Guild Wars' graphic engine - state-of-the-art?

Right, so i have this asus laptop:

intel pentium dual core t2370 @ 1.73GHz,
2gb ram,
160gb hdd,
ati mobility radeon hd 3470 with 256 mb dedicated memory
vista ultimate sp1

And I can run Guild Wars, on max graphics settings like a dream. It averages at around 35-50 fps, even during the most crowded fights.

Then, when i play wow, I can never get beyond a 25-30 fps mark, and there really is no point comparing the two, as it's quite obvious which looks better. is it that wow's engine is crap?

Where's this big difference coming from?

Not sure on this one. It may not be that the WoW engine is 'crap', it's just that Guild Wars' graphics engine must be more optimized. WoW's graphics are not exactly graphically-intense, so this must be the case.

Indeed, quite the contrary, I might add. So one would expect wow to run better than guild wars, eh?

GW's engine is actually simpler than WoW's: it doesn't need to keep track of as many variables (for instance, GW does not have a true z-axis).

also, GW "cheats" a little bit when it comes to rendering objects, especially objects from far away.

if you pay very close attention, you'll find that GW will replace all objects from a certain distance with 2D stand-ins, thereby making GW's draw distance virtually infinite. if you zoom all the way out and look at your character (or anyone else's character from a distance), you'll find that the character sprite gets replaced by one with much lower polygon count. in towns, only your character gets rendered with maximum texture quality. everyone else is rendered in "medium" or "low".

there are other examples as well. shadows (if you turn it on) will only be rendered on characters, and only those within a certain distance. GW does not have any moving light sources (the sun never moves in the sky), so all shadows from terrain objects are merely textures drawn on the floor. GW's heavy use of instancing also allows it to pre-load textures (provided with sufficient VRAM), which dramatically improves performance because it will never load textures in the middle of a given map.

all these optimizations makes GW run faster than many older games on low quality/older machines. they also mean that if you have good hardware, GW will run ridiculously fast. GW typically runs around 120FPS for me (even in spamadan AD1 at peak times), whereas Lineage II (an older game) can dip into 20FPS at certain areas and viewing angle.

First of all, you're playing WoW, so that's your first problem.

But, moriz is right. Not to mention the lack of stuff popping up at you in the inferface. No "AGGRO" and the thousand other message WoW sends to you. So that helps.