Update: SET M2Faster "3" in config.wtf is to date the biggest FPS boost I've had. I tried it now on Valithria and my FPS doubled. OOC in 25 i was sitting at 90-100 at entrance, in combat was jumping between 40-60 with some dips down to 30-35ish. If i can get it stable @ 40+ then I'll be happy, 60+ would be perfect.

(I Apologize it someone mentioned this before, but after searching I didn't see anything about it so far)

This was done on an NVIDIA card.

I run a very high-end gaming system that I built myself, but was having low FPS issues quite a while back... One of the big things that gave me an absolute 500-700% improvement in FPS (From 10-15 up to well over 60) was making sure my nvidia setting in my nvidia config were correct... I posted this on my guild forums and it helped A LOT of people out...

1. Make sure your driver for your graphics card is up to date. If you haven't updated in a while, its prob about time. Visit NVidia.com and download your appropriate driver. DO NOT INSTALL IT YET. First, you want to uninstall your old driver. You simply go to your remove/uninstall programs option in your control panel, find your NVidia graphics driver (sometimes just called NVidia Drivers). If a popup gives you a choice of multiple drivers, simply just select the video one. Uninstall these drivers, restart your computer. When you start up your computer, it has been shown to be helpful to Exit your Anti-Virus program before you install graphics drivers, but this isn't really necessary. Run the file you downloaded, allow it to restart again, then go on to the next step.

2. Ok your drivers are up to date. Now you have to navigate to your NVidia control Panel. If you cannot find it in your start menu, just do a search for NVidia Control Panel and open it up.

3. Navigate in the control panel to: Manage 3D Settings. For my settings, I changed settings for all global applications, but I believe you could do this for just WoW under the program settings (but I am not 100% sure). You will see a list of settings in the window, and the following are what I have changed my settings to. Please note; some computers may need some different settings, do doing your own research on settings may be beneficial.

Ambient Occlusion: Off
Antisotropic Filtering: Application-Controlled
Antialiasing - Gamma Correction: On
Antialiasing - Mode: Enhance the application setting.
Antialiasing - Setting: 4x
Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1
Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single display performance mode.
Power management mode: Adaptive
Texture filtering - Antisotropic sample opti...: On
Texture filtering - Negative LOD bias: Allow
Texture filtering - Quality: High performance
Texture filtering - Trilinear optimization: Off
Threaded optimization: On
Triple buffering: Off
Vertical Sync: Use the 3D Application setting

Then make sure you apply and save the new settings. Restart your computer, and hopefully it will have some beneficial effect. It did for me at least!

Could you be more specific about your system?

From what I've read online M2Faster can be set between 0 and 3.

1 for Dual Cores,
2 for Tri Cores
3 for Quad cores and up.

Aha sorry I assumed people had read my previous posts.

System specs:
OS: Windows 7 64bit Ultimate
CPU: Core i7 920 (now OC'd to 3Ghz)
Ram: 6Gb (triple chan 2gb)
Videocard: Geforce 280 GTX
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R, X58, Socket-1366
Soundcard: Creative Soundblaster X-Fi GamerXtreme
NIC: Onboard

One thing I've noted with these settings is that transparent objects now seem to have a grid-like texture; e.g. trees or the bank in Dalaran. I haven't tested yet which of these settings (I suspect Texture filtering - Quality: High performance). Let's see how this performs in a 25man raid.

With regards to SET M2Faster, will this still give an performance increase since 3.3.2? Shouldn't the client now use all available cores, atleast in the config.wtf it shows "DetectedCores:3" or is it something completely different?

If its onboard sound then it should be treated as hardware, so "use hardware" should work just fine, if not improve performance.

It might not be the case anymore, but triggering 'hardware sound' used to mean the game would allocate way more resources and channels that would cause a lot of onboard sound devices to slow down the system too much.

This doesn't make any sense, onboard sound is not a piece of dedicated hardware that processes audio, it's the system's CPU handling it all.

Yes, onboard sound is exactly that, a piece of dedicated hardware that processes audio. Many modern motherboards have sound chips onboard (hence the name). It's mostly Realtek, but there are some ATI chips as well nowadays.

However, it is true that there is a difference in performance between onboard sound and dedicated sound cards (and not to speak of the quality difference), so the CPU seems to be at least partly involved in the audio processing.

Here are some benchmarks comparing no sound, onboard sound and a sound card with various games. The difference isn't large (at all), but it's there. Oh, and it's in German, but I guess you'll figure out how to read those benchmarks anyway.
Soundchips in PC-Spielen (Seite 4/9) - Tests - Hardware-Infos

Mod merge:

So lately I've been thinking about upgrading my monitor from a 4:3 19" to a 16:9 widescreen 24" with 1920x1080.

Now I'm wondering how this upgrade would impact my performance. It's been often mentioned that the limiting factor is mainly the CPU, but the jump from 1280x1024 to 1920x1080 is quite large (762.880 pixels more to draw), so I wonder if my good old 8800GT can handle this.
Also at the time I'm running in window mode and manually maximize the window. Running in true full screen is being said to be another performance boost. However is this also true if you run it on your secondary monitor instead of your primary (to keep the desktop icons but especially the task bar visible)? Can you even do that?


My complete specs are:
Intel Core2 Duo E8200 Wolfdale, OC to 3.4GHz
ELITEGROUP N8800GT-512MX DT
4 GB RAM
Windows7 Ultimate 64bit


Anybody here running roughly the same specs and can share some of his insights?

Sp00n, I have roughly the same specs (same nVidia card, similar processor, same RAM/OS) and have no issues running on a 1920x1200 monitor. I run Windowed+Maximized and it has never given me any trouble.

I don't know about running fullscreen on the secondary display though. I haven't run dual-monitors for about a year now, and I don't remember my settings from back then. I believe I managed windowed+maximized on the secondary monitor.

Has anyone figured out the Rotface hard mode lag? When Vile Gas goes out, I'll drop to something like 2 fps for maybe 2-3 sec. It happened on both 10 and 25-man, though it was much worse in 25.

I tried lowering particle density to min (previously max) and that didn't do much. I was going to try unchecking Vile Gas in BigWigs, but if I remember correctly, it'll still call the code, and unchecking it just prevents the bars/messages/icons/etc from happening. I didn't get a chance to comment it out and reloadui before we downed him unfortunately.

The more I think about it, I haven't had any issue on Festergut when he casts Vile Gas, so I'm kinda stumped.

No, because as you can see here in your System Information: Win XP (as a 32 Bit OS) can only truly manage 3GB of Physical RAM. But that is enough for WoW anyway.

Try to disable your sound output (ingame).

Actually 32bit Windows XP can handle 4 GB overall, you'll have to set the /PAE switch in your boot.ini file.
How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP

The /3GB switch may also be useful, as it enables windows to allocate 3GB of RAM to a application instead of only 2.

However, you may very well notice that your graphic card's memory is substracted from these 4GB.
Also, setting any of this or even touching the boot.ini file may very well crash your entire system and prevent it from booting correctly. You have been warned.



For a list of all available switches in the boot.ini, and what they are doing, see this page:
Available switch options for the Windows XP and the Windows Server 2003 Boot.ini files

Are you running stuff beside WoW usually? What addons are you running? You definitly dont need QuestHelper while raiding, do you?

This is what I'm wondering as for all intents and purposes this is not required any longer due to WoW 3.2.2 being "smart" enough to say "Hey you have 2 cores do #2!"

Has anyone had any luck with this part as I just reinstalled WoW on my quad core and wondering if I need to begin the hackery.

I still set M2Faster on my Quad Core system.

These are the additions I've made to my config:

SET M2Faster "3"
SET processAffinityMask "3"
SET gxTextureCacheSize "768"

If I let WoW do it's own thing with the processAffinityMask (where it should pick '15') I noticed a performance hit. I don't know why. If I tell it to use only 2 cores it seems more responsive but haven't tried removing it since I made some BIOS changes (8x to 8.5x multiplier, C1E disabled).

I noticed a few things last night when I ran around Wintergrasp and Warsong Gulch with CPU Profiling turned on and thought I'd share.

1) In a side by side test using Shadowed's AddonProfiler, Bartender4, and Dominos enabled at the same time, Bartender4 appeared to use about 3x the amount of memory and 4-5x the amount of CPU. I have no affiliation with either, so I'll be switching from Bartender to Dominos.

2) Corruption's BloodQueen addon appears to keep eating resources even if you're not on the fight, so if you have it, best to keep it turned off.

3) Virtual Plates is a huge CPU hog, so I guess I'll keep that disabled while raiding.

For a frame of reference, ever since 3.2 or 3.3, I started occasionally dropping down to 10-15 FPS during raids, where I used to be at 30+. I get 70+FPS in Dalaran, 100+ FPS flying around in Northrend, and 10-15 FPS in some raid encounters.

My GPU is not overheating, and none of the 4 cores on my machine is anywhere near full utilization. I do have a 2048x1152 monitor, so I might just be SOL about trying to push that many pixels through the WoW engine. I've been slowly turning off graphics driver settings one by one as well. One strange note is that my Nvidia Profiles don't seem to think that warcraft is installed.

Current System Specs: Q6600/4GB Patriot Low Latency DDR2 RAM/GTX 260(core 216)/Onboard SoundMAX/Windows XP

Mostly lowered graphical settings (shadows off, minimal spell particles, etc). M3Faster and componentThread set to 3.

I usually do the combat logging for my guild for World of Logs, and I haven't been able to try disabling that yet.

Remember that CPU profiling attributes to an addon all of its libraries, *even when those libraries are used by other addons*. So often you will have an addon that comes early in the alphabet using a lot of CPU because it has a dependency on Ace3 or whatnot that every other addon uses. In other words, the accounting is counterintuitive.

1) Bartender4 is usually the first addon to load Ace3, so every addon using it counts towards Bartender's CPU time.

3) I just improved my own nameplate addon. I can can just guess how Virtual Plates work, but mine are 60 times faster now due to not constantly having to update them. Virtual Plates look very nice though .

Hi - I was after some advice regarding fixing quiet an annoying problem. I recently upgraded to

i7 930
ATI 5870
ASUS P6T
6 GB RAM
using windows 7
24 inch 1900x1200 display

I am using the same WoW directory as I was using on an old core duo system. With the new set up my frame rate is great in dalaran and 25 man raids - frame rate never drops below 35-40 fps with ultra settings (a big improvement on the 5-10 fps of the last system)

My problem is when the camera angle is changed quickly the system lags up for half a second before returning to high fps. I notice it more when I am flying out side - I can be at 150 fps flying in a straight line - move my camera angle to look behind me - and the game holds up for a short time and often stutters for a second or too and then goes back to normal.

I have tried dropping all the video setting on minimum - and disabled all addons but the problem is still occuring.

Are there any setting changes you would recommend

Cheers

Ward:
1. Latest ATI drivers? 10.2 as of this writing
2. Windows 7 64bit or 32bit?
3. Go through your addons and try ripping out old ones and updating those. Looks like your system is trying to do something and can't find it or is waiting.

Ward I had a very similar problem when I switched from a GTX260 to a 5870. The only thing I found that gets rid of the stutter is to either turn off Vsync or alt tab while WoW is running, open up the catalyst control panel and press OK. It's some kind of bug with ATI drivers.