# World of Warcraft Friday Release!!!



## Viro (Feb 8, 2005)

Alright, alright, those of you who are lucky enough to be in the US are probably bored of this game by now. Those of use who are in Europe are finally going to be able to play this uber cool game come Friday!!!

Does anyone know how the games run on the Mac? I heard that when it was first released in the US, WoW ran quite poorly on Macs. Anyone know if this has been improved?


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## chadwick (Feb 9, 2005)

There was a client update that improved the Mac client a little bit. It runs really slow on my Mac hardware, though, so I didn't really see an improvement. From what I've read, it's pretty close performance wise to the PC versions based on the video card alone. I'd really recommend a 9600 Pro or better card to play it. 64MB VRAM minimum. 

My iBook with the 32MB Radeon 9200 Mobility and the Mac mini with the 32MB Radeon 9200 are pretty much unplayable, maybe 10 FPS. I've heard of people with PowerBooks using the 64MB Radeon 9600 Mobility getting 15-25 FPS, which is playable. My PC with the GeForce 5700 gets about 35 FPS worst case, and 45-60 FPS in most places, so any card of that caliber or higher will be great on the Mac, too.

I think you folks in Europe will be getting your own servers. Here's to hoping that they will be less busy than ours, but chances are they won't. They still have serious server side issues to work out. Be patient with them, because the game is great fun.


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## Damrod (Feb 11, 2005)

Has anyone heard of a solution so that you could host your own server? I know that Blizzard won't supply us with that possibility (sure, they want to make money with the monthly fee for playing on their servers...), but are there any actions from 'freelancers' doing something in that direction?


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## brianh (Feb 11, 2005)

WoW works great on my machine. Have gx5200 card and 1gb of ram.


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## chadwick (Feb 11, 2005)

What kind of frame rate do you see, brian? (Ctrl+R to turn that on in the game.)


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## Viro (Feb 14, 2005)

I've got WoW today! The game looks alright, it's quite fun and my video card stutters in towns, but it runs fine otherwise . I've managed to progress to a level 5 night elf rogue in the last 2 hours. Cool.


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## Viro (Feb 14, 2005)

I get about 10 fps in towns, and 10 - 20 fps when I'm out prancing in the forest. Funnily enough, I didn't think my frame-rate was that low, as everything seemed quite playable, with the occasional jerks here and there.

It's still quite fun though I don't know how long the fun will last before I get bored with it .


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## chadwick (Feb 16, 2005)

What hardware did you have again, Viro?


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## Viro (Feb 17, 2005)

Powerbook 12" 1.33 GHz, with 1.25GB RAM but I don't think the RAM is helping much in this case. Still, the performance isn't too great and could be better.


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## chadwick (Feb 17, 2005)

Interesting. I just got my Powerbook 17" today with the Radeon 9700 w/ 128MB VRAM and it plays quite nice. It performs with about the same frame rate as the 2.4GHz Athlon I have with a Radeon 9600 Pro.  The 12" PowerBook only has a GeForce2Go 5200 or something similar, I think?


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## chevy (Feb 17, 2005)

Anybody tried an iMac 17" 1 GHz (GeForce4 64 MB)


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## Viro (Feb 17, 2005)

The 12" Powerbooks have the under powered fx5200 Go. Which kinda sucks but so far, the game is still playable, even in highly populated areas. I've found that if you zoom in on your character, the framerate goes up! Probably because your FOV is limited and thus there is less to draw on screen.

No idea how an iMac G4 would do. I imagine it would be similar to the Powerbook 12" since the video cards are almost identical.


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## Pippin (Feb 22, 2005)

chevy said:
			
		

> Anybody tried an iMac 17" 1 GHz (GeForce4 64 MB)



Hey Chevy funny but I just installed WoW on a 17" 1 GHz today... And to be honest it worked fine. I am never impressed with games on Mac and was expecting about 10fps but it seemed surprisingly ok.

Edit that... Phoned my friend because I dont want to give inaccurate information but it was one of the 1.25 models with a 5200. :S If thats any help.


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