So, what the opinion of the stress testers of WoW?

[--Pete]

Hi,

Then there's the graphics. Pretty, but nothing special. The "Things are invisible, until you are within 75 meters of them" effect pretty much spoils them, if you are looking at the horison.

Have you tried changing settings in the Config.wtf file in the WTF sub-directory? I find that the with the settings pushed up to the max, the game looks very good, but is unplayable on my ancient machine. For your info, the text of a Blizzard post follows (slightly changed on values since I never thought I'd need to share it).

--Pete

#############################################
Edited to the values actually used by me (PPM)
#############################################

Here the the values that are worth mentioning. Feel free to change their values to find the best combination for your system. If you experience any problems, just delete the file and all the settings will restore to default.

SET lod "1"

Toggles terrain LOD on and off ... looks much nicer with it off, but draws about 2-3 times as many polys. If you have a 2ghz+ processor and a GF4 or better, you can usually turn this off.

SET fullAlpha "0"

Leave this to "0" ... almost no objects use full alpha, and this setting does not affect spells or particles. Turning it on will slay your framerate if you do get close to an object with full alpha.

SET doodadAnim "0"

Setting this to "1" will enable environment anims, such as windmills, birds, etc. All animation is very CPU intensive. I wouldnt suggest enabling this with less than a 1.5ghz machine.

SET mapShadows "0"

Turns display of terrain shadows on / off.

SET lodDist "50"

Generally leave this at 50-100. Sets the distance at which the terrain LOD change occurs. Only meaningful when LOD is "1".

SET DistCull "150.000000"

The absolute max distance an object (not terrain, but objects on it) will be drawn. Much like SmallCull, this value heavily affects framerate on lower end machines. On a high end machine you can set it to the same as your farClip setting. It should be a good bit less than farclip on a slower machine.

SET shadowLevel "1"

Sets the resolution of the shadow maps on the terrain. 0 is high, 1 is low.

SET trilinear "1"

Any good video card (GF3 or better) set this to "1".

SET frillDensity "8"

Sets the density of the foreground grass, rocks, etc details. "8" for a lower end machine, "16" for a mid range machine, "24" or greater for a fast machine. Goes up to 256 max i think. 256 is not for the feint of heart and might crash you.

SET farclip "177.000000"

Matches the farclip slider. Range is 177 to 777. Dont ask why the weird numbers =P Farclip is the single biggest setting that will affect your framerate. Experiment!

SET specular "0"

Specular cannot be used without pixelShaders. Enables specular highlighting on certain terrain textures. Looks nice and shiny!

SET pixelShaders "0"

Enabling pixel shaders allows the world to be rendered in less passes, potentially increasing performance on cards that support them. Pixel shader code is still work in progress, so on some video cards its faster, some its slower.