I have a 8800GT and I also suffered from low FPS ever since 3.0, It solved itself for some reason when I remounted my CPU cooler.

Do you mean applying new thermal compound on it?

"Does anyone still have issues with low FPS in 25 raids?"

Yes. I run WoW on a 30inch monitor at 2560x1600 (Its nice having that much screen real estate). But lately in Ulduar my fps has gotten really choppy, especially on some parts of fights, like P2 Mimiron, Freya at times, and pretty much all of Hodir. Since my guild is working on some 25man hard modes and I felt like the choppyness was hurting my DPS, I finally got to the point where I went out and bought a new video card hoping that would fix the problem. I upgraded from 2 crossfire linked 7800 GTX nvidia cards to a single ATI Diamond 4890. The first thing I noticed is my computer generated like one tenth of the heat it use to. Those 2 old 7800 GTX cards were power hogs and generated tons of heat. The new 4890 seems very efficient, fan hardly ever comes on. My FPS still seems low with the new card. For example I hover around 25 to 30 fps standing by the fountain in Dalaran, but I'm guessing that's more of a network or cpu bottleneck. I did some 25man Ulduar on my alt priest last night, first time there since getting new card and it seemed smoother. The big test will be tonight with my main mage, trying Freya intermediate and Hodir hard mode.

Does anyone know any settings tricks to optimize fps on WoW for the new Radeon 4800 family of video cards?

Lower your resolution as a test. If your frame rate does not change it is most likely your cpu being too slow.

I also run 2560x1600 and even with a 7950gt the video card was not the bottle neck (unless I turned on shadows.)

My Cooling paste had gone gritty/sandy. I have a huge heatsink tower (scyte Infinity/Mugen) and it seems that the cooling paste that came with it had some issues for me, its a long shot because I never had any temprature problem (and my CPU didnt backthrottle either) but it helped for me.

Thanks for the answers.

Yesterday I tried to increase fan speed from both my video card and my CPU. I ran speedfan all night to check the CPU temp. I never got past 50°C and my fan had automatically increased its speed. I've set my GPU fan speed to 60% and I never got below 20 FPS in Ulduar 25.

I did remove 2 addons: GrimReaper and BigBrother, and unchecked everything in the combatlog options. Even if I doubt it comes from these, I can't be sure.

I'll try to clean up everything in my tower and check the termal compound. Tower might need a real cleaning

My new 4890 video card doesn't seem to help my fps problem. But at least my system runs a lot cooler and seems more stable now. Same story at any resolution, so something else is definately the bottleneck.

I have a DELL XPS 600 system from around 2006, and from what I've read the 3.4 GHz CPU in it is still not too bad. So my best guess is that Its running low on memory. I've gathered from google searches that the geniuses at DELL decided to impose a 2GB limit on this system instead of allowing it to access the 3+GB normally available to 32bit XP systems. So it sounds like my best option is to reinstall a flavor of 64 windows which will let it access the motherboard limit of 8GB of memory. Hopefully I'll see some fps improvement after doing this...

Before doing a new installation, do you actually need the memory? That is, how much are you using? I play with 2GB RAM, often have Firefox open with 20+ tabs and still have no big problems running WoW. Note that FPS is only improved by increasing memory if memory is an actual limit. Check the Task Manager (add some extra columns with memory size things) to see confirm that you need more memory.

I just upgraded from an XPS600 with a 3.4ghz Pentium 4. 64bit XP will not fix the 2gb limit it is built into the motherboard. CPUZ will see all 4gbs if you have 2 sticks installed but the OS will only see 2gb.

You will also find out the Dell case is designed specifically for that motherboard which is not standard ATX, the power supply is also proprietary. So you cannot just install a new mobo+cpu combo and re-use the rest.

2 weeks ago I upgraded from my XPS600 to a new Mobo/CPU/PSU/Case. Had 4gb of DDR-1066 I had bought a few months ago, 8800GT from last Feb, disk drives from the XPS (already black to match new case) and hard drives from the XPS

Motherboard: Gigabyte EP45-UD3P
CPU: Intel Core2Duo E8400@3.0ghz OC'd to 3.6ghz
PSU: 550W 80% efficiency modular plugs
Case: Antec 300

Roughly 450$ shipped to shift yourself off of Dells proprietary platform. Required less then 15 minutes of work to get the CPU running at 3.6ghz on the stock intel heatsink with Arctic Silver 5.


The performance difference between a Pentium4 and a Core2Duo is monstrous. Anandtech has a nice new bench feature and he's trying to add old CPUs to it overtime to get power comparisons. One of the first oldies he added was a Pentium 4 660 which is the 3.6ghz model, the 3.4ghz was the 650 so yours is actually slightly slower. And the E8400 is at stock speeds. You can effortlessly overclock it to 3.6ghz which puts its speed above a stock E8600.
AnandTech Bench (beta): Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 vs Intel Pentium 4 660

That says it all about the CPU difference. I personally went from having to shutdown all background programs except vent (no music, no xfire, no anything) turn off recount, turn down everything but spell particles and projected textures to low. And i'd still bottom out at 5-10 during some situations.

I now run everything maxed, except 1x multisample, can run firefox/winamp/xfire in background, run recount and i never go below 40fps. Only changes to system were new CPU and new motherboard letting me see 3.25gb of ram instead of 2.

Next step is some more case fans and a new CPU heatsink and I'll have a 4.0ghz dual core for under 500$.

AFAIK every "vanilla" 32bit Windows (XP at least) variant only addresses 2 GB.

The addressing of 3GB is called PAE (Physical Address Extension) and should be doable on every windows with some registry wizardry.
And beyond 3GB you really need a 64bit variant of Vista/Win 7.

But please check that before doing bad stuff[tm]

//edit: overlooked the first sentence of the post above, if Dell made that hardwareside.. ouch :|

PAE is only used when you want to access more than 4 GB of memory on a 32-bit system.
On a 32-bit Windows system you can have up to 4 GB of memory minus the amount of memory your graphics card allocates. Eg. if your graphics card uses 512 MB memory then there's 3.5 GB left for the system.

See Memory Limits for Windows Releases (Windows).

Do you know if they removed the application cap with Vista Ultimate (64)? I know everyone talks about getting more RAM but the speed (and relevant to your bus speed) always means more.

I did something similar to Brekk 1.5yrs ago when I built a new system. Nabbed a E2150 (1.6 dual core, but not Core2Duo) and found with a Zalman fan and mercury contact the CPU was very cool running at 3.0/3.0 (bios timing at 375) This also boosted my 800FSB to 1.5GHz (which can easily be where a system bottlenecks). Alas the timing also mean I under-clocked my ram from 800MHz to 750 (hardly think you would notice) just to sync up the clocks.

I built it for $450 back then, sure the parts are worth squat now. Certainly available if you have a fixed income.

I can never stress enough how important a "clean" system is either. The WoW directory just drag and drops, no registry entries or something. Expedites a faster OS rebuild. Use CC Cleaner and your favorite AV/Spyware cleaners before you raid and see if there is improvement. Make sure at least your .MPQ files are defragmented and if you have a spare drive, toss the pagefile on the non-OS drive.

Oh, thats wrong. Just the other day I made a spelling error while installing. I Just renamed the diretory but got erros trying to patch

The errors were unrelated to your spelling error then, I'm pretty sure tons of people just copy paste their wow installation when they backup/reinstall.

Hell, I have a laptop that's running on "world of wacaft" for 2 years now (copy paste as well).

edit: not entirely related to wow, but does anyone know if Gigabyte mobo's (790x chipset) are going to support memory remapping any time soon? (or know of a custom bios that does)
I'm a bit annoyed by loosing out 1 gig or ram simply because they fail at implementing a function every new mobo should have these days.

Worked fine for me as well, and Blizzard techs will agree this method should be fine. I'd suggest trying to execute the patcher manually from the WoW directory, as the only thing created by the installer that could possibly make a difference would be the Install Path key (this used to cause patching errors for warcraft 3, but WoW SHOULD just attempt to patch files in its working path).

Hmm maybe i misunderstood you. I installed the game to "c:\speile" but renamed it to "c:\spiele" right after i was finished. After i downloaded the latest patch i wasent able to use it. I had to use regedit to change the wow diretory so it would work.


Edit:

ok, this could be it. I was downloading all the patches while i was installing the game. So all the file where on my desktop.

I guess I could have elaborated some as I was referring to a clean install:

On any drive ~15GB+ (even a 16GB USB stick) you can copy/paste your entire WoW OU. After your OS reinstall, and you have your drivers done copy it back to your usual path. There is never a need to keep your DVDs / make ISOs / patch ever again.

Or keep your OS install on its own 20gb partition. When I did my last reinstall I just had to make a new shortcut on my desktop correctly targetting my Launcher.exe in my WoW folder not on the C drive. No installs required.

Back with some news. I installed Windows RC7 this weekend, cleaned up my box and re-applied thermal compound on CPU. I didn't lag that much during our 25 man raid yesterday but I think I could expect better from my system. E6400, 4GB RAM and 8800 GTS 512, shouldn't I be able to run full settings? I have to disable shadows, reduce view distance by a nice chunk and reduce spell effects. I can get down to 17 FPS running 25 man raid, which seems pretty low for my system. Would a CPU upgrade change that ?

Yes and no.
My gear is: Athlon 64 X2 6000+ @3,1GHz, XP 32 bit, 4GB RAM (3,25 in use due to XP limitations), Gainward GTX 260-216 884MB RAM.
Flying across Icecrown with all settings maxed out except for shadows, I'm at 100 fps (and capped at that, it never goes higher - why this is the case, is another story). At peak time in Ironforge with lots of people in The Commons I get 70-80 fps, Dalaran is between 30 and 45.
Ulduar is another story. On fights like Iron Council fps drops to 25-30. It is still PERFECTLY playable, and I'm not really complaining, but it should be higher, much higher.

A funny observation I made yesterday. I started WoW, sat down near the fountain in Dalaran and alt-tabbed. Then I ran Far Cry 2. 1600x1200 resolution, all settings at high. I had 70 fps, with WoW running in the background... Seriously, WoW needs some optimisation.

I gave up on my DELL XPS 600 system. Can't say for sure, but I'm pretty confident that the FPS problem was having only 2gigs of memory, it just isn't enough to run 2560x1600. If I'd read the post about swapping out the mboard and cpu, I may have tried that. But I didn't -- I went down to my local Frys and bought everything piece by piece to complement my 30inch DELL monitor and 4890 Radeon VCard:

i7 920 CPU
Asus Mboard with chipset supporting i7 CPUs
1 TB WD Green HD
Vista 64
12 Gigs Memory
Big Case with lots of fans, RW DVD

All for about $1300. I can only imagaine how much DELL would charge for a comparable system. Spent all day Saturday putting it together, No more FPS problems, very happy camper. Did Hodir last night, and it hummed along very smoothly. Seemed to always be maxed around 60 fps where before it would limp along at 8 to 15. Hopefully this will be able to handle any new games that come out within the next 3 or 4 years.

Back again.

I OC'ed my CPU from 2.13Ghz to 3.2Ghz (E6400), and after a stability test I was ready to test wow. I removed vsync which I had turned on because I had some tearing.

I ran 25 man raid with 60 FPS...turning vsync again drops my FPS by 20. I still get some tearing but rarely and I'll get use to it since I get none in raids.

Hope that helps some of you.