World of Warcraft and SLI

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: taltamir
First make sure you have 4GB of ram. WOW is a RAM whore and it will benefit a lot more from the extra ram then from extra GPU or CPU power

More RAM never hurts, but advising someone to "make sure" they have 4GB of RAM is ridiculous... 1GB eliminates any noticeable HD swapping in WoW with WinXP in my experience. Needless to say, if you're running Vista you'd want 2GB of RAM anyway. I didn't notice one bit of difference in WoW performance going from 2GB to 4GB though.

 

[Vipeax]

Games that need 4GB ram in Vista are games like Crysis, not WoW.... As mentioned earlier: WoW is CPU limited. Going from an Opteron 170 at 3GHz (basically same benchmark results of an AMD x2 6000 stock) to an E6750 increased my fps by 300% or something. Now with a Q6600 & a 9800GTX I sometimes hit over 500 FPS while grinding. About 200-300 FPS in Orgrimmar.

 

[kb3edk]

WoW runs like crap for me in SLI. It did back when I first got the game and ran it on a pair of 6800s, and it runs like crap now on a pair of 9600s. A couple alt-tabs out to log on Ventrilo or read a raid strat, and the game becomes completely fux0red until I close/restart it.

I currently disable SLI before I start WoW because even a single 9600 is basically overkill, framerate-wise even at the resolution I play at (1680x1050). Voila, no more problems with alt-tab!

Also I should mention I'm running on a much older SLI chip... nForce 4. And RAM is not an issue either, I have 3GB (and I will agree with everyone else here that WoW is a RAM hog)

 

[JWade]

if you only have 2gb of ram, i would upgrade the ram to 3gb or 4gb of ram before upgrading your card. I have multiple systems with WoW on them, all different specs. I took the ram out of one to add it to another system, went down from 3gb to 2gb of ram, there was a big performance hit in WoW (all systems are running vista in one form or another). With 4gb of ram and a 8600GT my x2 4400 has no issues runnng wow, never beow 30fps anyplace (I play with everythign maxed out)