Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne

Leaving the realm of FPS's for a bit, we take a look at Blizzard's massively popular RTS Warcraft 3, and its expansion pack, The Frozen Throne. As we have mentioned in the past, even for its superb image quality, WC3 is not a terribly performance-intensive game, so we aren't expecting any surprises here. Because WC3 does not have a benchmarking mode, all frame rates are approximate using a custom replay and FRAPS.

Warcraft 3

Warcraft 3 HQ

With only a marginal blip with the 3.04 drivers, you could practically set a watch to the 9700 Pro's performance on WC3 without AA/AF. Turning on these features causes a little more variance in results, but even here, there is ultimately no significant change in performance in the end. Though, we are curious about the overall lower frame rates compared to the high mark of 58.9fps with the 3.06 drivers.



Catalyst 5.11 versus 3.00 (mouse over to see 3.00)

Like with UT2004, there's not much of a story here with image quality. Although the nature of how we benchmarked and screenshot WC3 means that it's never exactly the same twice, there is no appreciable difference in IQ between the first and the last drivers, or anything in between.

Even more than with UT2004, Warcraft 3 is a no-story. ATI did not make any driver changes that significantly impacted either IQ or performance.

Unreal Tournament 2004 Halo
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  • n7 - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    Yeah the mouseover is borked.

    Interesting review.
  • JayHu - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    In the article you refer to driver revisions 3.4 and 3.6, but the labelling on your axis reads 3.04, 3.06. Took me a couple glances to figure out what you meant.
  • Ryan Smith - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    Fixed, we had to improvise on the graphing engine(which has to sort by something) so the 0's were thrown in without thinking to change the article. Thanks.
  • microAmp - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    Mouseover ain't workin' with IE & FF.
    :(
  • Howard - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    Doesn't work with Opera, either.
  • BigLan - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    Broken here as well w/ IE
  • Ryan Smith - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    It should be working now guys, our managing editor was puting it up earlier and it somehow went live a bit early.
  • reactor - Sunday, December 11, 2005 - link

    same thing going on here, picture disappears when i try to mouseover. interesting article though, good stuff :)

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