George In The Meta
Can you play WoW Forever on a laptop?
By George In The Meta ·
Short answer: yes. I've been playing the WoW Forever beta on a gaming laptop, and it plays fine, which is really nice. It ran at 140 FPS in the Orc starting area, plugged in, with the graphics slider on 4 of 10. It does get hot, but the heat comes out the back, not through the keyboard.
What laptop am I playing WoW Forever on?
An HP Victus 15 gaming laptop. These are its specs, read straight off the machine:
| Part | What it has |
|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Ryzen 7 7445HS, 6 cores, 12 threads |
| Graphics | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, 6 GB |
| Memory | 16 GB |
| Screen | 1920 x 1080, 144 Hz |
It's a mid-range gaming laptop, not a top-end one. I took it travelling so I could keep playing.
What FPS does WoW Forever get on a laptop?
140 FPS in the starting area, with a few Scorpid Workers around me, so nothing major. That's with VSync on and a 144 Hz screen, so it was sitting right up against the cap.
These were the settings: graphics quality 4 of 10, texture resolution on High, view distance 4, shadows 2, and DirectX 12. A busy capital or a raid will be heavier than the starting area, so I'll add those numbers after launch.
Does WoW Forever make a laptop hot?
Yes, it gets hot as balls, but not on the top. The heat is where you'd expect it to be, coming out the back with the fan.
The keyboard and the front, where the trackpad is, aren't warm at all. The fan is pushing out some air, though.
What are WoW Forever's system requirements?
These are Blizzard's requirements as reported by MeinMMO:
| Minimum | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | 10, 64-bit | 11 |
| Processor | 4 cores, 3.0 GHz | 8 cores, 5.2 GHz boost |
| Graphics | 4 GB, DirectX 12 (GeForce GTX 10 series) | 8 GB (GeForce RTX 40 series) |
| Memory | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| Storage | 128 GB SSD | 128 GB SSD |
My laptop is above the minimum but below the recommended spec on two counts: 6 cores instead of 8, and 6 GB of graphics memory instead of 8. It still hits 140 FPS. Blizzard also says your graphics card has to be an NVIDIA Maxwell (2014), AMD GCN 1 (2012) or Intel Skylake (2015) generation or newer (Blizzard).
Did I have to change anything on the laptop?
A few Windows settings got in the way at first. The laptop was set to sleep after 5 minutes even when plugged in, so it went to sleep mid-game until that was turned off.
Windows' 125% display scaling also made WoW's interface a different size from my desktop, so the UI scale is set to 0.75 on the laptop. And the brightness (gamma) was much darker than on my desktop, so that got turned up too.
So is a laptop fine for WoW Forever?
On this one, yes. It plays fine on my laptop, which is really nice. I play it plugged in, and the fan does its job.
If you're choosing what to play at launch, I've written up my Orc Enhancement Shaman plan, and everything else on Forever is on the WoW Forever page.
