Comment by jajuuka
1 day ago
How well it runs scales with how new the content is. They illustrated this in the article, but they didn't test the current expansion content and high traffic areas. I imagine main hubs like Dornogal or the current raid tier will require dropping the graphics very low to not have a slide show. Bumping up the resolution has a significant impact as well.
With player hubs, it's always a stutter, but it also depends on the network connection - you can have someone with the best rig showing 10 FPS and someone on a laptop with 30-40 FPS at the same time.
Mass mobs combat in Karazhan is a pretty good raid tester - in raids, the FPS won't be as low as that (AVG), but the 1%/0.1% lows will be quite close. For systems with weaker and weaker CPUs, even the AVG FPS will come closer and closer as the game will get a single-core "world state" bottleneck more easily. I did some comparison benchmarks before for this, including a world boss world quest with lots of people ;)
Also, regressions in WoW are a nightmare to handle. You go to the latest raid, the FPS is fine, but someone next to you has a slideshow.