x3100 and World of Warcraft?

First off: I do realise integrated graphic cards aren't good for gaming.

That said. I currenly have a laptop with a Mobility Radeon 9000, which is an integrated card as well. I only play World of Warcraft. With my current graphic card, I can play World of Warcraft lag-free (most of the time) when all my settings are at it's lowest. I do experience lag in Shattrah.

I was wondering if the x3100 integrated card can do World of Warcraft well? This a much more recent card than my current one, so I'm hoping it will do better. Is it possible to play World of Warcraft with high settings or perhaps even at the best settings? Or is it still impossibe?

 

well, i think it will be able to handle the game better than your current one. but atm the drivers for it aren't mature at all. so you'd have to wait for the new drivers. but after they come out, i think you'd be able to play the game even on medium or high settings.

 

WoW will run fine on the X3100. Don't expect drivers to do much as WoW runs off a relatively old 3D graphics engine, and the biggest improvements on the X3100 is on the latest shader supporting games.

 

YOu may have to turn down the settings, but you should run it fine.

 

In short, yes. I run WoW on an Intel GMA 950 with frame rates of roughly 20 FPS with a mixture of low and medium settings. The game is still very playable.

 

I'm sure the new drivers would help WoW a lot, the drivers enable hardware T&L which I'm sure WoW would benefit from. Now if WoW was as old as, say Diablo 2 then I doubt it T&L would help

 

It should handle medium settings on WXGA or maybe even WSXGA without dropping below playable settings. As seen above, the GMA950 can play it, and the X3100 is a significant improvement (in percent improvement) over the previous generation in terms of gaming power.

 

I have another question. With my current laptop, I can't minimize World of Warcraft (to check the internet for example) more than twice or it will freeze. Has this got anything to do with my current graphic card? If yes, will this problem remain if I would own a laptop with x3100?

 

Ability to minimize wow is typically related to how much ram you have. If you're at 1gb or less of ram then the page file starts getting used. This means that each time you minimize your system is writing tons of stuff to your page file (hard drive). Repeatedly minimizing puts a big strain on the page file which can cause windows to stop responding. Running an integrated card also means that all graphics are done through your ram. So when you minimize you've got windows stuff + wow graphics + wow stuff getting cycled through your ram/page file.

The x3100 is still an integrated graphics card which means that it uses system ram for storing graphics. Solving the minimize issue is a ram question. I would guess that 2gb of system ram + the x3100 would provide a noticable improvement in ability to minimize.

 

I can tell you that I had the same problem, although this was on my desktop. With 1GB of memory mine also had a habit of freezing up after tabbing a few times. Going to 3GB made this go away, and I figure around 1.5GB might be the sweet spot, even with an integrated solution.

 

Dont ask me how or why, but the recent patches by Blizzard have effected the minimizing of WOW. Many people after 2.1 I believe crashed when alt tabbing, they did something to fix it with the last small patch, but now my SLI desktop (which they dont support) now often goes nuts when I alt tab, forcing me to restart WOW. My machine before that had no issues at all. You could run it in windows mode to get around the problem, the long story short though, its not your machine most likely.

 

Thank you for the explanation! You are right, I have only 512MB ram at the moment. The lack of ram might be causing this. I will make sure to get at least 2GB of ram in my new laptop.

 

My WoW crashes by alt-tabbing only when i do this on the begining of a gryphon/wyvern flight...

 

duh, the next message is the good one lol

 

For those who want to Alt+tab while playing Wow try this:

1-Set your Display Resolution and Refresh Rate the same for Windows and Wow ( even if you are using an LCD monitor),

To change windows settings:
Go to Start -> Control Panel -> Display then click on the Settings Tab and set your Display resolution to wharever your want i.e. 1024x768.

Sill in the Settings tab, look for the Advanced button and click on the Monitor Tab, change the Screen Refresh Rate to the desiare value (i.e 75 Hertz)

To Change Wow settings
Go to the in-game Video Settings and change the Display Resolution and Refresh Rate to the same as your windows Display settings.

2- Of course 1 GB or more of RAM always helps.

Now your can Alt+tabbing to see your favorite youtube videos while wating for the first pull.

oh btw.. sometimes when a patch comes out, blizzard resets the in-game Display settings, so make sure u have the correct configuration after each patch.

 

This isn't true. WoW is one of the games that are on the list that benefits more from software T&L.

Some people underestimate the power of CPUs too much. Athlon XP 2500+ T&L performance is equal to Geforce 256. Core 2 Duos are substantially powerful than that AXP, and IGPs are substantially less powerful than the modern value dedicated cards.

WoW is a relatively new game, but its not really shader intensive or require hardware T&L to run. It's a more pixel bound game so software will run faster because GMA X3000/X3100 doesn't have lots of pixel throughput.

 

Hey!

Well, i don't know why but in my case if I play WoW with x3100 on my laptop i'm not able to play it on medium or high settings at all. I rarely get 10 fps on low settings even if the place where i'm standing isn't growded. I'v noticed that at some places my fps is very good, like 25-31. Maybe someone can give me some tips how to improve my gameplay.

CPU: Intel Core2Duo T7300 2.0GHz
RAM: 1GB
OS: Windows Vista Business
GPU: Intel GMA x3100, I also have latest Intel drivers.

 

The Intel integrated GPUs benefit greatly from more ram. Often times, going from 1GB to 2, people have seen a doubling of their fps. I would suggest upgrading to 2GB of ram atleast, in a dual channel configuration.

 

The expansion places are more demanding than the pre-exp areas. My friend told me that his desktop with 8800GTX sometimes drops to 30 fps in the main expansion city, Shattrath which means the game might be not coded well too. You won't really get much better than that actually, I don't get too much better than you and I have E6600, 2GB DDR2-800 and G965 with XP.

I do run it 1024x768 everything High though.

EDIT: No I run it at 1280x1024 with little bit less than High.

 

Try changing your view distance. Apparently this is has the biggest effect on performance.