Mad Priests on Madmortem

WoW’s graphics engine can be tweaked by setting a multitude of Variables from inside WoW – some provide features you can not access using the standard interface, and some simply increase the range of what you can do in the standard interface.

The two main methods for changing the CVars are either simply typing something like “/console characterAmbient 1″ or adding a line “SET characterAmbient 1″ to your config.wtf (if you ever really screw something up, simply delete your config.wtf to reset everything to default).

For an overview of CVars have a look over at WoW Wiki

Below is a list of more (or less) interesting tweaks to your graphics engine:
Note: Every command listed below is tested by myself, both in what it does and what its limits are. However, I may be wrong (i.e. I might simply be to stupid to set the cameradistancemaxfactor to 3.4 as some people suggest – but I simply do not get any difference to setting it to 3.0)

characterambient 0 – 1: Toggles between giving extra lighting to characters. This is primarily personal preference.
extshadowquality 0 – 4: Changes the shadow detail. I like setting this to 0 simply because all those shadows really annoy me at times .
skycloudlod 0 – 3: Changes the level of detail of the clouds. This is only really visible while travelling with a flying mount.

farclip 1 – ~1600: Extends your viewdistance, the hard cap seems to be slightly below 1600. At least for me there was no need to set farclipoverride to 1, although wowwiki suggests that this might make a difference.
horizonfarclip 1 – ~7000: Extends the distance in which prominent features are drawn (foggy hills mostly)

groundeffectdensity 16 – 256: Changes the amount of clutter on the ground (i.e. grass, little crystal fragments, whatevers). Having a high value here is really pretty
groundeffectdist 0 – 140: The distance in which the clutter is drawn on the ground. 0 to disable (this improves visibility of herbs, gnomes, etc)

cameradistancemax 0 – 30: cameradistancemax * cameradistancemaxfactor is the maximum distance you can scroll out with the camera. The absolut maximum is therefore 30 * 3 = 90.
cameradistancemaxfactor 0 – 3: cameradistancemax * cameradistancemaxfactor is the maximum distance you can scroll out with the camera. The absolut maximum is therefore 30 * 3 = 90.

Personally, I have put everything of those on max, except for shadowquality which is at 0 – But then again I figure my PC is rather acceptable, so your mileage will vary