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We Tested Every WoW Forever Graphics Setting — Transcript

by Bellular Warcraft · 3,327 words · 485 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:01WoW Forever is not WoW from 2004. You're
0:03not going to get hundreds of frames per
0:05second for free just because you're on a
0:06modern device. All Blizzard's graphic
0:08updates have added quite a tax to your
0:11frames per second. You will need a
0:13better machine to play it. But of
0:14course, like [music] with just about all
0:15modern PC gaming, it is more complicated
0:18than just the game being harder to run.
0:20There are dozen new settings, some of
0:21which will destroy your frame rate for
0:23nice visuals, others which will destroy
0:25your frame rate and pretty much give you
0:26nothing in return. So, we've deeply
0:29audited things and after testing on both
0:31a high-end PC and a 6-year-old basic
0:34MacBook, we've figured out what settings
0:36change how the game looks and which ones
0:39give you your frame rate back at the
0:40lowest cost of visuals. And believe it
0:42or not, they're very much not always the
0:45same setting. By the end of this video,
0:47you'll know how to config WoW Forever
0:49just right for you.
0:53First up then, a bit of methodology and
0:54this will be vital for helping you apply
0:56what we have done to your own situation.
0:58Now, most of our testing was done on a
1:00PC with a 9800X 3D and a 4070 Ti Super.
1:05Now, that CPU is way more than needed,
1:07which is actually [music] good here
1:08because it means we could isolate
1:09exactly what the graphics card impact
1:12is. And once we had an idea of what
1:14changed what, we basically tried to see
1:16how low we can go. Now, in this case, it
1:19was on an entry-level 2020 MacBook
1:21[music] Pro. Basically, if we could get
1:23that thing to run WoW Forever, there is
1:25pretty much hope for anything made
1:27within the last few years. Okay, let's
1:30talk about findings then. Forever looks
1:32extremely different as a game, but most
1:34of this is driven by three new systems
1:36[music] Blizzard have added. There is
1:38new lighting, new fog, and new water.
1:40And as it turns out, only two of these
1:42things will torture your poor machine.
1:45You may be surprised which one actually
1:47comes pretty much for free. Now, these
1:49new graphical systems are [music]
1:50controlled largely by these options:
1:53shadows, SSAO, compute effects,
1:56secondary lighting, and liquid detail.
1:59I'll go through what these actually do
2:00and [music] which level of each actually
2:02matters to you because in many cases
2:04there are massive diminishing returns.
2:05[music]
2:06Shadow quality is quite simple. At ultra
2:08high every shadow will be a perfect
2:09outline. The lower you go basically the
2:12blurrier the shadow is. Now in our
2:13testing we found that ultra high was
2:16definitely a bit of a frame eater.
2:18Dropping it down a step or two was quite
2:20noticeable but it did give a good 10 or
2:22more frames per second back. We found
2:25that good was pretty much the goldilocks
2:27zone here. [music] Shadows weren't
2:29perfectly sharp but they also weren't
2:31huge blurry blocks. Going much higher
2:33than that just ate into performance for
2:35only marginal improvements to visual
2:37presentation and honestly lower looked
2:39awful without giving much [music] of a
2:41boost to frame rate. The next thing then
2:42is SSAO which stands for screen space
2:45ambient occlusion. Now this effect
2:47darkens the corners where light [music]
2:49basically shouldn't be getting into. So
2:50it is a form of shadow but it's not from
2:52direct lights like the various other
2:54settings we'll cover. Now with this
2:55turned off indoor areas look extremely
2:58flat and fake. The higher the setting
3:00goes the more of these little corner
3:02shadows the game tries to simulate. And
3:04generally speaking we found it was not a
3:06major performance hit. Now you will get
3:08a few frames per second back by dropping
3:10this down to high or good. Any lower
3:12than that doesn't confer much of a
3:13performance benefit and it does make say
3:16inns and the like look a hell of a lot
3:18more terrible. Okay, computer effects.
3:21This is going to be the least obvious to
3:23most people. I mean what is
3:25computing in this context? Well the
3:27short answer is fog. A lot of the new
3:30fog and mist is handled by this setting.
3:33And that made it honestly quite
3:35frustrating to test. And that's because
3:37some areas seem to show no difference
3:39yet in some other areas turning it down
3:41still did up our frame rate. But after a
3:44bit of a benchmarking nightmare the good
3:45news is actually darkshore. Specifically
3:47[music]
3:47the darkshore harbor at night. This
3:49ended up being a perfect test scenario.
3:52We can see that at higher settings the
3:53fog was just more evenly spread [music]
3:55out. But by contrast at the lowest
3:58setting you could see these obvious
4:00blocks of fog like you can see here in
4:03front of the structure on the dock. Now,
4:06in our testing we overall found that
4:07anything good or above basically works
4:10to make the fog feel nice, dense, and
4:13real. Certainly for this setting, the
4:14higher the better, but it does get
4:16really heavy in performance [music] as
4:18you move your way up to ultra. To
4:20quantify that, going to high and then to
4:22ultra knocked off dozens of frames per
4:24second. It does look absolutely terrific
4:27when it's maxed out, but it's probably
4:29the first thing you should drop down a
4:30bit if you want to give your PC a
4:32breather. Okay, the next thing then is
4:34secondary lighting, and this is doing so
4:36much heavy lifting. So, whenever a torch
4:39lights up a dark forest, basically
4:41that's this effect doing its job. Now,
4:44lighting is probably the most important
4:45thing in any game for vibes and
4:47atmosphere, but it's also something
4:49developers can get wrong, at least in
4:51terms of performance. They'd be real
4:53with you for a variety of technical
4:55reasons, this is just an inherently
4:56expensive [music] effect to do. Now, in
4:59World of Warcraft, it does obliterate
5:01your frame rate. On the ultra setting,
5:03it is honestly just brutal. This one
5:06setting chunked our frame rate by
5:07upwards of 50. That's just from going
5:10from the high setting to the ultra
5:12setting. And to be honest with you, the
5:13difference between high and ultra in
5:16most circumstances is very hard to see.
5:18To test this further, we dropped the
5:19setting down to good in this little
5:21warmly lit nook, and honestly it was
5:23quite hard to pick out what even changed
5:25[music] from a visual presentation side
5:27of things. But, for performance, well,
5:29it definitely did improve. So, overall,
5:32good is going to be fine in most cases.
5:35>> [music]
5:35>> I think high is really nice if you can
5:37afford it, but certainly stay above fair
5:40if you can because once you drop that
5:42down to fair, I think it completely
5:43kills the vibe. On to the last major
5:45technical improvement, and that is the
5:47water.
5:48Good news here. The beauty of the new
5:50water is not graphically intense at all.
5:53Even to a decently trained eye, there is
5:55little difference in any of the
5:57settings, and that's especially compared
5:58to the part that matters. All of the
6:00beautiful reflections and animations are
6:03still there even at low [music]
6:05settings. This upgrade is seriously
6:07impressive and on an artistic level, I
6:09mean, it's gorgeous and even better, it
6:12does not come at a notable cost [music]
6:14to your frame rate. So, you can leave
6:15this one set on the high setting and it
6:18really won't cause any problems. Now, in
6:20our overall testing, those were the
6:22major settings that really moved the
6:24needle the most and basically, if you
6:26put these new settings on to good, you
6:28will end up with the best bang for your
6:30buck. Ultra does look amazing, but it
6:33will put your machine through its paces
6:35for marginal visual improvements. But,
6:38WoW has got many more settings and while
6:39we're here in the graphics pane, two
6:41quick things. Both of them though are
6:43personal preference. Spell density and
6:45bloom intensity have [music] got tiny
6:47effects in performance, but a huge
6:49effect on your actual game experience.
6:51Now, bloom intensity is maxed out by
6:53default and in Mulgore or the Barrens,
6:56oh boy, this can be completely visually
6:59blinding. So, drop it down a little bit
7:01if you want to stop getting flashbanged
7:03by a patch of grass. Then, there is
7:06spell density and this is going to get
7:08really annoying with how bright some of
7:10the new cast animations are. We couldn't
7:12find any meaningful performance impact
7:14in just general gameplay, but this
7:16realistically will matter in raid and
7:18battleground situations.
7:20In many cases, I would say just keep
7:22this set on essential unless of course
7:25you explicitly want to see dozens and
7:27dozens of spell effects flying past your
7:29head and the whole thing being a bit of
7:30a light show. Now, in our testing, none
7:33of the other graphic settings really
7:35mattered that much, but there is a trend
7:37to be aware of throughout just about all
7:39of these. And that's that the highest
7:40setting is usually disproportionately
7:42[music]
7:43expensive. So, when in doubt, keep it
7:45one step below the top or one step above
7:48the bottom at a bare minimum.
7:50Now, there are the likes of view
7:51distance, clutter and environment. I'm
7:53going to skip over those for just a
7:55second because there's a really neat
7:56trick that we'll cover with those later.
8:00Before that then, step two which is
8:02actually the single biggest lever you
8:04can pull.
8:07>> One of the most important things about
8:083D graphics is of course your render
8:10resolution. 4K does not sound like a
8:13lot, but it is actually 3840 by 2160.
8:16That's 8.3 million pixels. Down [music]
8:19at 2K or 1440p, you actually have under
8:22half the pixels. It's only 3.7 million.
8:24And at 1080p, it's only 2 million. So,
8:27that's under a quarter of the work in
8:29theory, but in practice, it is actually
8:32even more. You see, why is new lighting
8:34system which uses ray trace global
8:36illumination has got to do a ton more
8:38work for every pixel that you add. That
8:41means the dragging render resolution
8:42down is essentially the biggest thing
8:44you can do to impact your performance.
8:46Going from 1440 even just down to 1080
8:49almost doubled our frame rate in certain
8:51situations. Now, the downside to that
8:53when taken too far is of course, well,
8:56it's low resolution. It's really blurry
8:58and that looks pretty horrible. Now,
9:00World of Warcraft does not yet support a
9:03bunch of the modern upscaling
9:04technologies like say Nvidia DLSS stuff.
9:07The only option provided in World of
9:09Warcraft is a very old version of AMD's
9:11FSR. At worst, it's [music] distracting
9:14and at best, it's just ugly. Ultimately
9:17then, your mileage will vary in this one
9:19even down to things like the size of
9:20your monitor, pixel density, how far
9:22away your monitor is from you, if you're
9:24playing in a TV or Steam Deck.
9:26Basically, bring down render resolution
9:28as you need, but do so carefully. And do
9:30keep in mind that because of how pixel
9:31count scales up exponentially, you will
9:33often get a lot of benefit from taking
9:35just 10% off. And really that won't
9:38cause too much blur. So, give this one a
9:41try. See what you're comfortable with.
9:42>> [music]
9:42>> You could save a lot of frames. Now,
9:44once you've done all those things,
9:45you'll be getting close to performance
9:47level that works for you.
9:48And with that done, it is time for the
9:50final step. And this is stuff that you
9:52are not going to find in the in-game
9:54settings menu.
9:57Here's the short version. Type this
9:59in-game command and you quite simply
10:01will be happier. It's just {slash}
10:03console ground effect density 64. Now,
10:06what this is is the setting for ground
10:08clutter, but it's being controlled using
10:10a console command instead of the menu.
10:12And that's because whenever you set
10:14ground clutter to 10 on the in-game
10:16settings menu, it actually is a value of
10:1948. Basically, the actual effect can go
10:22higher than Blizzard slider allows. And
10:25it really can go quite high. It can go
10:26all the way up to 256.
10:30When you set it to 256, there's a hell
10:32of a lot of ground clutter. It is
10:33honestly a bit absurd. But if you set it
10:35to 64, it is a noticeable improvement.
10:39Now, 128 can look good to some people.
10:41It's a little bit too dense for my
10:42taste, but some people like it. So,
10:44basically, it's just worth trying this
10:46one out for a few different numbers
10:47[music] to see which you prefer. Now,
10:50there is some sad news here, and it's
10:51that this one does eat into your frame
10:53rate a good [music] bit more than you
10:55may expect from just some extra grass.
10:57So, pop it back to 48 or just move the
10:59slider in the menu to restore things to
11:02their usual values. Now, for
11:04completeness' sake, there are actually a
11:06few more things in the settings. There's
11:09ground effect fade and ground effect
11:11distance. Personally, I don't recommend
11:13changing these too much because you do
11:15end up with some weird effects.
11:17Sometimes, look, defaults are kind of
11:19just the default for a reason.
11:21View distance, then. This one
11:23This is kind of wild, but it doesn't
11:25really matter. You see, with all of the
11:27new fog, keeping it [music] high looks a
11:29whole lot better, and we couldn't really
11:31find a notable impact on how the game
11:32runs. That might seem completely insane
11:34if you played retail WoW, but look, that
11:36fog effect actually does do quite a lot
11:38of work here. And the upshot of that is
11:40that rather than how we did it back in
11:42the day, where our view distance was
11:44really one of the first things we would
11:45change to get more performance, really
11:47nowadays, I would say render resolution
11:49is an easier way to just make the game
11:51overall more [music] playable in terms
11:52of frame rate.
11:54Okay. Now, we have walked through all of
11:56these different settings. But, speaking
11:58of playable, let's actually see what
12:00performance results we were able to
12:02achieve on our test computers.
12:06I'll kick things off on our beefy PC.
12:08The final settings were really quite
12:09simple. So, render resolution was
12:11actually fine to stay at 100 for that
12:14correct crisp look. Pulling shadows down
12:16to ultra, compute down to high, and
12:18secondary lighting down to high was more
12:20than enough to ensure at least a solid
12:23144 frames per second [music] in pretty
12:25much any area of the game. That's more
12:28than enough for the refresh rate of most
12:29people's monitors, but if you've got,
12:31say, a 240 Hz monitor, well, yeah, you
12:33can go above 200. Doing so was just as
12:36easy as taking all of those settings
12:38down one more step. With, honestly, a
12:40tiny enough impact to how gorgeous the
12:42game ended up looking.
12:44Pulling the resolution down to 75%
12:46[music] did turn it into a bit of a
12:47blurry mess, but ultimately, it got the
12:49frame rate to 300.
12:51What about our little MacBook, though?
12:54Well, it uh it did not fare quite as
12:57well.
12:58It was always clear that this one would
12:59be a struggle. The lack of VRAM hurt it
13:02quite badly, so every setting had to go
13:04one above the bottom to even have a
13:07chance. By a chance, I mean 15 frames
13:10[music] per second, which was completely
13:12unplayable. Pulling render resolution
13:13down to 50%, a brutal thing that hurts
13:16my soul, did get us closer to playable,
13:19but um
13:20it was about 22 frames a [clears throat]
13:21second, which, if you think the original
13:23Ocarina of Time, one of the greatest
13:25games ever made, has a beautiful, creamy
13:28uh frame rate, well, 22 is what it had.
13:31I consider it to be unplayable. 30 to
13:33many people is the bare minimum, 60 is
13:35the goal, and we did end up being able
13:37to hit 30 in this little MacBook, but
13:39that was by dropping all of the most
13:41important settings down to their lowest,
13:44which really meant that a lot of what
13:47makes WoW Forever feel like WoW Forever
13:49was just kind of lost. But, it was at
13:52least playable in a pinch, and WoW's art
13:53style is quite timeless, so it didn't
13:54look that bad.
13:56But, that's mostly because this actually
13:58helped us figure out that texture
14:00resolution did not need to drop at all.
14:02And setting this one back to high
14:04massively improved how the game looked
14:06with seemingly zero visual impact.
14:09Then, we went to Mulgore to test that
14:10out a little bit more, and that gave us
14:12more proof. We tried to keep render
14:14resolution low to keep core settings low
14:16and to push everything else. And what we
14:18found was a surprisingly playable game.
14:21Notably, with texture resolution, view
14:23distance, and ground clutter. They
14:25actually survived all maxed out, even
14:28while liquid detail could go up to good.
14:31And with all that tweaking done, the
14:32game still ran at about 40 frames per
14:34second. That's obviously not ideal, but
14:36it's more than playable on an old device
14:39in a pinch. A new MacBook Air or any
14:41modern Windows laptop will do a hell of
14:43a lot better than this thing. And if
14:45you're finding yourself looking for new
14:46hardware to play this game, that
14:48basically is good news. The next thing
14:50then is handhelds, and there's good news
14:52in that front. Now, we have not tried it
14:54on our Steam Deck just yet, but others
14:57are reporting [music] exactly what we
14:58would expect after all the testing we've
15:00done here. And that is a solidly
15:02playable experience across a few
15:04handhelds, ranging between 40 and 75
15:06frames per second. Do just remember
15:08though, if you need some FPS in a pinch,
15:10water is fine, shadows, compute, and
15:13lights all need to go down, and the
15:16blurrier you can stand, the better in
15:18terms of render resolution, at least for
15:20your frame rate. But before I leave you,
15:21there's an easy way out of all this that
15:23I actually want to warn you about. So, a
15:25lot of people recommend HyperFrame. It's
15:27an add-on that automatically adjusts
15:29your settings.
15:30This might be a skill issue, but we
15:33found that it used some kind of crazy
15:35hacks that we found to be more or less
15:37unacceptable. Its default settings drop
15:39your camera FOV. Now, that basically
15:42just means it tightens in your view, it
15:44will appear more zoomed in, and it will
15:47render less of [music] the world.
15:49It'll also make you more motion sick.
15:51So, in my view, that's one that's
15:52absolutely [music] not worth the
15:53trade-off. Plus, after using it, we
15:56started to see some pretty bad
15:57environment pop-in that just was not
15:59happening before. Now, maybe we got
16:02unlucky with a weird settings overlap,
16:05but if you want to fix [music] up your
16:07graphics, I would say it's better to
16:08just do it by hand, following all the
16:11things that we've laid out in this
16:12video. That way, you'll understand
16:14>> [music]
16:14>> how things work instead of having an
16:16add-on that does some pretty insane
16:18things sometimes that's just a bit of a
16:20magical black box that uh you won't
16:22really understand if you don't already
16:24know about all the settings. And if you
16:25know about the settings, you don't need
16:27the add-on. So, let us know if any of
16:29these things have uh helped you out.
16:31When in doubt,
16:33pains me to say this, but yeah, dropping
16:35render resolution really does just give
16:38you a shitload of frames. Okay, that's
16:40it for this video. Stay tuned for our
16:41huge add-ons guide. And if you want more
16:43forever, watch this next.

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