Testing procedures and selected cards
Test configuration
| Os | |
| Operating system | Windows 10 x64 Pro 1803 (17134.165) |
| Driver | The game was tested with the latest public drivers available at the time of the benchmark:
NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready 399.07 |
| Game | The game was tested in the latest version available at the time the benchmarks were set up:
World of Warcraft – 8.0.1 (27547/27602) |
We recently updated our test configuration to ensure that the system is the same as building a "typical middle class" over the coming months. We chose an AMD Ryzen platform – especially because the 1600X is a processor that offers decent (game) performance for little money. And we adapted our test system – as far as possible – to the current most popular and widely used hardware. This knowledge and configuration are based on data from the Steam User Survey (as of August 2018):
- 8GB of RAM use 39% of players (our configuration has 16GB, and is equivalent to almost 38% of players on Steam).
- The Full HD resolution is used by 61% of players, but still play 14% with a resolution of 1366 x 768. QHD have less than 4% of players, and the spread of 4K is still a joke. We will therefore only test in Full HD.
- 4-core CPUs are represented by almost two-thirds (59% to be precise). However, we expect a higher prevalence of 6-core CPUs in the coming months.
Test protocol
We perform all measurements with the PresentMon tool and the GUI programmed by the Igor, which allows us to perform many simultaneous measurements. It also can also create very accurate graphics.
To ensure that the performance of the graphics cards is really realistic, we heat them before measuring. In fact, most graphics cards have a certain and very individual power limit, which is only reached once the temperature of the GPU has stabilized. This means that measurements made within the first few minutes of operation lead to better performance and are therefore not representative.
Therefore, we always let the card first reach its nominal operating temperature and then record its performance measurements during the test run. In the graphics options, we tested the game in Full HD with the maximum (level 10) options, except for the environment details, which we only set to "High" to avoid activating HBAO+. We leave the surrounding details at 9. The MSAA is set to 8x/8x.
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