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EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked

Does size matter? Will we see any advantages to gameplay experience with 512MB of memory on the EVGA 8600 GTS Superclock versus the standard 256MB? Will the extra clock frequency provide any real-world gameplay experiences? We will find out in today’s evaluation.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade

(DirectX 9)

World of Warcraft is a wildly popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) with over 8.5 million subscribers. It continues the Warcraft storyline from Warcraft III.

The most immediately noticeable aspect of World of Warcraft is the unrealistic graphics. They are artistic and stylized, almost cartoonish, and continue the visual style that has been a part of the vast Warcraft legacy. Partly due to this, and to obtain mass appeal, the game is not very demanding of hardware and can be set at high resolutions with high quality settings and still be playable on a wide price/performance range of GPUs.

The first World of Warcraft expansion pack, The Burning Crusade, adds what is essentially a new continent (though it is not on the same world as the kingdoms of Azeroth), known as the Outlands. It also adds a new playable race and member of the Horde faction: the Blood Elf. The Blood Elves inhabit an area far to the north in the Eastern Kingdoms, known as Eversong Woods. The focus of the expansion pack, however, is the chaotic realm of the Outlands which offers new quests, equipment, and lore enhancements, as well as other additions.

For our run-through we used the new realm in the Burning Crusade expansion, Outlands. For our route we rode on a Striped Frostsaber in and around Shattrath City in the Terokkar Forest.

All three video cards were able to handle the highest in-game settings this game provides. They were all also playable at 1600x1200 with 8X TR MSAA and 16X AF, providing the exact same gameplay experience.

World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade is not that demanding on the hardware. It runs beautifully on mainstream graphics cards and these three are no exception. All three video cards produced similar performance. The extra memory of the EVGA’s cards or the extra clock speed of the Superclocked version was not able to improve our gameplay experience here and made no difference what-so-ever.

If you are looking into getting the EVGA GeForce GTS 512MB Superclocked or regular edition to feed your WoW addiction save your money and get a 256MB version instead.

Image Quality

Screenshots below are in PNG format to eliminate compression artifacts and can range in file size of 1-3 MB.

Not a big surprise here all three cards delivered the same image quality and gameplay experience.