I was recently watching a beta test of Camelot Unchained where they boast about rendering 250 players at the same time at 70fps on a 1070 (https://youtu.be/TdK_gUSW9iA?t=3528).
From what I understand the biggest issue that causes lag is the client GPU not being capable of rendering hundreds of player models at the same time while maintaining decent fps.
Considering that classic wow was optimized for 2005 GPUs and internet, how many players do you think we’ll be able to have on screen while maintaining 60+ fps on a 1070?
1070 runs better in DX11 that don’t apply the 8.1 multi thread update. Wow are a game that CPU demand is the big problem in that case. So i guess with a i7 7700k, 200-300 players on screen (using spells) maintaning 60+ fps is more likely.
That right there should tell you not to get too excited. Assuming they keep their word about sharding, I would expect a fair amount of lag in heavily populated areas, even in 2019.
I think classic will run better than retail now. Classic consume less CPU/GPU resources than retail and will have the same technical updates on software.
It’s not the best comparison. Camelot Unchained is a modern engine that is designed for large scale battles. It is more fit for that purpose and has better capability of taking advantage of modern hardware.
Of course it will have advantages compared to an old engine not designed for large scale battles.
Classic’s advantage of course will be lower polygon counts, lower texture resolution and lower sight range. This matters a lot.
I suspect the server will crash long before you reach the limits of a modern high-end PC in Classic WoW, though. You may not be able to reach 250 players for that reason.
There is no way to tell at this point what is going to happen, theres so many changes and factors that could be anything at this point.
First of all the original classic ran on older hardware of course so that was to be expected, but also it was 32-bit which only used 3 gigs of ram and used older shaders and only ran on 1 core. It runs better on newer hardware but still has its limits due to the engine.
Now the modern client is better with 64-bit and more optimizations but it can still have these problems on max settings because of the new player models and higher texture armor and increased polygon counts, that’s a problem with the modern client not classic.
From what we saw at blizzon the new classic wow is using the modern client but with the old assets, so this could actually be even better since it will be using the lower detailed models and textures but with the modern engine and 64-bit and the latest hardware, this should be the best running client of all.