Hi EJ guys

I thought I'd ask here as many frequent visitors here raid. I have tried official tech forums without any luck...

I raid as a MT and over the passed month my FPS in raids has dropped to now its <15 and very jittery, and affecting TPS...

I understand this isn't a tech forum but I might be a common issue that many visitors have solved and thus could help me

PC specs
Athlon X2 64bit 3800+
Geforce 7800gt 512
2 gig memory
on board sound (relteck ac7 I believe)

In game settings is everything is on low.

So the specs are well above recommended specs for the game. I have optimised my athlon drivers to a state where out of raids it sits happily on 120fps.

Now in raids with nothing happening that will hover 40+

once the action starts (mags, SSC etc) it becomes very jittery and sits 10-20.

Now Addons are defiantly contributing to this as if I turn them all off its smoother and runs 25-30 in combat, but its not very realistic to run without any mods for raiding.

I'm trying a bare bones ui tonight with omen, pitbull, couple fubar mods like money, durability and finally bartender(I don't like how much space default hotbars take up, is bartender expensive? All updated using WUA).

So does anyone have any ideas?

Thank you

Since your performance is going down with time I assume that it's either your mods starting to eat too much memory or other performance issues going on in the background.

Your PC specs are very similar to mine (You have more RAM as a matter of fact) and I get 20-40 FPS in massive combat with all settings on Maximum, so I think there is definitely an issue here.

Given that your FPS is still bad on low settings I'm inclined to believe it's a larger problem with your PC than with your mods specifically.

Unfortunately I'm not more technically able to help you troubleshoot these. A few suggestions are to check your CPU usage and run antispyware programs such as S&D search and destroy and AdAware.

Hope some more tech-savvy EJ members help you out. I feel your pain.

Do you have anything in the background running that could be whoring memory?
Your setup is similar to mine, and i'm getting 40 fps consistently in raids with everything maxxed out.
Do you have a decent amount of space left on your hard-drive?
Running any programs such as MSN or winamp, anything like that?

Disable pitbulls aura module, and see if there is a performance difference.

Thanks for the responses guys!

I don't have anything run in the background except for things like g15 lcd manager, anti virus program, msn does run. I have run spybot pretty much every day also.

I have checked what processes were running using that windows process explorer and next to nothing showed up except WoW...

The fact you guys run similar mods and have similar specs gives me hope!

I do run at 1600x1024(fullscreen) res due to it being the native res for my monitor... I have tried lower but there is no lower wide screen resolutions available for my monitor so its not very realistic I can use them on a wide screen monitor.

I'll try dropping the aura mod also

Thanks

In what situations is your FPS dropping this much? I run a weaker setup (P4 3.2k, 2Gb Ram, 6600GT) and sit around 30 even with settings maxed using a generic ace2 UI. The one exception to my FPS woes is during Leo, where after a few attempts my FPS plummets - on this particular fight I'm assuming that the game is drawing the steam pump rooms even though they're out of sight, but I'm unsure. Otherwise I have very few issues, even in fights where there's a big draw distance and lots going on such as Al'ar.

I'm no expert but some tweaking I have done is, first, to run virus scanners and spyware checkers to see if there's anything running in the background. I use AVG and Spybot respectively for these tasks, both are freeware (I think). I also had an issue with a lot of dust in my PC, if you pull your case off and clean fans with a cotton wool bud that can help too.

Only change your UI if you've exhausted everything else, with a machine like that you really shouldn't be having problems.

Whoa, that helped me a lot. Thanks.

As much as I love Pitbull, it really is a resource hog for me as of late.

Pitbull is horrible, seriously. I went back to AG Unit frames after I saw how much memory Pitbull was hogging. The funny thing about it is originally Pitbull was boasting that it was smoother and required less mem than AGUF. That isn't the case in the least bit.

One thing you can try is to turn on the add-on profiling feature. I don't know how it is done using Blizzards default latency meter but it will let you mouseover the latency meter and see the cpu usage of mods.

It is very easy to do using the Fubar performance meter addon.

Another mod that is known to be a bit resource intense is KTM and you can try out Omen which should be better on your CPU. It is compatible with KTM and will publish data to other users who are still using KTM.

Turn off all in game sound if you use it. I used to get some awful FPS lag during raids, and since I turned sound off my FPS has improved drastically.

Just a couple of non-WoW suggestions.

Make sure you're not doing scanning or rendering in Windows while playing. This can be a RealTime Anti Virus, or other similar programs.

Defragment your hard drive.

Check video and network card drivers.

Fresh vista install gives me (on my system) 30 fps while full size frapsing in 1680*1050, after a couple of weeks perfomance drops to 17 fps. Dunno whats the reason.

I have a similar problem and just can´t find a way to improve my FPS.
Since I installed Vista my FPS during raid dropped dramatically to around 7-15 infight.
My system specs are:

AMD64 3700+
ATI 1950 AGP
2 GB RAM
X-FI Music

My ingame settings are: Everything on max, but only 1280 * 1024 display size and no AA and no Trilinear Filtering. There is no virus scan active etc.
Changing these settings doesn´t improve my FPS significantly.
I did some research on various hardware sites but didn´t get a working solution. Half of the people claim they have not lost any performance by switching to Vista and the other half has experienced the same problems with FPS drops.
But let´s say i go back to XP, i would only gain 10 FPS during raids and I think i should have a good deal more with my current system.

I don't know... I've got a A64 3500+, X850XT PCIe, 2GB and once the action really heats up, I'm down to single figures and thats with Windows XP.

Addons, resolution and graphic settings seem to affect performance only marginally if at all.

couldn't it be also that your hardware is not properly cooled, since it's summer?

I was going to suggest overheating as well. Since you are saying it has gone down over the last month, assuming you are living in northern hemi sphere, it may have become too hot or may be your cpu fan or case fan is not working properly? Did you check the temperature on cpu, vga and system? It might be that under load CPU gets too hot and is being throttled.

The only other thing I can think think of is defraging your hard drive.

I was having similar problems start early this week. Then I realized how hot it was to me and thought about the inside of my comp. So I went and installed ATItool and turned my x1900GT's fan to 100% and its been smooth sailing. I don't even notice the fan sound at all. Also I play wow on a 19"w 1440x900, vista home premium, 1gb ddr2 800 and C2D E6400@2.14ghz with 2xaa.

This is not directly related to the OP's problem, but it may be helpful for people who want to increase their FPS on lower-end systems.

Since 2 months I've been using Maximizer, a launcher program for WoW that opens WoW in a pseudo-full screen window. On low-end cards (such as in my laptop), this increases FPS tremendously compared to real full screen mode, or borderless windowed mode for some odd reason.

Maximizer | World of Warcraft @ Curse.com

If you have a low-end system, give it a shot (Source code is included and it is clean).

Since your FPS is steadily dropping I suspect that you are getting hammered by the bug described in this thread from the EJ UI forums.
2.1 - Macros Directly affecting fps?

In my case removing all macros didn't change anything. Blizzard Posters said conditional macros ( like /cast [nochanneling:Hellfire]Hellfire) were the root of that problem and you could circumvent that problem by telling the macro what tooltip it should display or by disabling the tooltip.

#showtooltip Hellfire
or
#show none


edit: There was another bug mentioned when people had decreasing fps after alt+tabbing. a workaround for that was having different monitor refreshrates for Windows and the game. But my fps are very stable throughout longer gameplay and alt+tabbing.

This is why they added a "Use software" option for sound. The problem is there's a lot of sound hardware out there (usually on-board audio) where marketing have made programming decisions and decided to advertise themselves as "hardware" mixing with some arbitrarily large number of channels, for example 1024.

What actually happens is the mixing is done in software and faked up by the driver. WoW takes its word for it and sends a ridiculous amount of audio channels at it, slowing your CPU down.

So, click "Use software" (or uncheck "Use hardware"... whatever the option is called, not on a WoW computer at the moment) and maybe reduce the number of channels too. It's not intuitive, but you'll most likely see an increase in FPS.

Edit: I also saw a huge increase in FPS from editing all my macros with the "#show None" recommendation. Next patch fixes that anyway.

I reverted to my old basic ACE ui system. My temps on the pc are low (50's for GPU)

I am getting 20 frames a second atm but it is no longer jittery. The main change would be the removal of pitbull...

All my macro's have a #show <something> in them either none or their function depending on if I need the cooldowns visible to help with timing.

Anyways I fps is very low still but not jittery I do hope someone finds an answer and I'm disappointed by similar specced machines are having the same problem.

I also have sound off now, though it didn't seem to make much difference.

Thanks