bobxii

The problem with the 9.x drivers is the fan control is boinked. Happens with the 48xx cards on Crysis a LOT. The fix is to delve into the settings in Catalyst (for each profile), set the control to "Manual" instead of "Automatic", and set the target "Percent" to ~65+. Essentially, the fan control fails to spin up the card's fan and it overheats and shuts down. You can set a few profiles and hotkey them (I use ALT+f5-f8) for various speeds.

 

Tinwhisker

My machine itself was put together rather hastily a little over a year ago to replace one that crashed hard. I got a high quality motherboard and harddrive but in the interest of time and money I went for a lower amount of RAM, slower GPU and slower processor. My thought was that with a good motherboard I could upgrade the lesser components over time more easily and get full benefit from them. I have long since replaced the GPU and RAM but am still running on a slower Core2 processor (~1.9GHz).

I'm able to run with decently high settings (no full shadows) in most situations but now in Ulduar 25man I do get a noticeably lower framerate which I believe is because of a bottleneck at my CPU (probably due to recording combatlogs). It's far from crippling to any gameplay but it can be quite annoying in some situations. I'm not thrilled about the idea of replacing my CPU at this point for a machine that I may only keep another year, but if I did would I see a significant framerate increase from swapping in a medium-priced Core2 running at ~3GHz? Would opening up a bottleneck at the CPU have that much of an influence on framerate during raids?

Hey baby, wanna' earn 10 achievement points the hard way?

 

chaud

It depends on your other components, so a list would be helpful.

 

Tinwhisker

Off the top of my head:

Intel E6300? @1.86GHz
Nvidia 9600GT (512MB)
ASUS Nvidia motherboard w/1066 FSB (I can look up the model tonight if needed)
8GB DDR2 memory
SATAII Hard Drives

I currently play WoW under WinXP; I dual boot with Linux for other purposes (hence the greater amount of RAM).

Hey baby, wanna' earn 10 achievement points the hard way?

 

chaud

You should be able to overclock that to ~2.5-3Ghz fairly easily, provided you have decent enough cooling, and see if that improves your FPS much. That would give you a fair idea of how helpful a new processor would be.

The 9600 is a decent enough card, so I doubt that is hurting you too badly.

 

• GravityDK

I have used and tested this pretty thoroughly on my i7 920 and ATI Radeon 4850.
Findings of notably higher FPS in many locations.

Biggest change came from increasing the texture buffer size from its measly default to 20MB or so, and from setting the process affinity correctly.

 

Aeldra

Since a few weeks I have following problem, it seems that something overflows my WoW (CPU load) mainly in 25 man raids. My fps during boss fights (on start 50-60fps) goes more and more down and after one hour (10-20fps) I have to shutdown and restart WoW (only WoW) and it runs fine again, for the next hour -.-

Intel E8500 Core2
Nvidia 285GTX (1024MB)
4GB DDR2 memory
WinXP

I have checked a lot of things:
- drivers uptodate
- downclocking/stepping/powersafe is disabled
- no heating problem
- no memory overflow
- disk is not defragmented
- nVidia Stereoscopic 3D Driver uninstalled
- same with/without addons
- same with directX/openGL mode
- same with vsync on/off
- same with full screen/window mode
- same with any graphic details low/high
- /console reloadui does not change anything
- /console gxrestart does not change anything
- Clean/filter/disable the combatlog does not change anything
- I have tried nearly all suggestions in the forum, which affects the config.wtf, but also no luck

Any other game, also other MMOs run fine longer times.
I would be grateful, if anybody have an idea what could cause such an behavior.

 

• GravityDK

Possibly overheating? I use Real Temp 3.0 to keep an eye on it.

 

Aeldra

No, I use HWMonitorPro to display it on my G15.
- CPU 30-45°C
- GPU 60-75°C

 

vorda

I assume you did it already, but can't find it in your post: did you try without addons?

In case you did, maybe worth a shot to install windows 7 on a different partition and see if the problem applies there. Just use all the drivers provided by w7, should help to pinpoint if it's a driver/os issue.