Thanks for your responses

It is 64 bit windows seven (I would be pretty silly to have 6GB of ram and that video card if I was using 32 bit

I installed the drivers a couple of weeks ago when I built the system - I will check whether they are 10.2


Thanks for your suggestion with alt tabbin out and opening the catalyst control centre. I will try that when I get home. I have alreay diasbled vsync - I haven't had trouble with any tearing issues and it improved my frame rate quiet a lot.

Looking forward to fixing this stuttering - it is so sad to see the game run this laggy on this machine

one thing I noticed last night is that it only seems to occur when I am outside - I was in ICC last night and the first 2 bosses where fine - could rapidly change the camera angle with no stuttering - but for the airship boss the stuttering was back - it didn't make a difference if the view distance was short or far

You've changed your CPU, video hardware, and have changed a lot of quality/performance settings.

You need to whack your WDB Cache directory and let it re-create itself when you fire up WoW for the first time. Those cached textures were all for your old card and I don't know if it's voodoo or legit but removing those caches always improves things when I've swapped video hardware or even video settings.

I'd also suggest putting:

As the first line in your Config.wtf after you do that and setup your video options again how you like them.

When I did a rebuild and copied over my old addons and configs I got a large improvement in performance when I completely gutted my old SavedVariables and addons and started from scratch. I had something, somewhere, causing me to take a hit in FPS.

Having said that I'm still < 30 fps in-combat in 25mans with a quad-core intel system and an ATI 5750.

I happened upon a console command that gave my fps a huge boost in messy 25-man encounters. Before it was usually 10-15 and now it increased to 20-30. The console command is:
I'm sure a lot of you already knew about this but I'm sure a lot of others didn't. The X value I chose was 256, based on a thread saying i should set it to half of my graphic card's total memory (which is 512). I'm sure the benefit of this change varies greatly depending on what graphic card you have and what graphic settings you are running. I generally run at minimum settings for everything except range. I'm guessing the default value for my configuration did not let all the textures fit inside the cache, causing a substantial slowdown. For people with 1 GB graphic cards this change might not do much since their default value might be enough.

Does anyone have any information on how the default value of gxtexturecachesize is calculated and if raising it even higher could have any positive/negative effects?

just thought I would provide more information

I have the following system

i7 930 processor
1GB ATi Radeon HD5870
6 GB DDR3 1600 RAM
128GB SSD drive
running 64 bit Window 7 pro
Fatality Soundblaster pro sound card
1900x1200 24 inch Dell monitor

This is a brand new system with a fresh install of windows - I have made sure that all the drivers for the video card / sound card and mother boards are all up to date.

I have done a completely fresh install of WoW from my WoTLK DVD and updated to the relevant patch using the least number of patch files possible - i.e. 3.x.x - 3.2, 3.2 - 3.3, 3.3 - 3.3.a

I am running absolutely no addons (for now) and the config file is completely untouched.

My problem is as follows

When ever I change camera angles I get a stuttering lag where the screen will freeze for 0.25 seconds repeatedly for about 3 seconds and then it goes back to being completely smooth when I whirl the camera in 360 degree changes. It then remains lag free if I continue to change the camera angles. However if I keep the camera angle still for a while (i.e. while I type this) and then move the camera (or character) the stutter comes back. This stuttering occurs frequently during standard play when the camera angle is changed

This is more noticable when I am outside rather than in buildings, but still occurs when indoors. When outside I get fps of 100-120 when the camera doesn't move.

I have had all settings on absolute minimum and the problem still occurs. I have changed the screen resolution to 1200x800 and it is still there.

While this doesn't make the game unplayable it is very annoying given although the fps was much lower - it was more playable on my old core duo / 8800 GTS system.

This is a pretty high end build and I would have thought the hardware should definitely cope with the demands of this game.

This exact problem was happening on my old copy of my WoW install from my previous computer which I thought was due to set up issues with the hardware changes, But the problem continues despite reinstalling (and downloading) WoW. It occurs both when run from my SSD and the standard SATA harddrives.

Do you have any suggestions on what I should do to fix this issue.

I am happy to provide any further information (I have tried to be as detailed as possible)

Thanks in advance

I have had vsync both off and on - I don't think it is a screen tearing issue

You could try change the graphic rendering engine.
To do so, edit your config.wtf and change (or create a new line with) SET gxApi "d3d9ex". You could also try to set it to "opengl" to activate the OpenGL mode. However, on Windows, OpenGL isn't really supported by Blizzard (it's more of a Mac thing), and your FPS will suffer, but it certainly works.
To restore the default value, simply remove the line or use the value "d3d9".

This is by no means a solution for your problem, as I have no clue what might cause such an behaviour (especially on two different computers, with different hardware - at least I assume this is what you meant).
It sounds as if the graphic card is "forgetting" the area around you after a certain time, and when you swing around it has to reload all textures from files instead of its memory.

You could also try to increase the gxTextureCacheSize, as mentioned by MatsT. General rule of thumb seems to be half of your video card's memory, so I guess 512 for your HD5870 (if it has 1024GB of RAM).
However, to make this work, you seem to have to enable the "d3d9ex" mode. I'm getting conflicting information here from WoWWiki and the linked blue post in the article, but I'm going with the blue poster who explicitly states that you have to change gxApi do d3d9ex to make it work.



Besides that, I think we really are in dire need of a reliable and reproducable benchmark for WoW. Looking around the net for information, I often came across "WoW is so simple, it can run even on a 5 year old rig".
Well, fuck that, we all know that playing solo or 5man instances doesn't mean shit. It's raiding with 24 other people and having their spells fly left and right besides you plus all sorts of addons and scripted events that makes your computer tear away. And I just haven't found a reliable way to benchmark such situations, besides - well - raiding, which isn't really the best place to start experimenting with console settings.

Today I've been using the flight quest in Quel'Danas to test some settings, as I remember that it relly hurt my FPS back in the days with all those mobs fighting.
Unfortunatley, it wasn't that reliable either. I can only assume it was the weather changing from midday to afternoon, but suddenly my FPS dropped by ~10 on average, with the very same settings I've used before multiple times (with only minor fluctuations then).
May have been a short PvP vendetta as well, or both, but I just couldn't get same results as before. Even restarting WoW and/or resetting some values didn't really work.

So, does anyone have any tips for benchmarking? It's a shame Blizzard hasn't added a decent benchmarking capability to WoW (maybe some scripted event with two armies fighting each other or what do I know). The /timetest command is just plain useless, as it disables all player/NPC characters, and only leaves the environment. Which of course doesn't really say anything.

I personally doubt that the WEI is a good way to compare systems. Its far too rough a guesstimate.
My q9550 with 8gb ddr2 and a gtx260² spits out a rating of 7.3, 7.3, 7.1, 7.1, 6.9.

Thankyou for your replys and sorry about the delay - I got banned from making posts because of the "there isn't any characters associated with your account" bug from Blizzard which occurs when you credit card gets charged on the weekend.

Just to clarify some things that have been brought up in discussion.

This stutter occurs on both the new install of WoW which is located on the SSD drive as well as the old WoW copy which I used on my previous computer (I transferred over the hard drive). On my previous computer this problem didn't occur at all - only when using the same files as I used on the old computer (I hope that makes sense )

I actually got a 80GB G Skill SSD which has a similar performance to the intel variety - it certainly isn't a cheap SSD drive. I dont think the issue is drive related given the same fault occurs on both the SSD and older SATA hard drive

My window performance scores are very similar to yours - all in the high to mid 7's

All drivers are up to date and there are only bear essential programs in the back ground - I am using avast antivirus software which I am a bit loath to turn off as I dont want to leave my system unprotected.

Adding VSYNC doesn't make any change in the degree of stuttering - so I dont think it is a screen tearing issue - with it turned on I stay at 60fps for all but heavy 25 man raiding. The odd thing is that the stuttering is much worse when I am by my self and outside in northrend. The problem doesn't seem to occur in Azeroth to any great degree. I also noticed that the stuttering got really bad when I was in the flaming forest in howling fjord.

I also tried those configuration changes to increase the amount of RAM allocated to WoW. I think it may have reduced it slightly - MAYBE - I am not sure if I just want it to be better or if it actually is.

I seem to have similar problem, and have been looking far and wide spending hours reading and trying things to fix it.

During 10/25 man raids I will suddenly get a big delay on skill usage and then disconnect. I'm pretty sure it's related to addon spam, but more directly possibly to some TCP settings. In 10 man raids if I ignore the whole raid then I seem to be fine on bosses, with a little delay on trash.

I have someone sitting next to me on a computer that is not as good hardware wise, who has no problems of the same sort. I've tried changing ports in the router and swapping cables with no change. So it's definitely something between my computer and the connection to wow that's failing. We are both using WinXP at the moment.

I've used TCP Optimizer, disabled Nagle's Algorithm, turned off and on various addons, ignored my whole raid, changed windows QoS settings..almost anything I can find info on.

What I'm wondering is if there is anything I haven't tried that I can't seem to find info on? I'm about to reformat, reinstall windows (both 7 and XP, just to try it out), possibly even buy new hardware to solve this problem. It's absolutely infuriating getting prepared and setup for a raid only to DC constantly.

The ignore fix seems to work for a lot of people in 25-man, but it only does for me in 10-man. I was also experiencing constant wow crashes tonight on ToC 10-man, but I'm not sure if it's related. I think a complete reinstall will definitely help, as well as testing my hardware. I'm just really lost as to what to do...

Does this problem persist even when you disable all of your addons?

I haven't turned off every single addon..I just can't stand not using a bar mod. I've turned everything except bartender and X-perl off though, and it still happens. I will try it though..but if that's the only fix, I don't think I could play.

Also, as I said above, another person sits next to me and they don't have problems, with pretty much the same addons.

Edit: I reformatted, reinstalled everything today..and it worked! I haven't installed a firewall, just using windows atm. I'm not gonna bother using one at the moment, although I think I had the problem before I switched firewalls before the format, so it may have been a problem with some setting..either way, I'm happy.

Get SpaceMonger - Download - and use it to drill down to your WoW folder and see where those 24gb are coming from. Could be ancient patches or tons of backup folders or accidentally recorded movies or screenshots from when screenshots were TGA.

Wintergrasp is probably the best place to try to benchmark graphics settings. At least its better to do it there than in a 25 man raid.

This is my first post here. I shall use it to say some of the tweaks that I've found. I get a consistent 60 FPS in quite a few places now, whereas I used to get 30-40 in some heavily-forested areas. First off, be sure you have the different rendering API enabled by having this in your Config.WTF file:

SET gxApi "d3d9ex"

Second, put the following line in:

SET gxTextureCacheSize "x"

Replace 'x' with a variable, of course. This variable affects how much of your GPU's memory WoW will utilize. For users with 1 GB of video RAM, I highly recommend ~800 MB. I tested a lot with this variable, and values such as 512 MB and 256 MB are simply too small, ~1024 MB causes stuttering, and above that causes lower FPS. Extremes on either the higher or lower sides of the spectrum will create unbearable FPS issues of anywhere from ~5-8 FPS.

In addition to that, if you have hardware sound acceleration enabled but no real sound card, disable it. WoW's software rendering can be offloaded to a second core, and as everyone knows, the bulk of WoW is done on one core. Ensuring that some processing isn't taking place there can really help out.

Also, the graphics card doesn't have that much demand on it in WoW except for some rare moments. A large portion of what would normally be handled on a GPU is software-accelerated in WoW, so if you feel like adding a bit of strain to your GPU, use the following macro:

/console overridefarclip 1
/console farclip 1600
/console horizonfarclip 6226
/console smallcull 0
/console skycloudlod 3
/console characterAmbient
/console environmentDetail 2
/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 140

It will force a farther view distance in Outland and Northrend, greatly increase ground clutter, make lighting effects more profound, and make the sky a bit more ambient.

Fully-configured, you can maintain good FPS and have some camera-related FPS drops evened out pretty nicely. It goes without saying that this will only get you so far and you do need some damned powerful hardware to make WoW work well on ultra settings (I turn shadows down a notch myself >.>), but it's nice to juice out what you can.

I used to get about 40 FPS in this part in Nagrand. After I fiddled around with some things, I got it here:

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/o...510_192643.jpg

Vsync's on, so it's not exactly showing the full improvement, but it's over a 50% increase, as can be observed.

My system specs are:

Intel Core i7 920 @3.6 GHz
12 GB DDR3-1333 RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5970
Windows 7 Home Premium x64

I do still run into FPS problems, but changing the memory cache size and re-enabling software rendering made a pretty large performance difference.

Still differs far too much to be an acceptable benchmark. Anything with real human interaction will be too differentiating to get great benchmark results, sadly. Unless someone made a benchmark that creates other players that are controlled by the program itself, the only benchmark areas we have are areas that get little to no visitation from other people. Forests bring down FPS by a rather extraordinary amount, but they don't bring in the "RNG factor" that bogs down framerates in areas like WG, raids, and Dalaran.

Go more than half. I set it to 512 MB initially (half of my 1 GB) and still ran into issues. There's no "surefire" variable, but I'd either take off ~150 MB from your total, or go for about 70-75%.

Most of us know this well enough, but in light of this discussion I'd like to remind everyone of the terrible shadow implementation WoW uses. The difference between the lowest and highest setting can be as high as 50-60 fps in this game, with intermediary settings falling in-between. E.g. it's totally not worth setting it to anything but the lowest setting.

Hi guys,
I have just upgraded my pc and a fresh install of wow but it seems to have created a few issues.

Any time i log in the resolution reverts back to what seems to be a default setting, not my own and the log in screen won't remember my account name even though i have the box ticked to remember!

specs are

AMD Phenom quad 3.2ghz
8gb ram
HD 5670 1gb x2 crossfire
Win 7

Any idea as to what might be causing this and how to go about fixing it?

Cheers and thanks in advance.

You probably installed WoW within C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86), right? There's a reason the auto-installer recommends C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft - With default settings, executables are not allowed to create or modify files contained within protected directories. Program Files and Program Files (x86) are both protected directories.

Either run WoW as an administrator (not the launcher, the actual game), move the entire World of Warcraft install to C:\Users\Public\Games\ (has been known to mess up future patching, unless you tweak the install location in the registry as well), or (most drastic fix) uninstall and reinstall. That should fix all your woes.

Thanks for the responses guys
@Keninally my wow folder is actually on a seperate "games" drive all together which was brought across from my old machine (which was running XP).
Do you think that may have something to do with it?
Im more than happy to re-install if need be

Cheers

Thats a new one on me. In that case, just try running the game as Administrator (right click -> run as admin) and see if that fixes your problem. If it does, you can just do it that way from now on. If not, Try hlid...that guy's idea.

For what its worth, you might still have problems with patching, when the time comes. I can't say for sure, but a reinstall probably wouldn't hurt.

Also, on a side note, since you're playing on a new system, see Emolate's post here. You might not be having any noticable problems related to this, but it'll probably make things run smoother once the WDB is recreated.

Am I right to assume that changing the SET M2Faster from the default "1" to "3" is useless on a Dual Core processor? At least that's what I have been reading until now in different posts and discussion, including this one. However, almost none of them seem to mention something specific about the ancient Dual Core processors like mine.

It's also worth noting that the second to worst shadow setting looks a LOT better than the worst setting, at a minimal FPS slowdown. It's after that setting (not the lowest), that the slowdown becomes visible.

I also run my WoW in it's own partition, and have had no problems with patching etc... However, I didn't install it on this machine, just copied it over from my old one so there's no registry for WoW to confuse the patcher. As Kevinally mentioned though, make sure you've admin rights to your game as well.

BTW, people have always just gone with hlid. My full nick looks too much like a faceroll for most folks. (Although it's legit, it's old Norse.)