Finding a Balance with Graphics Settings

The higher the frames, the better

©2014 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Scientific research shows that a majority of people prefer viewing motion pictures at a higher frame rate than the traditional 24 frames per second—FPS—standard. (Didyk, Eisemann, Ritschel, Myszkowski & Seidel, 2010) The same concept applies to various mediums of motion picture, including video games like World of Warcraft. The higher the frames that are running on a television or PC monitor, the smoother the motion of the picture showing will be.

Monitor technology limits how high the frame rate shown can be; a 60Hz native refresh rate—a max of sixty frames shown per second—has dominated the PC monitor market for several years. The popularity of 120+Hz monitors are steadily increasing in the market today.

Regardless of the type of screen, this post will help you start exploring how to balance your game's performance on your PC.  The goal for optimal visual performance is keeping your games FPS running as close to your monitors native refresh rate as possible. Still, the balance of performance and graphics fidelity on any computer is as varied as the person who owns the PC.  Experimenting with the individual settings will help find what works and what does not.

The graphics menu

Before making any tweaks to your WoW graphics settings, we need to actively measure the frames per second that your game is running at. Blizzard has built a frame counter into the game engine, which is toggled on and off using the Ctrl+R command while in-game. The counter should appear in white text at the bottom center of your screen.

©2014 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

 Adjusting the graphics settings is one of the main methods to finding the balance between graphics and performance while playing. For those with a keen eye, you might have noticed that the FPS counter in the screenshot above is showing under 60 FPS. The frame rate in the game will always be varying, due to other reasons besides graphics quality. In this case, the server connection is causing my frame rate slowdown, since I took this screenshot in the middle of a city with many other online players.

The majority of WoW's gameplay is located away from these overcrowded cities, so you will experience higher frame rates while playing through the actual game content.  Still, tweaking your graphics settings in an area that experiences low frame rates will give you a better comparison about which settings affect your computer the most.  If you want more information about other factors that cause lag, the following guide on GeForce.com is a good starting place: How to Get Rid of Lag

Navigate to the game menu (press Esc) to find the System menu button and select it.

©2014 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The Graphics section is divided into a Display options list and a Graphics options list. In the Graphics list, there is a slide bar that allows you to select a preset quality setting for you to start with. This is a simple way to change levels of graphics quality for comparison, but spending some time changing individual settings will produce more refined results to your performance.

Hovering over the drop down list for each graphics setting will show a pop-up dialogue explaining the function of each feature, as well as your systems recommended setting (which is based off the hardware detected in your computer).

©2014 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The recommended setting is often a calculated guess determined by the game developers. You may find that it works just fine for you, but I urge you to spend a little bit of time experimenting with these options. You may prefer extra graphics quality for a slight hit in performance or vice versa.

Be sure to press the Apply button on the bottom right of the menu to activate your new settings when finished.

References

Didyk, P., Eisemann, E., Ritschel, T., Myszkowski, K., & Seidel, H.-P. (2010). Perceptually-motivated real-time temporal upsampling of 3d content for high-refresh-rate displays. Computer Graphics Forum, 29(2), 713–722. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01641.x

Blizzard Entertainment. (n.d.). Blizzard Entertainment. Retrieved from http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/

GeForce.com. (n.d.). How to get rid of lag. Retrieved from http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/how-to-get-rid-of-lag-guide

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