Logical Increments Site?

[kalos72]

Anyone use this site or have an opinion on the recommendations?

I want to replace my old ass XP machine with a good new one to run several 5 man teams on. Thoughts?

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

[MiRai]

My advice has always been that if you (or whomever else) are going to use a chart (or benchmark) that was built to help people understand how a system can handle a single game client, that you should lean toward the higher end of the chart in order to gauge gameplay performance while multiboxing. That, and the fact that if you're going to build a multi-GPU system that you should stick to nVidia at this time since Crossfire doesn't work in any windowed mode.

That site also has a breakdown for World of Warcraft specifically, but to be honest I haven't read through anything they say on that page, so I cannot comment on that at the moment.

If you want more advice on what you should get, then we'll probably need a budget to start with.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I was pretty happily running 5 1080p clients on an i7-2600k @3.6GHz with a 580GTX Ti until I blew up my motherboard a few weeks ago. I had to drop some settings to keep FPS up with the main client at High graphics options but it worked just fine. I'm guessing that would have held up for Legion as well, with some further reduction of graphics options to compensate. 16GB of RAM might not be enough for Legion, depending on what you're doing on that machine while you're boxing.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

That site also has a breakdown for World of Warcraft specifically, but to be honest I haven't read through anything they say on that page, so I cannot comment on that at the moment.

I skimmed it and they don't mention much useful info.

Unfortunately, there are not enough WoD benchmarks available, so this guide uses the benchmarks from the MoP expansion. Once WoD is benchmarked, or perhaps when WoW is benchmarked again after Legion releases, this guide will be updated with the new data.

Pretty much useless for gauging multiboxability[sic].

[MiRai]

That site also has a breakdown for World of Warcraft specifically, but to be honest I haven't read through anything they say on that page, so I cannot comment on that at the moment.

I skimmed it and they don't mention much useful info.

Unfortunately, there are not enough WoD benchmarks available, so this guide uses the benchmarks from the MoP expansion. Once WoD is benchmarked, or perhaps when WoW is benchmarked again after Legion releases, this guide will be updated with the new data.

Pretty much useless for gauging multiboxability[sic].

This is the only benchmark for WoD that I'm aware of, and I believe the only site which continues to include a WoW benchmark (Tom's Hardware used to include a WoW benchmark, as well; not sure if they still do).

To be honest, I've been wanting to do a fairly comprehensive benchmark on WoD vs Legion now that the video settings are changing a bit. I had started doing one back before I upgraded my GPUs last year, but stopped because my current GPUs were limited, and I wanted to give people more information than what I was able to record at the time. Now that I've got Jesus-level hardware I can probably benchmark the game in 8K. >_>

[kalos72]

So then, is there a baseline for boxing? Something that says if I want to 5 man on low to mid settings, whats the minimum? I dont have more then 5-600 to make this thing if I can avoid it. A better monitor is the next thing...

[MiRai]

So then, is there a baseline for boxing? Something that says if I want to 5 man on low to mid settings, whats the minimum? I dont have more then 5-600 to make this thing if I can avoid it. A better monitor is the next thing...

It all depends on who you ask because different people can tolerate different settings when it comes to minimums. Some people can play at 1280x720 x5 @ 30 FPS, whereas others won't play at anything lower than 1920x1080 x5 @ 60 FPS. The hardware required to hit those two examples are much different, and without knowing what your expectations are it's really hard to say.

If you want me to take a guess, then I'd say that a current-generation (or equivalent) top-tier Intel i5 with a GTX 960 (or equivalent) for a bare minimum these days, and that's probably pushing it. An i5 may not have enough overall power to handle five game clients, and a GTX 960 may be struggling to push out adequate framerates when it comes to Draenor (WoD) or The Broken Isles (Legion) content. All of those components together (CPU, motherboard, RAM, GPU) are going to run at least $600, and then we're assuming that your older PSU can handle the newer generation hardware (and that we're re-using the case).

An Intel i7 is going to be the CPU you want to aim for, and then probably a GTX 970 (or equivalent), especially with the increase in hardware requirements for Legion, but those two components together are more than $600. It's difficult to upgrade after skipping several generations for a minimal amount of money because few pieces carry over to the new build.

[Crum1515]

If you want me to take a guess, then I'd say that a current-generation (or equivalent) top-tier Intel i5 with a GTX 960 (or equivalent) for a bare minimum these days, and that's probably pushing it. An i5 may not have enough overall power to handle five game clients, and a GTX 960 may be struggling to push out adequate framerates when it comes to Draenor (WoD) or The Broken Isles (Legion) content.

Speaking from personal experience, I have a skylake i5 and dual GTX980, and its difficult to do 5boxing wow, even with all settings at gutter trash level. my GPU handle it just fine but the CPU peg out frequently.

The extra cores, whether logical or physical are a big help.

If I lower to 720p levels its playable, but not pleasing in any way. I am a fidelity whore so take my experiences with a grain of salt.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The extra cores, whether logical or physical are a big help.

Agreed.

[mbox_bob]

Definitely agreed.

Game software architecture has been taking the slow road, but over the last couple of years has really started to hit it's stride with using multicore CPU's, so it is almost at the point where you need to allocate 1.5 cores per game instance. The architecture works well on a Dual core system @ 3Ghz+; normally only using about 50%-60% of CPU time. The remaining % is either idle, or handling all the other stuff that goes on in the background, without slowing your game down. All good for the single instance game.

When multiboxing you push the components harder, and you can whittle that "headroom" down a little (although not too much). You might want to think about 1 physical core per game, as opposed to a 4+4HT, where 1 HT core is approximately 30% a physical core, so it's like 5.2 physical cores, but we are not quite there yet. Of course this does depend on the game engine age too, but Blizzard have been slowly updating the engine behind WoW, so it's requirements have been going up over time. Looking at the requirements for Legion I'd almost be tempted to get a 5820K just to 5 box.

ps. I thought that logical increments site was quite cool. Very handy for "showing the progression path", although I think their RAM path is weak.