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?

You're a lot of DPS, you know that? You wanna' earn 14 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).

You're a lot of DPS, you know that? You wanna' earn 14 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.

 

Rifk

I haven't read through this entire thread, but I just wanted to bring up the importance of the proccessAffinityMask setting for people with multiple core processors. I recently upgraded to a core i7, and was disappointed that I was only getting around 35fps in Dalaran during peak hours. Then about two weeks later I discovered the processAffinityMask setting in this thread, changed it to "85", and my Dalaran fps in the most crowded areas now averages around ~48-50, and I get 60 fps throughout the less crowded areas of Dalaran.

The results surprised me, until I realized that on an i7 the first two cores are a single logical and a single real core. Therefore WoW was technically running on a single hyper-threaded core. Moreover, I've read that as of patch 3.1, WoW can now take advantage of three processors.

Anyways, this is a MUST do for anyone running a core i7 computer. I wish there was a way to get this information to more people easily!

 

vorda

If wow can only run on three cores, isn't it best to turn HT off?

 

Nerub

Have you tried setting it to 255? This should enable up to eight cores for WoW, but it does little to nothing for my i7 (HT cores are not recognized it seems).

It definitely works on four cores, at least when I open my Task Manager. I guess he meant three actual processors and not cores (albeit I do not remember anything like that in the Patch Notes).

 

MarcAntony

Setting to 255 or 15 (for C2Q users) is generally not the best performance boost for 9/10 users. When you do that, WoW ends up using the last core almost exclusively, wheras if you set it to use specific cores (not 1 & 2), you will see a much larger increase in performance. I also find the best performance by setting wow to the last two physical cores and then I even go into the windows process manager and set things like Vent, Fraps, and other things to not use those cores at all. Doing this allows wow free reign over those cores and I see the biggest performance increase from doing this vs 255.

 

slant

85 is cores 1, 3, 5, and 7. I set that parameter to 84 (cores 3, 5, and 7) on my corei7 machine as the WoW application only actually utlizes 3 cores and I want to ensure that core 1 is fully available for vent, windows, etc. A useful chart up to 8 cores can be found at this link:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Using processAffinityMask CVAR in config.wtf

 

Aeliel

I've read the whole thread and I haven't managed to find a solution that works to my problem.

Here are my machine's specs: 3.33GHz Dual Core, 4Gb DDR3 RAM, GeForce GTX280, Vista64; it isn't overclocked in any way. Here's a dxdiag as well, if that helps.

I recently started in Ulduar on my mage, and I find myself having tremendous FPS issues. It's important to note that this happens in Ulduar and in Ulduar only: I've done Naxxramas, Sartharion 3-drakes, Eye of Eternity on this same computer and haven't had a single FPS-related problem until stepping foot in Ulduar (I run WoW on Ultra graphical settings). Even Dalaran at peak hours gets to about 15FPS, but never lower.

I haven't done the 10-man version yet, but the specifics of what happens in the 25-man are a combination of strange "stuttering" out of combat (for what it's worth, it seems to happen when anybody casts something new), and as soon as combat begins (trash or boss), I get roughly 1 frame every 2-3 seconds or worse. It's absolutely unplayable and my performance suffers accordingly.

For some context, this computer runs games such as Crysis, Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 (all on high or ultra high graphical settings) with no FPS problems whatsoever, so I'd be very surprised if this were a hardware issue caused by e.g. overheating or simply low system specs. The best advice I've been able to get so far goes along the lines of "get a better PC" or "decrease the settings", and I strongly believe neither is necessary. To prove this, I even conducted an experiment and tried Ulduar25 on my old computer, which has the following specs: 2.80GHz Dual Core, 2Gb DDR2 RAM, Radeon 4670 512MB, Vista64. I copied over all my addons and saved variables and ran the game on the exact same settings (ultra high), and the game actually runs smoothly in Ulduar25 and has no FPS issues, none at all. In short, the worse machine succeeds where the better one fails.

Now, I've tried experimenting with switching addons off and it didn't help, I've tried lowering graphical settings and only once I had everything on lowest did the fps issues go away, although by then the game was ugly and unplayable in raids. On a machine quite so powerful, it's simply ridiculous and obviously shouldn't be necessary.

For the time being I've been raiding on the lower-spec machine, but it's getting rather frustrating that I have a very good computer and am unable to use it for raiding due to this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

• squiffy

Have you tried swapping the GFX card between machines and seeing if the behaviour is still consistent? Just suggesting this as a way to eliminate the different brands of GFX card and their related drivers from the situation.

 

Aeliel

No, haven't done that and I'd rather not risk mistakenly crossing the wires or otherwise breaking the components as I'm not very technical. My warranty naturally wouldn't cover deliberate damage inflicted due to ineptitude

Is there any other way I could find out if it was the specific graphic card's issue?

 

Schnappi

Disable any kind of scrolling combat text and damage meters and see if it helps. I've had the same problem before and disabling SCT has always fixed it.

 

Aeliel

I tried disabling those addons and it didn't help at all (the problem apparently also exists in Uld10, to a less aggravating degree than in Uld25, but still fairly game-breaking). I switched to my old computer, and it worked fine on maxed out settings in 1920x1200 even with both Recount and MSBT enabled.

So it seems I'm back to the suspicion on the graphical card difference - I've tried looking for any specific information on how to improve GeForce GTX280 and WoW, but been unable to find anything.

 

• Goatbert

Go into your Nvidia Control panel and make sure Ambiet Occlusion is turned off - that can have a huge affect on frame rates.

 

EasirokThunderpants

I had/have a similar problem recently. Previously I had wonderful framerates in all zones with no hitching or stuttering. However I was running the Windows 7 beta release, which was set to time bomb last month. So I made a backup of my interface and WTF folders, and reloaded the machine with Windows 7 RC. No hardware changes were made. I loaded all of the drivers that were previously installed (very careful to load the exact same versions of everything). I then installed WoW from the distribution media, fully patched it up, and restored my addons and settings.

Performance was exactly the same; however now when I enable combat logging in Ulduar I see the same behavior that you are experiencing. It is much worse in Ulduar 25, but it is definately present in Ulduar 10. Recount does not impact it - only turning on the combat log recording to disk (or using LoggerHead to do it automatically). My framerate is the same (about 80-90 fps in Uld25) and my latency is the same (usually 40-60ms). Every now and then though, I get a one to two second freeze where the game is unresponsive. It occurs mostly when raid-wide effects happen - initial pull... when heroism is cast... when razorscale does a wing buffett.... etc. I estimate that it costs me on average a good 200+ dps per fight.

And if I just turn off combatlog, the problem goes away entirely. This really sucks though because I was the one usually capturing logs for upload to WoL.

I don't think its my drive array either - I didn't alter the configuration of that (raid mirroring) and I am still using the most up-to-date chipset INF from Intel as well as the latest raid manager software from them.

For now I am just running with combatlog turned off, and nobody is uploading raid performance logs. It doesn't really matter that much anyways I suppose since a large number of our top raiders disbanded while we were still working on getting Yogg down and now we have to depend on green recruits and pug backfill just to make it to the keepers these days.

 

Kemortia

Somewhat sideways to your problem, but I don't really see why you'd run a mirror raid. It's possible that with a striped raid you could possibly see an elimination of the problem as you're (sort of) doubling your writing speed to disk. It's also possible you've just found some sort of hardware bug that's present in the RC that wasn't present in the beta. I've had a few strange quirky things happen under the RC that didn't happen in the beta myself.

Sorry I can't offer more advice.

Eek, Shaman

 

EasirokThunderpants

I run a mirrored array because I have found modern disks to be very unreliable (typically have one fail every year or two). The disks were also mirrored under Win7 beta when I wasn't having this problem (as well as under Vista64 before that).

But yes, I agree it is probably related to something minor that was changed for the RC.

 

Ronboar

I had a similar problem to the one Aeliel describes. I would move into a raid instance with 40 FPS and a soon as the bossfight started it was ½ FPS at best.

I found that just disabling addons wont always help. In my case I had to remove them completely and reinstall them.

As said a million times before Questhelper is a heavy addon - get rid of if when you raid. And addons that collect data for later use, like recount and damagemeters will eventually eat up your computers ability to cope with all the stuff that is going on during a bossfight.

[EDIT: typo]