All of this is irrelevant. I think that you are arguing something different here which may be why we’re running into so much confusion. I’m talking about what systems the game will RUN on. Not what systems it will run well on. By run I don’t mean 1 FPS but that’s also very different then run well at Max settings in the most graphically intense part of the game and not experience a bit of slowdown. We’re talking barrier of entry here.
Why do you keep having a hard time believing it? Nobody here has any reason to lie about what systems they got the game to play on. You still are arguing for much higher system requirements then even blizzard. From their website:
Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or better Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better
Geforce 2 at 32MB? Even crappy onboard graphics are better than that. 7600 Geforce is I believe five years old (my wife’s computer which I mentioned earlier has a 7800 in it so I can confirm that 7600 is a reasonable card to put as recommended as her comp runs the game well at near max settings). Either you have a computer that can run WOW or you haven’t purchased a computer in 3 years or more. From a video card standpoint a 10 year old video card can apparently run the game. There is no serious hardware requirement for WOW at the low end and at the high end it’s negligible.
I thought about starting a new thread polling the SDMB on what systems they managed to get WOW running on but decided it wouldn’t be a varied enough sample. .
Only one person here has actually claimed to run WoW with an IGP, and that’s Omni. Ellis Dee just assumed he’d be able to do it fine. I don’t think Omni is lying, but given that he seemed to have barely played it, I suspect he played in the starting areas - which are both the least graphically intensive part of the game, and they don’t have many other players. The graphical load there is at the lowest. WoW has been around for 5 years now, and they’ve developed the content to be more graphically detailed and complex as the game developed. Just running around in the common areas of the new expansion pack areas has a more significant hardware requirement.
The other end of this is that Intel integrated graphics are terrible. I’m not so sure that you are correct about “even the worst” IGP being better than a geforce 2. It’s hard to find numbers because no one really cares about benchmarking integrated graphics - if you’re serious enough to want to see performance numbers, you’re certainly serious enough to buy a video card.
But I did find this comparison that includes the IGP he has. The ones that say GMA 3100 or G33 without a corresponding video card are equal to what he has. For half-life 2, running at 800x600 low quality it manages to average 14.43 FPS. At 1024x768 medium quality, the frame results are so low they can’t even fit a number on the graph. The same board with an ATI x2600 is there for comparison, and even though the x2600 is old and was crappy even when it was current, it demolishes the IGP in question.
Now, as I said, WoW is not crysis or even close. It’s designed to scale well on a wide range of systems, and it’s coded very well for the most part. But the card in question can’t even eke out 8 or 10 FPS on even very low settings on another very well coded (and contemporary with wow) scalable engine - the source engine. I can’t find benchmarks specifically for wow, or I’d post them. But I’m extremely skeptical that you could get any sort of reasonable performance out of it. As I said, maybe in the empty starting zones at the lowest settings, but that’s about it.
I have never once used this argument, mainly because it’s far too stupid to have ever occured to me. Reading this quoted text is the first time I’ve evr even heard of the idea. Please stop projecting your insecurities onto me.
Oh, please. Maybe you weren’t directly making that argument. But it was a response to me saying that I wasn’t a partisan fanboy, that I was making logical arguments. And you rejected that, and compared it to my fandom of a bad team.
So tell me, if I were the fan of a good team, would my opinion on gaming have more merit?
It’s not the first time you’ve tried to mock my fandom and imply it somehow discredits my character or intelligence. That’s a lame form of smack talk even when it’s relevant, which it certainly isn’t on this topic.
Besides, the comparison is in-apt anyway. If you’re saying my like of PC gaming is like my fandom of a bad football team, it’s inaccurate because PC gaming is pretty clearly the superior experience. Which is the opposite of the Browns, who are consistently bad but remain relatively popular (at least well beyond what you’d expect with the population/economic situation/team success of their local fanbase, and a surprisingly widespread non-local fanbase). The fact that PC gaming relatively unpopular is not a reflection on its merits. In the court of public appeal, people will take what’s a little bit easier and spoonfed to them and appeals to the lowest common denominator. If any comparison is to be made, it’s more like the fact that I’m a big fan of shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, and they die an early death, meanwhile we’re going on season 14 of some garbage reality shows. Too few people appreciate the finer things and since the most money is made with the lowest common denominator, the good stuff dies and the medioce but easy stuff drowns out everything else in the market.