Need GPU upgrade help >.<

[Mubox]

I don't think I said a computer will run 60 FPS in Dalaran.
I know some people get that in some areas of Dal.

But the particle density sucks there, and you frequently get 20-30 FPS, even with very top-end systems.

On 3.3 patch day Bonechewer instances went down (all of them) and I got ported into Dal, my effects are set to high except for texture filtering and shadows. There were several dozen (uncountable) number of people who got ported into Dal just like me. FPS was 59/60fps. i7-975, 1gb nV 260m GTX, 4 other clients were running at the time, they were ported into Shatt. Top end systems shouldn't struggle in Dal at all, though if all 5 of my toons ported into Dal i'd probably have noticed a more significant drop.

I play windowed mode, maximized to 1920x1200, 32bpp.

For the OP, I previously ran a core2 2ghz, 4gb ram, w/ and nV 8900m 512MB. A full AV would drop my FPS to 6fps (with all toons present, effects on all set to lowest, playing at 1024x768), I blame this entirely on the GPU as CPU use appeared the same. The 8900 series (and prior) were excellent for 'their time' but are 'fairly low-end' compared to what is currently available from nV/ATI (as usual for gfx tech).

You know what would really benefit all of these performance threads is if someone could update the wiki with a breakdown of all current graphics options (available from blizz UI, e.g. nothing specific to the console) and what each option depends on. For example, particle density is CPU heavy, whereas shadow detail is GPU heavy. Something like this may help people diagnose what they need to updgrade in their particular rig.. for example, if sliding particle density down doesn't really seem to help then it may not be a CPU issue, or as another example, if reducing model detail doesn't affect FPS but a reduction of texture detail drastically improves performance, it may be time to find a gfx card (and perhaps also a mobo/cpu) with a higher bus xfer rate, as this is something that depends on the bus bandwidth and clock rate of both the mobo/cpu and the gfx card moreso than the number crunching power of either the CPU or GPU.

Just a thought.