World Of Warcraft and the Intel HD4000 information "WIP"

So when you go into bestbuy and you tell them you want to play wow on a laptop. The Geeksquad agent is quick to point you to a Asus G75 and tells you that you have to have a graphic card to play the game. Well its a 7 year old game with only some improvements.

Side note. A lot of pc's now come with one stick of ram. Typically even on some of the $445 laptops this is DDR3 1600. So if you want to maximize performance pick up another 4gig stick of DDR3 1600 as your igp uses your system memory and the faster memory will help your frame rate a little.

So You can run wow on anything. Heck even a ech-a-skech . But wither or not you will be able to crank up the eye candy is another thing. Lets look at the biggest frame rate killers wow has.

-Res. Higher the res the more pixles that gpu must drive. However many people want 1920X1080 i know i do.

-Shadows. On ultra shadows will crush your frame rate like a bug. However its pretty hard to tell the diff. between ultra and high and even at fair they still look good however running fair will give you a nice bump in the frame rate.

-Particle density. This comes into play when you are running any 5,10 or 25 man. As a tank this will kill your frame rate since your are in the middle of it all.


So i like to dial in settings outside the AH in Org or Stormwind. This gives your a idea of your frame rate you can expect in 25 mans. If you can get to about 30fps there. You should be about 25-30 in a 25man and about 45fps in a 5man

So for the test system i am useing a Samsung Chronos 7 with the fallowing specs. Also i am running a clone of the stock HDD so i am running alot of bloatware and backround processes just like any other stock out of the box pc.

Core i7 3615QM "HT disabled. I will do some results with HT enabled"
8gigs DDR3 1600mhz "when using a igp use 1600mhz or better"
Kingston Hyperx 3k 120gb SSD


So I will cut to the chase and tell you what you came to know before i go on and on about diff. res and setting combos.

1920X1080. Ultra settings with the shadows, Particle Density dropped to fair and the texture filtering set to billinar outside the Org AH gave me 41fps average and when inside the AH it gave me around 96fps. This is playable. Enjoy your game.



Now i will be doing some testing and i will update the post with settings. How they are in 5 and in 25mans "i don't do 10m raiding sorry" This will give you an idea on what you can expect and maybe help you decide wither to get a a Intel or a AMD APU. Either way you will not be disappointed but i'll let you know how the 3rd gen igp handle wow.



1920X1080 DX11 Wow Full Screen mode. Outside AH in Org during peek server hours.

Ultra + Ultra Shadows 19FPS
Ultra + High Shadows 26FPS
Ultra + Good Shadows 28FPS
Ultra + Fair Shadows 31FPS
Ultra + Low Shadows 34FPS

Ultra + Ultra Shadows & Ultra Particle Density 19
Ultra + High Shadows & High Particle Density 30
Ultra + Good Shadows & Good Particle Density 30
Ultra + Fair Shadows & Fair Particle Density 31
Ultra + Low Shadows & Low Particle Density 38

As you can see some settings did not impact frame rates all that much. This is because there were no spells being cast. From my test i seen that in 5,10 and 25mans particle density has close to the same effect on the frame rate as shadows does. As most players know some high pop towns are just as hard or harder on the frame rate than raiding. Now with IGP's you will take a bigger hit from spells in the game then a graphic card so during game play in raids and what not your igp is more sensitive to that setting. Example you can be at 41fps in org and in a 5 man at about 55-60. But as soon as combat starts you can dip into the low 20's with particle effects on ultra and lowering them will help soften this hit.