Galaxy GeForce 7300 GT with GDDR3

World of Warcraft

Publisher: Vivendi Universal Games

We're well aware that WoW is possibly the most popular game on the planet right now. It has millions of subscribers levelling up on a daily basis, and aims to be accessible to all. Given that this is a mainstream video card and World of Warcraft is such a mainstream game, we wanted to see how the performance came out.

The game was patched to version 1.12 and we connected to the Bloodhoof server.

We picked a section of the game towards the beginning, using a Human Mage character in and around the Jansen Stead. We ran a repeatable route around the fantasy game world and measured the average frame rate. We played with the detail settings to see how far we could push things.

We found that Galaxy's GeForce 7300 GT delivered a noticeably better gaming experience than the Radeon X1600XT. This is due to the smaller amount of texture units on the X1600XT - the 7300 GT has one texture unit per pipe which makes it faster in texture-rate limited games.

Our Radeon X1600XT suffered from a very low minimum framerate that was occasionally stuttery. This didn't change when we lowered the in-game details down to the minimum settings. Unfortunately, both cards were hampered by the small 512MB of RAM in the system, which is really insufficient to cope with the massive areas in-game.