So on Friday I collected my new rig, and it’s something of a beast. Phenom 2 955 Black Edition, 4 gigs of Corsair DDR3 ram(might upgrade that to 8gigs), 4890 Asus Top Edition graphics card (might get another and Crossfire the two) – the whole 9 yards.

Set up was easy. All I had to do was plug the graphics card in, boot up Win7 off the DVD, kick off the installation and about half an hour later punch in some localisation settings, et voila. Windows 7 is a great OS, possibly Microsoft’s best since XP. It picked up all devices and set up drivers for everything bar the graphics card, which needed the latest Catalyst driverset. Even picked up my wireless LAN and configured my network and broadband connection automatically. All in all, the most hassle-free migration to a new system and OS I’ve encountered in ages.

On to Warhammer’s performance, I’ll say this much. Night and day. WAR loves my new CPU and faster ram.Keep sieges with 3+ warbands? No problems, even at 1920×1200 and with specular and whatnot enabled.

The only niggle I ran into is that if you’re running Windows 7, you need to download and install Directx9. While Win7 ships with DX11, it seems Warhammer isn’t quite able to utilise DX9 emulation via DX11 yet. I suppose we can expect that to be fixed in a patch sooner or later.

It does raise the issue about this game’s reliance on hardware though, and when you look at the engine proper, one has to wonder exactly why it needs such a beast of a rig to run acceptably. During RVR we are routinely thrown into situations with dozens and perhaps hundreds of players on screen at the same time. I don’t know of many other games out there that deal with these situations without introducing instancing or phasing or something. When you consider how beautifully detailed WAR’s player and NPC models are up close, things start to make sense. While WAR’s environment rendering might not exactly be that great, the texturing and polycount on my Black Orc is far and away superior to any other MMO I’ve played. So chuck a hundred beautifully rendered guys battling it out amidst all manner of spell effects, and the pieces of this puzzle begin to fit. Thing is, in the midst of such a raging battle, nobody really cares about how pretty they look – what matters then and there is that they’re able to respond to a threat within a reasonable amount of time. And when your game client is running at 3 frames per second, well…that’s anything but reasonable.

I always suspected Warhammer was very, very hardware dependant and my new machine confirms it. I think it’s pretty safe to say, those specs on the back of the box? Ignore them. You need a top-end machine to run WAR acceptably when the custard hits the fan. For PvE a little hardware lag is fine, but in PvP lagging is a frustration that quickly begins to spoil your game experience.

So I wonder how many WoW fans quit WAR in disgust over the past year because their single-core, 2 gig crusty old 8600-based rig simply melted down every time they stepped into an RVR lake? And while patching in a new, lower-specced engine probably isn’t something we’re likely to see Mythic ever consider, it’s becoming cheaper and cheaper for us to contemplate a few upgrades here and there. Perhaps, before writing off WAR as an ugly, unresponsive goblin, give it the resources it needs to be that hulking, mighty giant. You might be pleasantly surprised at how much fun this game is when it’s not commiting suicide against your stone-age era PC. I know I was.