Alas, for inadequate hardware. As others have suggested, a Radeon 9600 is by no means the solution to any problems. Sure, it probably cost a *reasonable* amount of money in real-world terms, but it was released as a budget card. In 2003. Now, as a resident of the world of IT I'm sure the enormity of that two year gap won't be lost on you.

But I digress; it seems that (at the very least in WoW) what ought to be a perfectly decent setup doesn't actually perform well. I can't comment on the issue with ATI cards post-1.8.1 patch, but I've *never* found that I could get good performance on my Powerbook G4. This is a 1.5GHz 2004 model with 512MB of RAM (Mobility Radeon 9700) so it's no slouch, yet I literally run it with every setting at minimum and it's *still* only just about tolerable. Entering Ironforge makes the game begin to resemble a flickbook.

By choice I play the game on my Windows PC. Whilst it's very sad to have to say it, the only way you're really going to get maximum quality out of the game is to go that way. I will be very interested in seeing how this changes once Apple go the way of Intel, but I have this nagging suspicion that the problems are at a driver level. If you have a relatively tiny game-playing userbase, you're never going to get the scale of demand for better drivers that Windows gamers prescribe...

But anyway. Best practical advice? Buy a Radeon X800. Expensive? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Cheaper than buying a PC? Yes :)