New Dual-Boxing Setup for Classic WoW

[Landianism]

Hey Guys,

first of all, sorry for my bad English; i'm not a native. And also I'm really sorry if someone already ask that question, but I only found threads about dual-boxing hardware, that were 10 years old.

I played Vanilla WoW back in the day and I'm super hyped for the release of classic next summer. But the problem is, that i sold my old gaming pc in 2014 to buy a macbook (i5 dual-core 1,6 GHz; 8 GB RAM) for college. I tired BFA on Mac (no dual-boxing) and it works fine for me with 15 fps (i know that's low, but i had no lag) and graphic settings on 5. I also tried a vanilla client (1.12.) on windows bootcamp with 40 fps and that was also fine for me. Then I discovered dual-boxing with hotkey and isboxer few months ago, and I love it. Never tried it back in Vanilla (thought it was cheating). But it's to laggy on my macbook...

So I want to dual box, when classic hits (nothing fancy like 10 or 20 toons multi-boxing). But I didn't play WoW or any PC-Games for a few years and have therefore no knowledge about gaming hardware (you lose track of that stuff). I looked at the hardware requirements at the WoW Website for BFA (minimum requirements: e.g.: i5-760, GeForce GTX 560 2GB) and I thought: Ok, if this is the minimum requirement, then I have to get something better to dual-box. On the other hand, I thought: BFA works on my shitty macbook with only two cores and no graphic card, so do I really need something better than the minimum requirement to dual-box classic?

I'm fine with sub-optimal graphics. I know there will be a "Classic" button in the graphic settings. Also, my budget is small; still going to college. But I thought that I have to buy a new pc anyways because the macbook is even to slow for 'single-boxing'. I just want to do some dual leveling and dual instant farming, just for the fun of it. No PvP no Raiding.

What do you guys think? What Hardware do I need to Dual-box smoothly?

Thanks in advance for any recommendation. You're helping a newbie/future dual-boxer out ;)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

What's your budget?

[MiRai]

I would imagine that any machine built in the last six years* should have no issues 2-boxing Classic

* assuming it wasn't built with bottom-of-the-barrel hardware at the time it was considered "new"

[Apatheist]

i5 dual-core 1,6 GHz; 8 GB RAM

I'm fairly sure this machine will be able to run two classic clients without issue even in high density scenarios if you tinker with your settings.

I know we're not supposed to discuss private servers here but you could easily test this yourself right now.

[Landianism]

Thanks for the quick responses :)


What's your budget?

Like 500 Euro = 600 USD


I would imagine that any machine built in the last six years* should have no issues 2-boxing Classic

So that's like i7-4xxx, min. 8 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 7xx? When I compare that with current Hardware, then I assume, that a AMD Ryzen 5 would be fine, right?


I'm fairly sure this machine will be able to run two classic clients

Tried to run two Vanilla Clients and yes it works, but it's very laggy. And I think that Classic will come with updated graphics.

[MiRai]

I know we're not supposed to discuss private servers here but you could easily test this yourself right now.
It's not really the best test since it isn't the same client.


So that's like i7-4xxx, min. 8 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 7xx? When I compare that with current Hardware, then I assume, that a AMD Ryzen 5 would be fine, right?
Sure, but your budget of $600 needs to be stretched how far, exactly?

[Apatheist]

Tried to run two Vanilla Clients and yes it works, but it's very laggy. And I think that Classic will come with updated graphics.

You can tweak the classic client a lot to improve performance. Check out this thread (https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1100&sid=971a5eba84666f2fe1c2a3e95d1d2c4a).

Reducing things like particle density and view distance below the minimum available via the client has a huge impact.

I know Activision says they're going to tinker with the API but they've said they will not be updating graphics. During Activisioncon they stated they would be recreating the classic models and textures as faithfully as possible so I imagine trying out the available private server client will give you a fairly sound comparison.

[MiRai]

You can tweak the classic client a lot to improve performance. Check out this thread (https://forum.nostalrius.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1100&sid=971a5eba84666f2fe1c2a3e95d1d2c4a).

Reducing things like particle density and view distance below the minimum available via the client has a huge impact.

I know Activision says they're going to tinker with the API but they've said they will not be updating graphics. During Activisioncon they stated they would be recreating the classic models and textures as faithfully as possible so I imagine trying out the available private server client will give you a fairly sound comparison.
Without a doubt, Classic will be using the updated game client, and most of those commands in that post have been drastically altered, are currently locked down, or are long gone from the current game client CVars, and it's unlikely that Blizzard will be unnecessarily restoring old CVars just to please the #NoChanges crowd.

The Classic game client will also be rendering in DX11, not DX9, so there's both improvements, as well as additional resource requirements, to running 11 over 9.

Finally, using an updated game client will allow Classic to run smoother. An obvious statement, yes, but, for example, the original Vanilla game client updated a player's position 64 times per second, and this created an unavoidable stutter unless you were able to properly cap your your framerate at that number, which required that your display's refresh rate was, at least, 64Hz. Perhaps there was a small percentage of people playing on CRTs that had a higher-than-60Hz refresh rate, but it was still annoying to deal with, none-the-less.

[Apatheist]

Without a doubt, Classic will be using the updated game client.

True enough. The principle remains the same, though. Setting weather density to 0, disabling FX glow, etc. Pretty much every version of the game has had some out of the box ways to improve performance beyond what's available via the in-game UI. People were discussing render scaling in another thread. If it's a newer client that may be an option. It wasn't in classic.

I keep flipping between pessimistic and hyped for classic. Love the game but the list of unauthentic changes keeps piling up.

[ebony]

Well i think classic is only in 64bit or the beta was, as well so that old p4 under my bed might not work!