Few questions regarding wow settings and GPU/CPU dependance.

[Nuckels]

I am curious which of the following settings is more dependant on gpu or cpu performance. (I am aware WoW is a CPU dependant game for the most part)

Shadows
SSAO
Sunshafts
Liquid detail
View distance

Thank you kindly.

ps: Please don't answer based on JUST assumptions.

[Vash The Stampede]

Nearly everything on that list is GPU dependant with the exception of View Distance. That can be CPU or GPU which depends on the game. In Minecraft if you increase draw distance you will murder the CPU, while in Skyrim increasing draw distance will attack the GPU.

[Nuckels]

Nearly everything on that list is GPU dependant with the exception of View Distance. That can be CPU or GPU which depends on the game. In Minecraft if you increase draw distance you will murder the CPU, while in Skyrim increasing draw distance will attack the GPU.

It was only in correlation to WoW for me, but so this also applies to world of warcraft?

[Vash The Stampede]

Without knowing anything in how the game engine works, I would just say CPU and GPU. The game engine is old so it might do T&L on the CPU, but they've updated the graphics so maybe T&L is on the GPU now? When you increase draw distance you increase the amount of polygons rendered as well as textures. So there's most demand on the CPU for rendering polygons unless done on the GPU, and there's more textures which demands more filtrate on the GPU.

Unless someone at Blizzard wants to inform us how the game engine works, I can only tell you what the game demands and it really demands a powerful CPU. You could throw a GTX 750 Ti and WoW would be happy at 1080P, but that CPU needs to be fast.

[Stormspark]

Shadows are INCREDIBLY CPU dependent on WOW because of the age of the engine and how shadows were implemented. You need an Intel CPU to handle ultra shadows (no AMD can do it). AMD's can usually handle medium shadows, with the high end overclocked ones doing ok on high.

Most everything else on the list is a mix of CPU and GPU. That said, you can max out WOW (everything except AA) on a 960. So once you hit the 960 the CPU becomes the bottleneck for everything. As far as AA goes...how high you can take that is GPU-only. The highest setting of SSAA will murder even a 980ti.

[Vash The Stampede]

I'm pretty sure I ran WoW with Ultra Shadows on my FX-8350. Everything else is Ultra but I use 2XMSAA. Back when I had a Athlon XP those shadow features would kill my system but not today with AMD FX hardware. Either I'm lucky or something is really wrong with other peoples hardware. FXAA or whatever is max, is what seems to murder the games performance right now, and with SweetFX you could get SMAA which is not only superior in graphics but also performance. To this day I have no idea why every game isn't including SMAA, but somehow FXAA is everywhere. I'm perfectly fine with 2XMSAA but if it wasn't for me not playing WoW at the moment, I would SweetFX it and get me some SMAA.

Regardless, without any real info from Blizzard we don't know what graphics use what part of the PC. In a well coded game the entire list of graphic features should be using the GPU, ideally. But at this point you'll get more answers from Ghostcrawler about the game engine than most employee's from Blizzard.