WOW - New Graphics Card or more RAM?

[nobbie]

I've now found a very good compromise for my system with P4 2GHz, 512MB RAM, Geforce4 Ti4200 64MB and a 19" monitor:

- 2x Anti-Aliasing in the Geforce4 driver setup is now turned OFF, resulting in much better texture detail but also more "jaggies" especially at object edges.

- To make the now visible "jaggies" less noticeable and increase texture detail further, I've raised the image resolution from 1024x768x32 to 1152x864x32.

- The "Mipmap Detail" in the Geforce4 driver setup is set to medium quality (best compromise between application speed and image quality).

- The in-game graphics settings of WOW are now set as follows: Image Resolution is 1152x864x32 at 60Hz monitor frequency, Terrain Distance ist about 33% (of 100% max.), Environment Detail is LOW, Anisotropic Filter is LOW, Terrain Texture is LOW, Texture Detail is HIGH, and Level of Detail is ON. From the Shaders, only Terrain Highlights is turned ON, Vertex Animation Shader is ON, Vertical Snyc is ON, Hardware Cursor is ON, and anything else is turned OFF.

It's amazing how effective this change from an anti-aliased 1024x768x32 resolution to a non-anti-aliased 1152x864x32 resolution is. About 20% more image content (image pixels in relation to the 19" monitor) and no Anti-Aliasing means more texture detail with hardly noticeable "jaggies" and at the same time much better performance for a 64MB graphics card. Bat Flights even over terrain like Silverpine Forest with lots of trees and detail are now acceptably smooth, and the noticeably higher harddisk activity during such flights is mostly due to the constant loading of new visible content. At this point, the PC would certainly benefit from more RAM, i.e. 1024MB instead of 512MB to make content loading faster. I also think that my Geforce4 Ti4200 could deliver even better image quality if it had 128MB VRAM instead of just 64MB, but I'm not sure that an extra 90$ for a new graphics card like an older Radeon 9600pro with 128MB would justify that extra bit of quality. What do you think?