piteq

Since around last year Brewfest event I suffer some very irritating issue with game client. The problem is that the game is slightly pausing every 15 seconds, on the dot. Sometimes the pause is no longer than blink of an eye, sometimes it's around half of a second long.

For around 4 months from the time I first noticed it, I gathered tons of information, which I then tried to pass to Blizzard by the means of mails to Tech Support and game forums. This is currently third incarnation of the EU thread, filled with 70% trash and bullshit, as usual on official forums, but some people writing there got the same issue. Similar threads have been created also in US forums - like this one. Of course, it's also littered with tons of totally irrelevant trash about general fps issues and completely useless DXDiag info.

I'm not computer illiterate, but to decipher that I asked for help few technical skilled guys, including Microsoft employees and Process Explorer application author. The issue can be summed up into following points:

1. There's a slight pause precisely every 15 seconds, visible on client side. It happens no matter the services or software running in the background (I managed to keep the WoW and network services as the only running processes; after killing everything including explorer shell, it still happened).
2. For some people, kernel CPU performance graph in the Process Explorer shows spikes that happen every 15 seconds, as in following screenshot.
3. If you kill a process thread responsible for communication with server, the issue stops immediately (you can hang around in game afterwards for several minutes, until the game kick you out to login screen).
4. I tried to debug the client using MS debugger. For my client, it shows page fault / access violation errors that correspond to in-game "stutters". Example of typical debugger output can be seen here. I also performed a lot of measures using MS software profiling tools, which indicated some page faults during those "stutters". I described them in detail on official forums, so I won't waste your time here.
5. The issue has been discovered during WotLK beta, and quite ignored then (related thread on US beta forum has been trashed already).
6. Considering gathered reports, problem is mostly visible in 64-bit XP, non-SP Vista, and sometimes in 32-bit XP, no matter the SP installed. Installing SP1 or SP2 beta for Vista "solves" the issue in a way - it's no longer perceivable on fast enough machines, although if you disable vertical sync and look at the fps meter, you will still notice slight fps drop every 15 seconds. It's just handled much more smothly. Same for Windows 7 (which I'm using now for WoW gaming, since on my XP64, on very same machine, just different HDD it's completely unplayable due to this bug).

I checked my friends' WoW, who never complained about it, but when I showed it to him in game, he agreed he could also notice it. For four months, there was no sensible answer or any information about that. What's interesting <tinfoil hat>any reference to Warden that could be possible culprit, was immediately described by Blizzard posters as irrelevant (it is said that the Warden does his stuff exactly every 15 seconds)</tinfoil hat>.

It's only a fraction of info regarding this, but that post is already too long. What I'm interested in is to check if any of you, especially those using XP OS, can reproduce that problem on your clients. It can be very slight or quite noticeable. It should be visible for example in the middle of IF, when looking at those melt iron streams. (Example movie I've recorded is here; there's a "pause" visible around 2nd ant 17th second).

Sorry for the wall of text.

 

Draele

I'm curious if anyone knows in particular what config/menu tweaks would have the most effect for a system with a nice video card but with somewhat dated ram/cpu. I'm currently running a single core 3200+, 2 gigs of 333 DDR, but with a 8800gt video card. Other than simply turning off mods (I've pruned as much as I can get by without) is there anything that would increase FPS particular to this situation?

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Lexer

At least according to the discussion at WineHQ the option in the launcher currently does nothing. But if you want to use OpenGL you can always just insert "GxApi = opengl" to your Config.wtf file.

 

Blayze

I had a similar problem recently. The culprit was eventually discovered to be QuestHelper -- I did a manual purge of all its gathered information and set its performance down to 1% and it worked perfectly from then on.

 

Fugazor

Sorry but only choice is to buy new CPU. Some time ago I had A64 3200+ and bought 8800GTS to it - I was very unhappy with performance I got. Few days later I ordered Core2Duo, it really made big difference. Right now your card is really held back by slow CPU.

 

sp00n

I was/am having the same problem.
The ground would disappeared and FPS drop to <1, fixable by turning down view distance by one or restarting the game. The thing is, my problem 'evolved', up to the point where I had spiky polygon errors and complete graphic engine downbrakes, sometimes even resulting in a total failure of DirectX/D3D initialization on game restart (or any other game afterwards).
Then only a PC restart would help. The problem would return sooner than later though.
However, only WoW seemed to show these symptons, other, more graphic intense games (Crysis, CoD4, etc) would run just fine.

I installed several graphic drivers, used Driver Cleaner, updated MB BIOS, installed SP3 for WinXP, reinstalled DirectX9c and tried multiple 'tweaks' I've read in the form (disabling Write Combinging, disabled AGP hardware surface acceleration (sic?) via dxdiag, disabled VertexShader in config.wtf, etc). I even checked my GPU VRAM for errors without success (2 runs of 9.5 hours of testing without problem). Nothing helped.

I could play in OpenGL mode, but really, it was a FPS drop of around 50%, I totally don't recommend this for Windows based systems, unless you have no other way of playing.


After 3.0.8 hit, it totally destroyed my playing experience (crit errors on OpenGL now too, the -opengl switch wasn't working anymore with the launcher), so I decided to install a second installation of WinXP, where I only installed very basic software needed for WoW. I've had zero problems with screen freezes since then.


I still don't know what caused this problem, but for me, it seems to be something associated with my old Windows installation. I did not install a fresh copy of the game nor any addons, I used the same WoW directory for both Windows installations.

 

piteq

That addon is indeed problematic for many people; it's not the issue here unfortunately - I get the same problem even without any addons at all.

Regarding "disappearing ground" issue, I got it some time ago, the reason for me was AVG antivirus that somehow was messing with data read by game from disk. Unfortunately, I didn't find out any other way to solve it than uninstalling AVG and replacing it with other AV software (Avast! in my case worked fine).

 

sag_ich_nicht

I had the very same issue. It's overheating, WoW seems to use video cards in a very unusual way, which makes it very sensitive to overheating. The problem went away when I replaced my stock GPU cooler with a better GPU cooler by Thermalright.

 

Fonzey

Does anyone have a framerate issue when there is a shadowpriest present in the raid casting mind sear?

It seems to be the only spell in the game which does this to me, and drops my FR from 50+ to 3 or 4, if that!

It's really annoying to have to drop my spell detail to zero just for one spell, and as raid leader I find that this is influencing my choice a bit when populating the raidgroup :P which is a bad sign!

It's the same whether it's a 5man, 10man or 25man. As soon as the AE fest begins my framerate falls through the floor and I can't do shit!

 

sp00n

For me, it certainly wasn't overheating, as I have my GPU temp in my tray and it never exceeded 60°C (using Elitegroup 8800GT). I don't even need the fans running most of the time.
Unless the temp sensors aren't horribly broken of course. Also underclocking the card should have fixed that issue (unless the damage was already done - but in most cases the RAM modules overheated, which I explicitly tested for errors).
Also it isn't the antivir program. I'm using the very same in my second WinXP installation, without a problem (NOD32).

However, during my research I stumbled across two interesting postings, which could be related to the problem:
Source

#2: AMD Game Forums - ATI Radeon HD 4670 Screen Freeze in WOW and Warhammer Online


There's a plethora of threads about this problem in the WoW forum, with a myriad of possible solutions, however there seems to be no single reason that causes this. I'm just happy I've fixed mine (for now?).

 

Gerronimo

I had a similar stuttering issue, but approximately every few seconds. My CPU temp never got over 60ºC either, but forcing fans to high speed fixes it ingame almost instantly. This happened on a well above spec gaming laptop on fresh installs and reformatted HDD running Vista.

 

winst

You may find it's neither the CPU or GPU heat, my fps divebombs are caused by the temperature of my northbridge (on my motherboard a passively cooled little block between the pci-e slot and the cpu) exceeding ~56°C. Adding an exhaust and slot cooler beneath my gfx card, setting it's fan from default to 100% and increasing cpu cooling didn't change a thing (and I wouldn't expect so with 50-60°C and 30-40°C temps respectively) - until I pointed two 60mm fans directly at the northbridge. Even with this I have to blast the dust out every week and I fully expect the thing to keel over and die when summer hits again.

 

Dreadwyn

I have been using Windows 7 beta for about 3 weeks. I noticed immediately after I installed it, my latency went through the roof - where I had previously floated around 100ms latency, it was now 400ms at log in, and would gradually creep up to around 730ms and hold there.

I found that by turning off "nagling" and following the other tweaks found here I was able to dramatically cut latency, down to about 53ms.

Throwing it out here so you can share it with guildies who may be having similar latency problems. I confirmed these tweaks myself in both Vista and Windows 7.

 

Extenze

Running WoW using 3d Analyze check Performance Mode, and Low Precision shaders game me a pretty nice FPS increase.

Wireframe offers some pretty neat eye candy, too

I also use CFoS, it's a traffic shaping program that you need to pay for, but it prioritizes packets for certain apps and lets you upload/download at max speed simultaneously while lowering your ping.

 

venum666

You could always lower the FSB/voltage on your northbridge. Maybe it is unusually high so that's why the temp gets that high. If you link your motherboard I may be able to help or check out the motherboard section at OCForums. Overclockers Forums - Powered by vBulletin

 

Alunra

This is not a problem more of a Im going to try this and need some information.

Im looking to create a RAMDrive and move my relevant wow files into there and use symbolic links from the installation directory to the RAMDrive. The total size of my World of Warcraft directory is 13.5gb so I can't just drop the whole thing into the RAMDrive. Im going to start with WTF and Interfaces, but I also want to try to include any frequently accessed or used files. I know all of the .mpq files are large and currently Im only interested in the lichking.mpq (little over 2gb).

My question is does anyone know what the files are that wow.exe uses/accesses most when it is running. Hoping this will improve load times and generally help with performance.

Yes, I realize RAM is volatile and that I would have to copy files to the RAMDrive before hand and after to preserve changes. I'm hoping at one point to have a 4gb RAMDrive.

 

Voley

Where do you check perfomance mode? I only found low precision shaders...

Twice Scarab Lord.
http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/5237/sigyt7.jpg

 

sp00n

Under the -Remove Stuttering- tab, on the bottom of the page.
Interesting program, I'll play around with it for a bit and see what results I can achieve.

 

Mesmer

On the 3Danalyze website, they say it simulates features that the older video cards don't have. Does it work on improving performance even on newer cards?

 

Brekk

Just get an SSD harddrive.

 

• Kalroth

This wont work, since I don't believe WoW will access files outside it's own directory unless you modify the game executeable, which is a Bad Thing(tm). So I'm afraid it's all our nothing. Your best bet is simply to put more memory in your computer.

If you install Windows Vista (or 7) then you get exactly what you're looking for; SuperFetch.

 

Jalani

You can use symlinks with wow on NTFS filesystems (xp, vista) without much hassle.
Back when I multiboxed I had 5 directories linked to share game data, but to keep WTF and Interface split two ways (1 master account with its addons, and 4 slave accounts with a different setup). The intention behind this was not only to reduce hard disk space and simplify addon configuration/updates, but also to improve on caching and load speeds.

For the ramdisk idea, you can basically just symlink certain mpq's and the WDB directory easily enough - although I do suspect that a SSD harddrive will be better suited and more reliable ... or even just adding more ram for the disk cache.

NTFS symbolic link - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

winst

It's an Asus a8v-VM SE if that helps at all. It's pretty ancient, hell I don't even have DDR2. Dalaran is just a hellish nightmare.

 

Alunra

Yes, that is why in my original post I mentioned using symbolic links, im good to go there. What I'm looking for is what files I need to be linking. I know at some point wow.exe has use of all the installation files but the ones of most concerned with are the ones accessed on a regular basis. If there is no direct answer to that question, then is there an application that will monitor my hard drive access and tell me what files are being accessed?

As for the SSD, I already have one. At current technology they are not all they are cracked up to be and are mostly hype at this point. Sequential read/writes aren't bad but once you have used your SSD for awhile you start hitting more and more random read/writes and that kills things, especially writes. I had to move my wow folder back to the regular HD because the writes were killing performance.

Disk Caching is not an issue. I currently have 4gb and im looking to go to 8 (yes i understand 8gb will require xp64 or 2000enterprise with /pae or equivalent OS change to recognize ram over 4gb).

Im just looking to pimp my ride, get as much boost out of it as i can.

 

dr_AllCOM3

Not with a RamDisk, there are none avaiable with NTFS.

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