Warlords of Draenor's spruced up character models won't impact performance

World of Warcraft players needn't worry over the new character models in Warlords of Draenor. The visual upgrades to characters will not bog your system down or cause framerate drops. Or any other technical issue with the game.

According to Blizzard, the new models won't influence raid performance issues as most of the polygons and textures being drawn and rendered "aren't exclusively attributable to player models," but also to armor.

"On top of that, raids have their own surrounding geometry, bosses, etc... and all that adds up in the end," reads the post. "Obviously, new (more detailed) models means slightly more processing power is required, but new models aren't the only big change coming to WoD.

"We are also applying a squish to anything related to stats; this means that in certain situations, there might be some performance improvements, especially when it comes to addons that process combat data.

"More importantly, we are reducing the amount of visual clutter that currently fills every fight where a lot of players are involved.
Less sparkly stuff flying around means better video performance for everyone. Client performance is something we care about a lot. It doesn’t matter how well-designed an encounter is: you aren’t going to have fun raiding at 8 FPS.

"We want everyone to be able to enjoy playing with the new models, and our dev team is working hard making sure that WoW is as resource efficient as possible in order for that to happen."

In other words, players shouldn't be worried about any large performance drops. Things will likely remain "very close" to what they are experiencing right now.

WoW: Warlords of Draenor releases in the fall.