Originally posted by: nitromullet
Originally posted by: Shortass
Originally posted by: nitromullet
Between the 4870 and the GTX 260, the GTX 260 is hands down the better card for WoW. As many have said, these cards are somewhat overkill for what is needed to play WoW, but with the higher end cards you can start to crank up Anti-Aliasing ("multi sampling on the WoW video menu).
Here's what you do if you want to play WoW at the best looking settings with the best fps.
1) Pick up a GTX 260
2) Grab nHancer from
http://nhancer.com
3) bump up all the settings to max in the game (make sure to set multi sampling to 8x)
4) In nHancer, go to your WoW profile (should aleady be in there) and do the following:
Set AA to: "combined", "8xS", "Enhance in game setting", and "super transparency AA"
Set AF to: "16x", and on the Optimizations tab select "High Quality" Texture Filtering
5) You're done.
This will allow to to play WoW at its best with solid fps through out.
With a 4870 you can get similar quality, but it will really only be playable through out at 4x multi sampling.
Granted, both play the game well no doubt about it, but between the two I definitely prefer the the GTX 260 (and I've owed both).
Interesting post, but why would you suggest that GTX 260 can handle AA better than the 4870? All reviews out there seem to point towards ATI having significantly better performance at 8x.
I don't suggest that the GTX 260 can handle AA better. I say that in my experience, the GTX 260 handles transparency AA better than the 4870 in WoW specifically.
The thing about most of the AA benchmarks on the web is that they don't generally focus on transparency AA. They simply notch it up to 4xAA and run benchmarks. Also, they never benchmark WoW. Apparently, the general consensus is that a high end video card is not anything you would want if you're a WoW player, yet I've brought every single high end card I've owned in the past two years to its knees with this MMO.
WoW and transparency AA seem to be a special case for some reason. You can run 16x AA in WoW with a lot of cards if you don't use transparency or use inferior IQ settings like CSAA.
Up to this point, the GTX 200s are the ONLY cards I've seen that can run WoW with 8x trSSAA (8x ADAA 'box'/'super sampling' is the IQ equivalent for ATI). While a lot of cards will run these settings smoothly for a large part of the game, there are places where they tank down to the teens. This includes cards/setups like: 8800GTX, 8800GTS 512, 8800GT SLI, 9800GX2, 3870X2, 4850, and 4870.
I'm not sure as to what the exact reason for this is, but my suspicion is memory bandwidth. WoW doesn't put a lot of stress on the shaders, but it appears that running higher levels of high quality transparency AA (@ 1920x1200) pushes the bandwidth limits of most high end cards. The odd (and disappointing) part about the 4870 is that is has roughly equal bandwidth to the GTX 260.
Another important thing to note about my post is that I mention nHancer. The reason for this is that the AA setting I use in WoW is not available in the NV control panel, but works great and provides the best IQ IMO.