used Windows x64, and ATI's 64-bit drivers may not have been optimized properly yet. Also Catalyst 6.1 was from January 2006 and I believe Forceware 82.65 would be from March 2006 so nVidia had the newer drivers.

 

Jeffmd your new fps measurements are actually very close to what I´ve heard the fps should be

Like ltcommander_data posted the drivers may have had something to do with the low framerates measured in the original review. I bet x1300 128MB dedicated with Catalyst 6.8 scores better fps than what was said in the review, (unless it was measured in the middle of Ironforge in a 100 man raid )