Profiling reducing FPS is perfectly normal. It's a debugging tool. It has to collect statistics as it runs Lua script, and that's always going to cost some CPU. You should have no reason to have it enabled normally.
It also introduces a bit of a Heisenberg effect - turning profiling on changes your FPS, which means that mods which change CPU usage depending on FPS rather than a constant amount will give a false picture about what their share of CPU compared to the rest.
The problem is all this stuff is running in Lua script. There's nothing really wrong with Lua. It's just there's a ton of UI running in it, and it's all interpreted. What they need to do is integrate a JIT:
That would make even the largest Lua scripts take negligible amounts of CPU. (For those that don't know what a JIT is, it's like how Java works - the Java bytecode gets translated to native x86 machine code on-the-fly so it's orders of magnitude faster than executing bytecode).
That's a slight exaggeration. Certainly something to consider, but it making UI mods take negligible amounts of cpu cycles is a ridiculous claim.
It's not an exaggeration. Java running in a decent jit is orders of magnitude (at least 10 times) faster than bytecode interpreting. LuaJit doesn't do quite as well, but have a look at the benchmarks yourself:
Lua's not really as suitable for Jit as Java is (lazy typing, table lookups, run-time instancing of types etc), but it still manages roughly 5x the performance of interpreted. Mods like SWStats (and similar), for example, apparently spend most of their time in table lookups and storing all that data, which according to the linked performance conclusions is something that LuaJit greatly improves. Mods which spend most of their time in C functions within WoW wouldn't see an improvement.
By "negligable" I mean "such a small percentage you wouldn't bother optimizing it". Five times faster would put most sane UIs into the single digit percentages of total CPU.
Lua's not really as suitable for Jit as Java is (lazy typing, table lookups, run-time instancing of types etc), but it still manages roughly 5x the performance of interpreted. Mods like SWStats (and similar), for example, apparently spend most of their time in table lookups and storing all that data, which according to the linked performance conclusions is something that LuaJit greatly improves. Mods which spend most of their time in C functions within WoW wouldn't see an improvement.
By "negligable" I mean "such a small percentage you wouldn't bother optimizing it". Five times faster would put most sane UIs into the single digit percentages of total CPU.
I think a speedup of 5 is a little too hopeful, but it would obviously still be a tremendous speed increase.
That would be 1 order of magnitude. There is a rather large difference between 1 order of magnitude and multiple orders of magnitude.
I said at least 10 times. Some very artificial microbenchmarks give results 150 times faster. Average speed ups on "normal" code are about 20 times, which is 1.3 orders of magnitude, but that depends on whether you define an order of magnitude as base 10 and whether fractions greater than 1 count as plural. Fair enough, one order of magnitude, I guess.
In any case, if they optimised the Lua engine it would again only affect stuff which is CPU limited due to the way the script is written, and not due to UI features or WoW/Lua native functions. I think Pitbull Aura Mod, for example, is slow simply because of all the UI bling and the rescaled Aura bitmaps with countdowns. Shame, because I find Pitbull pretty unusable without it.
Thing is, I don't think they'll ever bother with much in the way of Lua optimisations because it's only a problem for 3rd party mods, and not the built-in UI. They've only ever optimised the Lua engine whenever the built-in UI was slow, a trivial (or really begging) change that would benefit everyone, or integrating the latest drop from the official release.
Is there some alternative to Pitbull Aura Mod that still means you can track target and focus buffs/debuffs? It's a really obvious FPS difference for me but at the moment it's still worth using.
I run 2gb of ram, dual core 2.2 and for wow fps hovers about 25~. it gets especially bad in certain raid fights though with 10fps. only reason i can think of is that i use onboard graphics (because im on a notebook). any suggestions to improve the fps?
Benchmarks with loops are sped up by 5x, similarly for table lookup heavy ones.
Reading through the luajit website it seems they are missing some important optimizations like tail calls and usage of integers for loop indices (the latter would be pretty big). To be honest I am a bit surprised the performance increase is only 5x, but my guess is that this is a side effect of lua not having proper arrays (everything is a hash table in lua). A JIT can detect when a table is used as an array only and make it into one. Doing something like this is not trivial (needs whole program optimization to prove something like this) but it would wield tremendous speedups on loop heavy programs.
In any case I am derailing. The point is that laujit is 5x faster than the interpreter and there is still a huge room for improving it.
I too experience pretty terrible performance in raids, though with my aging hardware, it's much more noticable. I'm currently running Mac OS X 10.4 on a Dual G4 1Ghz with 1Gb RAM and a terrible graphics card with some 32Mb V-RAM. (I'm working on replacing it soon enough.)
I've found that running too many applications in addition to WoW will drive performance down a great deal, so if I'm getting unusually low FPS I will close my browser (which I am prown to have many tabs open on), kill any other applications that I'm not using to play WoW, and usually things begin to perform a bit better. Sometimes simply restarting works well, too.
I've also found that having too many things on the Desktop can slow performance, though I'm not completely certain I understand why. I play in windowed mode, so that may have something to do with it.
For Windows users, be it XP or Vista, check what Services are running in the background and look online to see what can be disabled without killing your system (but, obviously, be careful). Sharing, for instance, can be a source of concern, etc. I, for one, disable any kind of remote access/service daemons on my machine in order to remove whatever could be running in the background and taking up valuable processing time.
I don't know a thing about computers, sorry. But I'm wondering how do I upgrade drivers? I hear it a lot but I am clueless on how to do it. I get 5-10 FPS in raids and I'm tired of it. Help .
I messed with her computer a bit yesterday more and found that the highest color and sampling option (24/24 ?) at 2x multisample gives better performance than the other options.
2.) Increase your Page File size (I went with the manual page file size and set it as large as I could for maximum size).
A page file is basically a virtual RAM paging file on your hard drive. This means it's bound to your drive's seek times and read speeds.
A page file is useful when you're trying to run a memory hogging program like Photoshop, CAD or WoW on a system with low RAM.
With 2GB of RAM you shouldn't follow the default system advice (1.5x2GB) as that will not only slow down your system like hell, but also go well beyond Windows's memory addressing capacity (which for XP is only 4GB, physical + virtual)
On my system, with 4GB of physical RAM, the only reason I don't ditch the page file completely is because some games require a page file (namely Company of Heroes).
In order to optimize paging file access and read times, store the paging file in a hard drive different from the one you're running your system/game on.
Originally Posted by Cyrdan
5.) Be careful leaving IE up over time when playing WoW (I run with IE 7.0 with Tabbed Browsing). I find, for whatever reason, that having IE up all the time, and alt-tabbing back and forth seems to increase memory usage on the PC.
Both IE7 and Firefox are a bit leaky, memory wise. Killing and reopening the browser periodically will help you there.
Both IE7 and Firefox are a bit leaky, memory wise. Killing and reopening the browser periodically will help you there.
I found this to be true with Safari/Camino as well, but especially true with any browser with tabs. (Or maybe it's simply that we're all too comfortable opening tab after tab after tab...)
Probably should be standard practice to kill the browser and reopen it with as few windows/tabs as possible, such as bosskillers.com, DKP listing, etc.
I was looking into making a pvp video, but unfortunately running fraps or any of the other screencapture programs I tried drops my FPS from 20-30 down to about 5. For anyone who has made a video here, what is your normal FPS that is required so that when it is dropped down by fraps, the movie still looks decent? Also, any tips on perhaps a different program that will not drop FPS as low as the others?
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
Easiest way to get around this is to disable all mods, turn down all graphic settings and play with 800x600.
Specs first
x2 4400 +10%OC
2 gig ram
ati 1900xt (catalyst 7.4)
Windows XP Prof.
Well my raid-fps are also dropping to ~10-20 from 40-50(world).
i am, however running loooads of addons (pitbull, icehud, trinity, recount, quartz as the most important) an i've given up trying to improve fps through addon switching, as my interface is a very important part in my playing experience, and previous addonswitching never really made an impressive difference, even switching DUF/DAB for ace alternatives.
Also switching all addons off doesnt improve fps by any noticable amount.
I neither had any success with driver-updating or reducing/disabling grafic-settings.
However i noticed that even when idling in shat, WoW is always consuming 50 - 55 % of my total proccessing time, and possibly cant use more due to limited multicore usage.
So i am thinking that WoW is just wasteful with its ressources in a raid environment, and can't do any better on my system.
However there's one thing that really bothers me:
I'm running WoW windowed / maximised an when the WoW window loses "focus" and still has to be rendered in the background, my FPS drops to 0.5(est.), everything else on the PC slows down so its actually really hard to give WoW its focus back, and then it takes some seconds to resume normal fps. Repeated alt-tabbing or closing random windows(Firefox, Explorer, WoWAceUpdater...) in the background helps getting WoW to Run normal, as does having WoW run on realtime priority.
For example:
WoW running > 20 fps.
Virus scan pops up, steals focus > 0.5 fps.
Trying to move mouse to close the virus scan window, really hard to do as the cursor position is also only updating every 2 seconds.
Finally closed the evil antivirus, WoW fills full screen again, still 0.5 fps.
Between 3 and 10 seconds pass.
WoW returning to normal > 20 fps again.
Sysinternal's Process Explorer shows that my total CPU usage drops from about 60% to ~52% in the 0.5 fps phase, however it is coloring the bar red, which means it is "kernel mode".
By reading wikipedia i found out that "Switching from "user mode" "kernel mode" is, in most existing systems, very expensive."
There is always some "kernel mode" programs running, which i presume are the OS itself and the Hardware Drivers.
However i am wondering why WoW feels the need to switch to "kernel mode" execution when losing focus, blocking everything else in its way.
I also noticed the same behaviour while on the login or character selection screens.
So, if someone has/had similiar problems, or knows a way to help me, i'd be very glad.
I can only offer broad tips. (not in direct response to the previous post)
If you're running SWStats or Recap, make sure to go in and purge data regularly (SWStats > Timeline > Nuke). You'd be surprised what that does to your performance if you leave old, stale data archived for too long.
At 8pm, Norton AV does a scan. So if you suddenly lag hardcore right around the same time each night, that might be it.
Check your WTF\account\[accountname]\savedvariables folder (is that right?) and look for any extraordinarily large files, particularly with names corresponding to mods you no longer run (Gatherer, for me, was not good). Try and figure out what they're for and whether you can do away with them.
Make sure you haven't got an excessive number of copies of your Addon's folder backed up. I believe I read here that WoW parses all that upon loading, so if you have a billion files it takes a long time. (This may not affect gameplay once you get into the game.)
Try temporarily renaming your addons + WTF folder. If that doesn't fix it, even briefly, delete the new and rename the backups back to their original names. If that does fix it then you've got clutter somewhere. Point being, isolate the source, then work the problem.. don't just flail blindly. Do it on the trash clear :P
I used xperl for a while and discovered that it's method of "incrementally shaving" life/mana bars when people took damage/cast spells was quite the performance hit (this was on a 2001 desktop PC, mind you). You know what I mean.. how the hitpoint chunk that is lost flashes then fades away. Ugh. Along a similar line, 3d portraits used to hammer me pretty badly, as did party castbars and range checks. Disable the features you don't strictly need.
Running 1680x1050 on a 8800gtx (163.14, 160.04, and 156.16 drivers) with an OCed E6600 C2D at 3.2ghz, things I've noticed....
1. I can get 550 FPS staring at an ironforge wall
2. I average anywhere from 60-130 FPS in regular situations (60 being the lowest in extreme parts of Shattrath)
3. Raiding can occasionally drop me down to 30, but it usually sits in the 40-60 range during typical raid situations
4. Any sort of lighting particle effect seems to massively impact FPS
5. Player models also massively impact FPS, especially ones with lighting effects (basically everyone nowadays)
6. Enabling Shadows absolutely destroy my FPS when any significant number of creatures are on the screen.
7. Running with the default UI yields around a 10-15% FPS increase at best, and usually makes no significant difference.
I use an Aced interface with Pitbull (Auras disabled), Omen, Fubar, Grid, ORA2, Prat, etc.
It is probably all due to poor coding, I can get 200+ fps flying around in an area with no npcs with max view distance; the moment 2 or 3 players hop on the screen it cuts that in half. Things like Paladin Blessings, large aoe buffs, and anything with intense light flashes can cause intense fps drops. The best thing is that the game on max settings and min settings yields the same FPS for me; meaning the bottleneck is at the RAM or CPU.
Anyways if anyone finds good ways to improve FPS please share; cause dropping down to 30 when fighting at the main BT entrance or when pallies redo blessings midfight is really lame..... I have done all the suggestions to improve C2D performance and have been trying different nvidia drivers; its pretty sad that I can pump out higher average FPS values in my Age of Conan Beta and Oblivion/Two Words then WoW under stress.
PS: One last amusing thing that I have noticed is that WoW appears to possibly render models through walls. Often staring at a wall with a large number of NPCs/PCs behind it will yield typical 60-100 framerates instead of what should be a significantly higher framerate (250-500 looking at a wall with nothing behind it). This can be observed in any zone with large numbers of creatures through walls/ceilings, or by looking at the AH/Bank through buildings from a distance in IF/Stormwind as opposed to looking at a direction with no players. This is also a large part of my theory for why FPS is abysmal in Shattrath, as it is often rendering the players and npcs above, below, and through the central dome and building walls in most parts of the city.
You'd think that being pressed against a single wall texture would yield the higher FPS yet its the other way around.... Could be an anomaly but I've tried the same test in alot of places.
07/30/07, 9:14 AM
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