I have an “ok” pc that was made about 8 years ago that I’ve been using for some gaming, mostly diablo 3 and Starcraft.
I recently bought a 2k monitor and upgraded my graphics card to a gtx 1060. But my cpu is still an i5 2500k.
I run diablo 3 on low settings but with 2k resolution at about 100 FPS (my monitor has a 144hz refresh). But diablo 3 is not optimized well for multi core and recent directx upgrades.
My question is if I get another monitor at 4K for WoW, will there be an even higher demand on my older cpu?
I’m curious as to what computer system pieces handle the higher resolution and if I’ll need to upgrade further if I were to get a 4K monitor.
Thank you!
Note that I know 4K isn’t required for wow classic but I’m kind of getting into pc tech and would love for my interface to be a smaller portion of my game visuals.
Don’t go overboard for Classic. I have a top of the line PC, video card, and a wide screen gaming monitor. I was getting 70 fps at max settings, despite getting 200+ in most of retail. I don’t think Classic is optimized very well.
The first thing I would do is upgrade that MB and CPU. Your video card is fine and 4K, while nice, is a bit overboard? But that depends on your likes.
But put the money into a cpu upgrade for sure!
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This will be difficult to answer for people, but you can answer it yourself by making a trial account and launching the current version of WoW to see how it runs on the lowest settings. I expect WoW Classic to have a very similar bottom end on requirements. A lot of current games are now affected by your RAM speed/size as well which i expect is pretty bad for an 8 y/o PC.
What i tell everyone who wants to upgrade any of their PC tech is to follow this as a guiding principle: Do not put components together that are too far apart on the spectrum in terms of performance. It squanders what you can get out of the good components and you end up being bottlenecked by the lesser parts. Instead try to upgrade everything to the same tier.
I know this has its limits as you may not have the cash to upgrade everything at once, but just try to be sure you can get all of the parts within a year or two to keep everything in the same tier.
Oh, and I should probably clarify. I was playing in Mulgore, which has draw distance for days. Once I started down-ranking shadows in the graphics options, I saw marked improvements in fps. But I still think the game is optimized poorly, or something is wrong.
- go to
www.wowclassic.com
- click “Download game manual”
- Page #6
System Requirements
OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Processor: Intel Pentium3 800MHz, or AMD Duron 800MHz
Memory: 256MB RAM
Video:
-
Minimum: 32MB 3D graphics processor with Hardware
Transform and Lighting, such as an NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card
or above.
-
Recommended: 64MB 3D graphics processor with Vertex and
Pixel Shader capability, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700
class card or above.
Sound: DirectX compatible sound card
Install Size: 4 gigabytes of free Hard Disk space
That’s strange. They said they won’t be supporting 32-bit operating systems, but it will apparently support 16-bit operating systems. What about 64-bit ones, then?
Thank you, I’ll just hope for the best when wow launches and upgrade based on need and preference from there.
My mobo cannot support newer cpus, so unless I upgrade that with my cpu, I’m stuck with what I got.
If I end up upgrading my mobo and cpu, I’ll just upgrade the whole pc haha.
My brother has the Beta.
I was able to have him log in on both my Last year’s new PC and it ran flawlessly as expected.
Where I was genuinely curious was how well a 11 year old gaming laptop that I have not touched in ages would run it…
Old gaming laptop specs:
- Core i7
- 12Gigs ram (laptop DDR??? old as hell)
- Modernized with a new SSD and Windows 10; boot time 4 seconds from button press.
- Only installed Software Win 10 and WoW Classic & Battle.net.
- 60 hz LCD display
- Ancient NVidia 460M graphics card
With that ancient gear Classic ran fantastic, IMO better than Vanilla ever did.
I hope that helps reduce your concerns.
For the price of a 4k monitor, I’d upgrade the Mobo and CPU so that you have a more modern computer. The 1060 is more than enough to play games. You’re probably not going to be running everything smooth at max settings, but it will run every game you try to play at a playable level.
4K is beautiful, but not many games are really pushing it yet. The point is to be playable by as many people as possible, while still looking and feeling modern. They want more people to buy their games, not less.
So those 2 upgrades will get you farther than a monitor upgrade ever will. I’d hold off on the 4K unless you’re editing 4K video.
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Thank you for some specs of your tested device.
Seems your cpu and ram is better and your resolution is lower, but your graphics card is definitely weaker than mine (most laptops graphics cards are).
Yeah the max resolution of the monitor on that Laptop is 720P…
The system reports 160 FPS, but in reality its only 60 because of the maximum refresh rate of the monitor.
Refresh rate is a lot more noticeable than resolution when you’re playing games. If you upgrade your monitor, get a 1440p that can handle 144hz and get gsync if you’re using a nvidia card / vsync if you’re not. Don’t make the mistake of going 4K with 60hz if you mostly play games.
On top of that, you’re probably not going to maintain 60hz at 4K on most games.
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Exactly, my monitor is 144 so I want to be pushing FPS up there on max settings. I’m no longer a 14 year old using a stock family pc.
That’s the exactly monitor I’m using, 2k, 144hz, gsync with my nvidia graphic card through display port. Sounds like I wouldn’t wanna do 4K.
I saw a video a while back where they prove that it’s not actually possible to see actual 4K resolution because it’s more detail than what the human eye can see… As for how true that claim is I don’t know because I am no eye doctor.
It’s true and it’s not true.
Now, it’s true that if we compare a picture in 2k and in 4k, people can’t disginguish the difference… UNTIL they start focusing on smaller details, especially background details. The difference between 2k and 4k is the amount of detail that can go into the smaller things you’re seeing. Basically for the spine of a book: Standard definition, you can tell it’s a book. 1080, you can tell they’re words. 2k, you can make out the name of the book. 4k you can make out the publisher of the book. But the main character is going to look exactly the same to you between 2k and 4k.
Questions, many:
Are you saying for example if you were to pause the video play and examine the image of the book (up close to the monitor screen)?
Curious how this is measured, because if you’re sitting on the same location as watching location then not sure how it would be detectable because of the physical distance from the screen.
So the resolution, as you know, is the amount of pixels. So when you’re comparing a 2k to a 4k, the 4k can fit almost double the amount of pixels into the same size screen. So that means that the little details on the spine of that book in the background are affected. So the higher the resolution, the more pixels that are able to show up on those small details. More pixels lets you have more detail.
And it does affect your main character. That difference can be the difference between being able to read the words on a patch the character is wearing vs not.
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Ah I see what you’re saying now.
This would also assume the camera is in focus on that book in the background because camera that use mechanical lenses for real life like focus on a certain object and things that are too close or too far will be out of focus and as a result blurry regardless of the quality of display we have.
For the sake of this exorcise, if the character was right up against the book shelf and the camera was 20 feet from the character and book shelf, then it would potentially be possible to see the character clearly and the books clearly, in addition read the text on the spine of the book on the shelf again assuming the character and books were in the same area of focus.
At least that’s how I am understanding what you’re saying in addition to what I know about how camera focus…
Huh, this is interesting, never really thought about it before but this could be why some modern animated disney movies look so… strange; because everything is in focus regardless of distance.
I would say your motherboard might be bottlenecking your system. Depending on the type of slot that it is in it might not be able to utilize everything the graphics card can offer.
If you change your MB be sure to save your windows 10 license.
100% agree on that one. Based on what you might have already spent on parts and the possiblility of purchasing another monitor it seems you might be able to afford I7-3770 which benchmarks a good bit higher than your current one without breaking the bank. GL, love building PC’s ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
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