How much improvement (if any) should I expect to see...

[knopstr]

I upgraded from a 1gb 8800GT to a new 1gb ati5870 video card last night. I haven't over-clocked anything yet or fully turned up any settings. I got it all installed late last night and didn't really get to test much. (I had to upgrade the power supply too).

I was just curious based on others' experience what if any difference it made in rendering 5 wow's.

Thanks as always.

[kate]

I upgraded from a 1gb 8800GT to a new 1gb ati5870 video card last night. I haven't over-clocked anything yet or fully turned up any settings. I got it all installed late last night and didn't really get to test much. (I had to upgrade the power supply too).

I was just curious based on others' experience what if any difference it made in rendering 5 wow's.

Thanks as always.

Well, if my experience going from a 260GTX to a 5850 is anything to go by, you'll see some improvement. Did you also add more RAM, though?

My old system:

Core 2 Duo 2.33, 4GB RAM (only 3 available, since I ran XP 32 bit), GTX260, running at 1900x1200 resolution

New system:

i7 2.80 quad core, 8GB ram, 5850, windows 7 64 bit, 1900x1200 resolution

VAST improvement, as in, before I ran with main window settings on medium, 4 side windows on lowest, throttled non-active window FPS to 10 and still lagged a bit when swapping windows or, god forbid, going to Dalaran. If I turned on mouse broadcasting my system would literally overheat and bluescreen inside of 30 seconds. New system I don't have to throttle if I don't want to, and just for fun I ran all 5 windows at maximum settings and was still getting about 30ish FPS in each.

I'll still run everything throttled, since I can't really see those windows very well, and probably reduce the settings just to avoid heat issues, but the difference was *huge* I'm still thinking of another couple of upgrades: going to 16GB RAM and adding a SSD for the OS and gaming partitions.

[knopstr]

I'm running a quad core 9650 from Intel (it was free...my wife works there) with 8gbs of RAM on Vista64. I have windows 7 but have not yet made the switch.

[Kicksome]

I saw a nice improvement when I went from the 4850 to the ati5870. It was very noticeable in Dalaran and WG. Maybe a 30% improvement.

It all depends if Video is your bottleneck though.

[Ualaa]

I saw a very noticeable improvement, quite a while back...

When I went from an 8800 GTX to a 4870X2 card (which is probably the best ATI card that is also below your card; the 5870 is a huge step up from my 4870).