Gogusrl

Yes, but you`re talking about 6.7 gb. Let`s round it up to 7, 8 gb of ram isn`t going to be enough and I was going to say 16 gb will be a lot more expensive but after checking out newegg I see G.SKILL 4GB 240-Pin DDR2 at ~100$ which is not that much afterall.
8gb (4x2gb) ~100$, 12gb ~250$(2x4+2x2), 16gb ~400$.
I`m assuming here that most of us are still on DDR2 with a 4 dimm motherboard and support up to 16gb of ram.

 

winkiller

I think you mean lowerping.com - and I'm still unsure how that should work.

Either I can blame it on 5am in the morning and being slightly insomniac or I really can't figure out how
should be faster than

The only reasonable? explanation that comes to my mind is that their servers are chosen with good routing to blizzard servers. But that's only half of the deal, you still need to get there with your default connection. And SSH slows the connection down instead of speeding it up. (OK, there's compression, but we're talking about pings and it's not like WoW will use 100% of your bandwidth...)

Live fast. Die young. Spirit rez. Take revenge.

 

LucidityAxel

Lowerping seems to be targeted at an Oceanic audience that wants lower-latency connections to Blizzard data centers located in the US. If the trans-Pacific link used by a particular Oceanic ISP is congested or has other chronic issues, and lowerping has access to a link that doesn't suffer from those issues, then a WoW player could feasibly see an improvement by using their service. In effect, the user would basically be changing to a different ISP for the purpose of a single game.

The propagation speed of an electrical or optical signal along any cable is fundamentally limited by the speed of light, so any user in Australia is going to get a few hundred milliseconds of lag to a computer in the United States regardless of any tweaks or improvements. That's just basic physics. The propaganda on their web site talks about 600+ ms ping times reduced to 300-ish milliseconds, which seems generally feasible if you trade a bad connection for a decent one.

 

Vaeys

This was covered in a thread quite a while ago - see http://elitistjerks.com/728397-post271.html. I think there was some discussion in that thread about people in the US reducing their latency slightly using it (dropping 50ms maybe?).

 

mek

A little nitpicky, but the limits of the relevant telecommunications tech are not primarily caused by the speed of light. Light travels 90 000 km in 300 milliseconds, which is obviously a lot further than the distance from Irvine, CA to Australia.

 

◊ Cadfael

Nitpicking your nitpick: That's the speed of light in vaacum. Light traveling in a fiber optic cable is not in a vacuum and is way slower.

In fact, it's a little known thing but an electrical pulse traveling in a copper wire is propagating faster than light in fiber optic cable, due to the fact that the electrical impulse travels at something like 0.96*c but light is slower than 1*c in the fiber (I think somewhere between 3/4 and 1/2 of c). For all relevant things it is still extremely fast but the 300'000km/sec speed of light really only applies in a vacuum. As soon as light is within another medium, it is slower.

"Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through with the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act as if there were some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged."

 

ninor

For people concerned about their latency, be careful about using tracert / traceroute as a ping utility, because it really isn't. Windows (from NT at least) have a built in command specifically for this, called pathping. This combines the tracert and ping commands to give a much better view of your actual latency through your network.

Use the command "netstat -n -p tcp -b | more" to find the ip you are connecting to. Somewhere within Blizzards network you will not be able to get ICMP echo requests, since they understandably don't support this on the actual servers. But if your routing and ping is fine up til that point, it's fairly reasonable to assume it's not a routing issue.

GitHub - YouTube

 

Alunra

Correct, and newegg is where i shop as well. I have only 4gb now but looking to go to 12gb with a 8gb ramdrive; with the actual memory you linked. I really have high hopes for this making a big difference in game play once i get the .mpq files in there.

 

Lumb

I don't have SLI, but I do have the ATI equivalent - crossfire. I disabled crossfire about a week ago after reading this post and my PC hasn't hardlocked since.

 

• typobox

pathping seems to need to be run from an elevated command prompt on Vista, even though it doesn't actually tell you that. Running it in a non-privileged prompt just gives a "No resources" error.

 

◊ Quigon

Nitpicking your nitpicking of a nitpick:

All of what you said is largely true about net speeds, but specifically light never slows down. It appears to slow down when it interacts with mass because it is absorbed and re-emitted by the atoms of the material. But between atoms its still traveling the full speed. So the potential is still highest with raw light.

 

syeren

Australians have reported huge boosts by it on World of Ming:

Something for WoW Actually Worth Spending Your Money On | World of Ming | WoW Riot | WotLK, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW, World of Warcraft, Arena Season 5

For further refrence!

 

Vasthoof

You are not alone - I don't see how this could be achieved, either, unless your link to Blizzard's data center is really terrible. Tunneling anything through an SSH connection will hurt roundtrip times badly. If they were offering an unencrypted PPTP connection, or a GRE IP tunnel, things would be different. But with SSH, I think you will only see an improvement if your connection is terrible.

 

Krypto1

So how far can you screw down your graphical settings before you risk not being able to see that void zone or that rain of fire over your head? I've been having excessive lag recently and tweaked my graphical settings a little to aleviate this issue somewhat, but I don't want to risk not being able to see that void zone anymore!

 

Whistles

Almost all Void Zone type things in the game are visible at the lowest Spell Detail. In fact it helps to pick them out from the DK/Paladin crap that is all over the ground. It can make things like the Blizzard on Sapph a bit harder to pick up though.

 

• Chicken

The poison clouds left behind by people that were injected at Grobbulus also become very hard to see at lower levels of spell detail. It's perfectly safe at Sartharion though.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Brekk

So has anyone noticed performance issues related to the login screen? I've got an 8800GT running Rivatuner, have it set to 80% fan speed at all times (i wear headphones so i'm not concerned with the noise) On the desktop my video card hovers at 48-49c, during normal WoW play in game it gets up to maybe 55c during demanding graphics situations. But if i just let my system sit at the WoW login screen with the frost dragon flying around my video card gets driven up to 81c.

Not even Crysis pushes it out of the 50's. It's become a concern, because if you AFK log out from the game it boots you to that screen, and I hate waking up the next morning to see my video card running at those kind of temps.

Anyone got any ideas why it may be doing this? I can only guess they never optimized the login screen for good performance with rendering of the dragon. (which looks like it uses a lot of shaders)

 

Darkmantle

This thread has much of the relevant discussion regardin tunneling and SSH connections.

The basic kind of explanation is that wow is not sending your packets back and forth as fast as it could because it is trying to use as little bandwith as possible. By adjusting the rate at which Wow sends its packets back and forth you use more bandwith because of the greater overhead for smaller packets but you can get better latency.

Anecdotally I found myself incapable of playing druid in arena when my lower ping stopped working and I went back to 450ms latency. Using lowerping I usually had 200ms latency.

 

Jezz

Yes, I don't have any numbers but I can definitely feel my computer is struggling during the log in screen, easily noticeable when I have multiple windows open and I notice severe FPS drops when one of them is at the login screen.

 

• Goatbert

The login screen is my new thermal test for video cards at this point. I've suggested at least twice on the official forums that Blizzard should offer a static login screen option. Screw that noisy CPU hog of a dragon. I play on a PC that has passive GPU cooling so it isn't noisy when at the login screen at least, but on the machine I use to do my auctions (on a different account) while raiding, if I let it idle and it gets to the login screen the fan in the system (A Mac Mini) goes to like 5500 RPMs and is very audible. Seems really unnecessary. Bring back the dark portal one IMO. Unfortunately no one at blizzard seems to care about things like this (or other small 'quality of life' suggestions like being able to reorder the character selection screen for that matter).

 

Vasthoof

I see. While I didn't find an exact reference as to what you posted (adjusting packet rate), I think the hints there pertaining to the use of the SO_NODELAY (the Windows equivalent is setting your NICs TcpAckFrequency to 1), thereby disabling Nagle's Algorithm, is the closest thing to what you mentioned (and the question, at least for me, arises, why this is not configurable from within the WoW client itself - maybe the Windows interface to TCP/IP sockets doesn't allow this?).

I took some tests yesterday and as expected, the effect of setting SO_NODELAY becomes increasingly noticeable as the total amount of data exchanged between client and server increases - to the point where my ping went down from 170ms to 90ms while in any given instance (adding the WoW client's port to the highest priority QoS class on my OpenWRT router helped further).

The effects of tunneling the connection through an endpoint OTOH are very predictable: You don't improve your ping much further than the cumulated time packets are in transit from your PC to the tunnel endpoint and from there to the server. While an IP GRE or IPIP tunnel added next to no noticeable difference, tunneling through any SSL based protocol added about 17% additional overhead (35 readings of the in-game ping monitor taken during instance play each).

This said, I didn't feel any real difference here at all, probably because my latency was fine beforehand in the first place.

One thing that comes to my mind are sound card drivers (again): If you don't have an external sound card but rely on onboard HD audio/sound, an upgrade to the latest driver may improve ingame FPS by about 50% - this is what happened for me (FPS readings taken at Dalarn borth bank), and it's puzzling, because the drivers I was using before the upgrade were the ones the mainboard manufacturer had for download on his own support websites.

 

Lollersk8er

Some people clam, that putting everyone in the raid on ignore improve their server connection in boss fights (Addons have no effect on that). Maybe that's helpful for those people with lag problems.

 

Oth

My video card (an 8600 GT) just imploded under the combination of new drivers and WOTLK. :/ I tried pushing the fan to full, and it helped a little, but the temperature while playing would never go below 75C. It was only a matter of time, I guess. (When I say the drivers were to blame, I mean that the latest Forceware drives improved my stuttering significantly but also seemed to exercise the card a lot more thoroughly...)

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...h-cenarius.png

 

Szynszyla

Oth - 75oC is not really high, you should need some improves if the temps were above 90oC but its different for each card, as long you don't get any artifacts from overheated memory or hard locks from GPU overheated you shouldn't really care about the temps.


Different point on view on performance issues:
While many are running high end graphic cards 8800GT/GTX260+/R4850+ usually the CPU is relativly weak compared being a bottle neck of whole system.

For the graphic cards listed, if we are talking on platforms based on CoreDuo/Core2Duo (quads are not the best idea), to have relativly good performance you are pretty much required to have at least that 3Ghz on the intel platform. I'd aim for at least 3.2ghz with high FSB, low multiplier as overall performance is much better, for people running 4870 or x2, a 3.5ghz C2D seems like a minimum out there. The differences are really big performance wise. Numbers like 3.5ghz or 4-4.2ghz for E21xx or E5200 are not far from being accesible to most.

While many stock intel CPUs are running at 1.6ghz-2.5ghz (E2140 to E5200), they are cheap compared to current high end Core2Duo 8400+, most of them you can pretty easily overlock to 3ghz without changing anything beside increasing FSB, even on stock cooling, of course everything depends on the motherboard quality and slight luck to not have "FSB WALL" on very low FSB.
Just to explain why not quad core CPUs for WoW if you are like me, who for past X years played only CS/WoW. Quad cores are expensive and the overclocking capabilities are much smaller than a normal CoreDuo/Core2Duo CPUs.

Going further about hardware, if you are about to choose memory, the difference between lets say 667/800mhz DDR2 Cl5 memory to 1033+ CL5-6 is pretty much non existant in games, even considering loading times and similar. This kinds of things leave for synthetic CPU tests like SuperPI.

I am sure you can find information on your country overclocking forums, extremesystems.com or similar.

 

Brekk

I know you said addons have no effect, but this sounds like someone is using an addon that has hidden channels to share info. Questhelper, Recount, and many others use hidden channels to share data and sync with each other.

This is very true. In general WoW is bottlenecked by the CPU. The graphics workload is not substantial, where as the CPU has to handle network communciations, addon processes, etc.

I personally run an 8800GT with a P4 3.4ghz. (Yes I know it's ancient. Screw Dell proprietary LGA775 mobos that are not C2Duo compatible) Planning on upgrading to a new mobo/e8500 soon. High graphics games like Crysis, BF2, etc. run quite well for me as there is little CPU demand.