World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft is, not to put too fine a point on it, the single most popular PC game ever—and a likely application for a graphics card in this price range. To test WoW performance, we used the trial version of the game, cranked up all of the image quality settings to "ultra," and enabled 4X antialiasing. Even that wasn't too much of a challenge for these cards, so we bumped the display resolution up to 1920x1200. I then took it upon myself to do something about the terrible wolf menace. Over and over again. This may not be the most strenuous test of WoW performance, but playing solo against computer-run monsters should keep network traffic out of the equation, so that the video cards are our primary constraint.

Both of these cards run WoW perfectly well at this resolution, but the 9800 GT has a pronounced lead over the Radeon. That perhaps makes some sense, because the simpler shader effects in WoW aren't likely to tax either GPU too much, so the 4770's superior shader throughput probably isn't much help to it. The 9800 GT's higher memory bandwidth could be giving it the edge here. Just a guess, though.