Intro
It has been years since I played World of Warcraft, and when I did, I played it on a potato. I last played WoW in the Cataclysm expansion when Blizzard overhauled alot of the graphics settings that you could play with an introduced an overhaul to many of the starting areas. Fast forward to 2020 and I have started playing again in WoW Classic, the "Vanilla" offering of WoW that was released in 2019.
Many of the graphics improvements that have been developed over the years have been added to the base game and it is running on an updated engine. Now that I have a beast of a computer to play on I want to see how far I can push the graphics settings.
While there are many things available that have been created to increase fidelity, such as third party modifications like ReShade, this post will not go over those. ReShade itself should not be bannable as it does not read memory or adjust anything to generate a competative advantage, unless you count glorious shader settings as a competative advantage.
Things the will be tested
- Increasing ingame settings to see how much of a difference they make.
- Modification of config.wtf file using ingame "/console". The settings being tested are the collective settings introduced into WoW Retail since launch as documented in https://wow.gamepedia.com/Console_variables
Methodology
In each test I will be determining what the setting does and determining the best place in Azeroth to screencap the change. There will be a before shot, and an after shot. If needed, there will be a motion picture to showcase the graphical change.
Indiviual Tests
In Game System - Graphics
- Display Mode - Render Scale
- Anti-Aliasing - at various resolutions/render scales
- Texture Resolution
- Texture Filtering
- Projected Textures
- Environmental Detail
- Ground Clutter
- Shadow Quality
- Liquid Detail
- Sunshafts
- Particle Density
- SSAO
In Game System - Advanced
- Triple Buffering
- MSAA
- Multisample Alpha-Test
- Post-Process AA
- Resample Quality
- Contrast
- Brightness
- Gamma
Console Variables
Note : Not Every Setting Will Need To Be Tested, Or Have a Need to Be Changed. Each setting that provides an adequate graphical fidelity/performance change will have a recommended setting next to the bullet point.
https://wow.gamepedia.com/Console_variables/Complete_list/Classic