8 years of World of Warcraft. time for new gfx engine

Technology never stops evolving and we all know that most games usually end up falling behind, as time never stops, while trying to keep up with the latest hardware.

But actually, a game like WoW is constantly updating its engines, with every new expansion and sometimes even during normal patches, we get a few updates here and there, both to the graphics engine but also to many other kinds of engines, like animation, A.I., network, scripts, physics…

WoW is actually a very efficient and polished game, and it has to be so, players need a smooth gameplay while doing very demanding CPU/GPU intensive tasks, like being in a city with hundreds of players around you, 25-man raids, or even world bosses when there’s 2 or 3 more 40-man raids around you trying to tag the same boss, and then there’s addons, which introduce some overhead but provide one of the most powerful game customization capabilities that I know of, adding extreme versatility and expansibility to the game.

Many changes and updates have been done to the game’s engines throughout all these years, some players might not notice them immediately but they are there.
Most of the engines that we use are made in-house and remain exclusive to our games. That’s why we typically don’t discriminate most of those changes and release extensive technical details.

For example, with Cataclysm we were able to introduce DirectX 11 support and many new different features like dynamic sunshafts and improved “liquid” rendering (aka awesome looking water!). With Mists of Pandaria we have better and bigger textures, improved shadows, overall better and more detailed 3D models and some stuff that you just won’t notice because it’s not visually distinguishable, like performance improvements on the way the game renders the world around you.

We also need to be careful about any changes we might apply to graphics, as sometimes those changes can mean a feeling of loss to many players that love and are used to the way the world looks. We know WoW can be very close to player’s hearts and that our community is incredibly passionate about the game, so we need to be extremely careful about any design changes we apply, not only visual changes.

29/11/2012 04:11Posted by Derpfatty

That's because WoW mostly runs on 1 core and not 3,4,5 or 6. It utilizes sometimes core 2 and 3 for a very few % but that's so small it doesn't make a difference.

Have you tried to change the configuration to try to maximize performance using some console variables?

I've been paying attention to WoW's CPU core usage since at least Cataclysm was launched, and I must say that I get pretty even and very high numbers when it comes to % of CPU usage in at least 2 of the cores.

If you happen to have a very high CPU usage on only 1 core, you might want to try to check your /WTF/config.wtf file inside WoW's folder, and edit some variables out.
*Please remember to make a backup copy of this file just in case...*

There’s at least 2 variables that probably deserve taking a look:
- timingMethod
- processAffinityMask

If none of these variables show up on your config.wtf, the game is automatically using the best values for your computer, you can still add these lines and force a specific value but it’s not recommended unless you know what you’re doing and have any performance issues that you need to solve.

I know this isn’t very user friendly, and especially processAffinityMask can be hard to understand so here’s the basics:
If you know which CPU you have and how many cores it has you can manually try to set the processAffinityMask value and see what works best.

Generally you should use for:
2 core CPU’s: SET processAffinityMask "3"
3 core CPU’s: SET processAffinityMask "7"
4 core CPU’s: SET processAffinityMask "15"

For 4 cores, you can experiment with values of 15, 85 or 255, I won’t get into much detail of what that does, but you can check on wowwiki if you’re curious.
This is basically the same thing as opening Windows Task Manager, Processes Tab, and right clicking on wow.exe and clicking on “Set Affinity…”
What this does is it tells your OS which cores it can use.

For timingMethod, as long as you have a multi-core processor, that is, anything that has at least 2 cores, you should have this line in your config.wtf (again, if the variable isn’t there, means the game is automatically choosing the best value):
SET timingMethod "2"

There are many more variables that can influence the game’s performance, for example, if you ever used any addons to measure or benchmark your cpu’s usage, there’s a very high chance that those addons activated CPU profiling, and that is a major performance decrease if it’s not deactivated properly by the addon or the user. (scriptProfile should be set to FALSE so it becomes disabled, SET scriptProfile "0", again only do this if this variable already shows up on your config.wtf and has a value of “1”, which means it’s activated)
Here’s a list of console variables for the Engine, Graphics, and Interface

Again, please backup your WTF folder, messing around with variables is generally safe and usually you can undo most mistakes, the game even does this for you if for example you happen to use a value that is out of range, but you should always keep in mind that the game usually automatically picks up the best variable values for your system, so it’s not recommended to change them manually unless you are having any performance issues and really know what you’re doing.