I use WoW Tunnels - Reduce Lag, The Easy Way. playing from Japan (US Navy) and have seen a ping reduction of 300ms. Well worth the $.62 a month it costs. I would recommend it to anyone who lives overseas.

I was so excited by this, I hate that stupid CPU hog of an animation. If I forget to close wow I come home and my machine is running the fan full speed.

However, on the Mac Client, for whatever reason, putting a 0 byte animation in the folder makes it crash. I wonder what format the .m2 file is actually in so I could make a single frame one. Can't find anything on this '.m2' extension though. Is that thing prerendered or is it actually using 3d calls?

BlackLoginScreen also crashes the PTR client. I think the login screen is real 3d, that's most likely why is uses so much resources.

I doubt it's pre-rendered. If it was then the login screen wouldn't dominate video cards the way it does.

Black Background Login mod works wonder. Exactly what I wanted.

M2 is, I think, an animation file. Essentially, it sets up the "scene" with the dragon flying in.

I just realized that if so, that explains why it stresses GPUs so hard - it is probably the largest animation available in WoW (since I assume it sets up the background of ice crown, snow etc). Interesting, if true.

As a solution to your problem, try replacing the 0 byte m2 file with an actual M2 file from the MPQs and see if that works.

I have a Pentium D 930, GF 7600 GS, 2gb RAM. My game was suffering severe performance drops but runs smooth now with all settings on high except view distance, AA and AF, obviously. Here's what I did:

• Cut the view distance. In raid, set it 1 bar above minimum. This yields between 7 to 20 FPS depending on where you are.
  
• AA and AF should be off or on low settings. Especially if you have a card as crappy as mine you do not want to have these on. However, if you have even a fairly decent card it should be able to handle some AA and AF without much of an impact on performance. Test them and see just how high you can go. Remember: It's not about "turning everything off", it's about turning on/off the right stuff for your system.
  
• Go to your graphics options and turn off "reduce mouse/interface lag". With the option off you will experience your mouse cursor lagging a little bit, but it should be okay. You get used to it. In raids I haven't noticed any mouselag beyond ~0.15s so far. Most of the time you really don't notice. The FPS gain however is huge. On my system it's between 10-20 FPS.
  
• Reduce spell animation detail. This isn't always neccessary, though. There are some fights, however, where you really want to do this. Sapphiron's chill ability for example tends to drain the hell out of my system. Sartharion can be heavy, too. Other fights you can generally leave it on high without noticing much of a difference. I am guessing this has something to do with some of the shader effects used by certain spells.
  
• Disable all addons that scan your raid, listen to the combatlog and/or redraw frames a lot. This includes but isn't limited to: Recount(!), UnitFrames, Grid, XRS, Actionbars. Addons like these tend to use a lot of iterations (loops) to provide their functionality. Its these iterations that will to eat loads of FPS. If an addon also listens to combat log messages, the FPS drain will be even harder. On some addons, the drain can be exponential, so while you don't notice any performance drops on 10 mans, you can get heavy FPS drops in 25 and they will go from heavy to unbearable if there's AoE going on. If you want FPS, you will have to let go of those addons, as painful as it may seem.
  After going back to playing standard UI + Omen, oPie & some minor utility stuff I gained an average 12 FPS during fights. On 25 man raids in particular the difference can range between "oh... nice" and "omfg it's smooth again!" depending on what addons were being used.
  Recount is the biggest culprit in my experience. It is also the one you can disable without loosing functionality, unless you're leading raids that is. Just go WMO or WWS instead. Using /combatlog doesn't make any difference whatsoever in terms of FPS.
  
• If you have a lowend card try this: Get a decent graphics card tuner tool. For Geforce cards that would be Rivatuner, on ATI cards I believe its ATITool. They have an option that allows you to force "Shader 2.0" on your card if it supports Shader 3.0. So if you have a lowend card that supports Pixel-/Vertexshader 3.0, try forcing it to 2.0 and see if it makes a difference. On my card this yields another 7 to 20 FPS depending on scenario and the game seems to, ironically, run much better this way. It has also gotten rid of some artifacts like "black flag textures" and such.
  Just remember that you need to set it back to Shader 3.0 if you play any other games.
  
• You can also use these tools to overclock your card and squeeze out some FPS this way. Just be careful! If you don't know wtf you're doing or if you have any doubts that your system can handle the heat, don't do this! Your FPS will go from 50+ to 0 if you fry your card. If you do overclock it, get a decent tool to monitor your system temperatures (I use Everest) and keep an eye on them while you're playing. If you really want to go down this route, I recommend getting a decent passive VGA cooler with heatpipes. I bought mine for 15 euros and it keeps the card at 35°c even if I OC the hell out of it. It also got rid of the damn standard cooler, which was about as loud as a F22 jet running its afterburners right in your face.

I hope this helps some of you. I know it certainly helped me The game went from 7-10 FPS in 25 man fights to 50+ FPS everywhere except Dalaran and I can enjoy playing now, rather than watch a slideshow as soon as the raid starts shooting.


If WoW is all you play I would really only consider getting a graphics card which can provide some higher fill rates. The rest of the money I'd use on some vanilla ice cream and a Watchmen movie ticket. Clearly your system isn't highend but it should be able to handle WoW without problems. As said the only bottleneck I see is the X800.

Ok, first off I want to say that I have very little knowledge about computer hardware and not much more knowledge about software. I play on a laptop with 1gb of ram, 128mb video card, and an amd turion64 processor. I know its terribad but my parents gave this to me for college and I have no money to upgrade/buy another computer. My question is what can i do to up my fps in raids? I already run with practically no addons, and all graphics settings on low, and during the more intense times on 3D i can drop down to 2-3 fps with the average fps being at around 5-7. Would it help if i opened up my laptop and cleaned it out? I imagine that it would help cool things down inside. Are there any commands to disable certain spells in an encounter, on 3D i would only need breaths, walls and zones. If i could disable player spells and the lava strikes i imagine my fps would go up quite a bit.

My latency seems to be higher in raids than solo. Solo, I see under 100 ms. In a raid or even a 5 man heroic, I'm usually at 350-450 ms. I don't use any addons that I know of which communicate with other players: no Recount, Omen, or suchlike. Are there any suggestions on the cause, or the best way to get the latency down during groups? I'm a bit baffled, and nothing I've read in this thread has changed my situation so far.

switching to a passive cooler is about the worst idea possible if you plan on OC'ing.

Try using the wow-proxy.jar application and run WoW through FreeCap (set both processes to high priority, above wow). This should improve general latency, but will probably not affect raid-latency.

As for addons... check them again - search them for the string "CHAT_MSG_ADDON" - if they include this, they have some sort of addon communication going on. Disable those addons to reduce the amount of processing (if you love the addon, you can try renaming all occurencies of CHAT_MSG_ADDON to CHAT_MSG_ADDON_DISABLED - or whatever - as that will mean they will not receive any message).

Graphics cards: What cards would you guys recommend to be able to handle Northrend at 1280x1025 with all the settings on high?

I have a two year old GeForce, and it's struggling to break 20 FPS at that resolution if I turn even the most basic shadows on. I'm pretty much stuck playing with Burning Crusade-quality graphics if I want to break 40 FPS

While we're at it, what's a good processor nowadays? I have an Athlon AMD64 2800+, and it's really struggling to keep up when I run resource-hogging programs/addons at the same time as WoW. It'd be nice if I didn't have to beg my guild's death knights to spec out of Morbidity and I could watch Hulu videos while farming

Playing a bit on PTR I was having a feeling out that the game was way more smooth than on live and this is with same addons and same configs, on PTR even with player texture maxed and projective textures maxed aswell.

So using the /timetest command I made a test in PTR and on Live flying from Dalaram to k3, I know its short and I will be doing longer flights to try out, but even so this small flight proved that I wasnt wrong.

Test:
Dalaram > K3, Logged out at the flight path facing the the outside of the city.
My System: Intel Quad 9450@3.2, 4Gb of Ram at 1066mhz, 2x 250gb WD caviar in Raid0, Ati 3870not OCed, Vista64 Sp1
Addons: the most heavy ones: Xperl(just unitframes), Recount, Dominos, Bigwigs, Classtimers, Omen, Prat, sRaidframes and oRa2
Config: View Distance 70%, Shadows 50%, rest maxed, I dont use AA on wow cause its not becuase its a FPS hog infact with or without AA its same FPS for me, but because it stresses my card more and makes the fan on it to work

Just as a note, dont mind the minimum too much, I have a pretty high system and on must every timetests I do there is a very low minimum, the timetest dont seem to slutter for me, but I suspect there is a fraction of the time that FPS always dives but for me its imperceptible cause it doesnt last 1 or 2 seconds, infact the ingame FPS counter never dives but still the results show a low min

Live results:
Minimum FPS: 16,129
Maximun FPS: 66,667
Average FPS: 60, 071

PTR results
Minimun FPS: 18,623
Maximun FPS: 221, 616
Average FPS: 75,001

As u can see for my system(results may vary) Iam having a significant boost and it relly feels like it when flying arround and on Uldar. Its way more smooth than on Live.

Your welcome to try aswell /timetest between live and PTR and post here

I`ll do that as soon as I get home but you should list your complete computer specs and give a list of addons as well.

I`m running an E8400 @ 4ghz, 4 gb ram, gtx 260 216 55 at 1680x1050 and i`m still not satisfied with the performance I get in raids / dalaran. (shadows at 1, antialialising 2x, everything else maxed). Gonna update this post when I get home and run the test.

I'm not sure about rendering in wow, but when you do timetest from 1st to 2nd flightpath the game might try to render or prerender some chars on the ground (players/mobs) and sometimes it might not. Depending on the zone density and rng it might be hard to run such tests especially in wotlk since many more people are in these zones nowadays.

I'd suggest doing such test in nearly abandoned zones in classic wow using 2 flight paths.

Silithus -> Tanaris or Silithus -> feralas

On top of that, you should do at least 4 time tests overall
2 for live and 2 for PTR running both maxed out details and minimum details using same resolution.

Another thing to compare would be run again 4 above tests with and without addons.

I agree on running several tests and without addons. But what I posted was just a personal test I made to check if my perception was real or not.

According to wowwikki, time test removes Spawns, so in a populated or deserted zone wont matter as much

PTR
no addons/max details:
min. fps 9.741
max. fps 142.608
avg. fps 43.139

no addons/low details:
min. fps 45.217
max. fps 367.242
avg. fps 262.471

addons/max details:
min. fps
max. fps
avg. fps

addons/low details
min. fps 43.050
max. fps 153.237
avg. fps 129.942

LIVE
no addons/max details:
min. fps 9.730
max. fps 141.125
avg. fps 48.541

no addons/low details:
min. fps 54.778
max. fps 349.632
avg. fps 245.225

addons/max details:
min. fps 17.291
max. fps 101.029
avg. fps 47.950

addons/low details
min. fps 42.608
max. fps 156.049
avg. fps 128.617

My setup used for tests:
E2160@370x9 (3330mhz)
2x1GB 370FSB 5-5-5-18 2T
GA-EP31-DS3L
R1950PRO 256MB DDR3
WinXP sp2

Important test details
Flightpath Silithus --> Shadow prey village during server day time

Addons used:
Atlas loot
Elkano buff bars
Lightheaded
MSBT
Omen
Omni CC
Questhelper
Recount

Max details
1280*1024 24bit color 24bit depth x6 multisampling
AA x6
AF x16
All settings on highest possible

Low details
1280*1024 24bit color 24bit depth x1 multisampling
AA - Null
AF - Null
All settings on low

Vertical sync off during all tests. Full screen.

Feralas is demanding on max details. Try flying through there during the server morning/afternoon time when there is sun. At least for the config above. I had FPS lurking some moments to 10 becouse of the shadows and insane amount of particles.

I can't thank you enough for this recommendation. I live overseas, and this service tremendously improved my latency and client responsiveness. I'm once again able to pvp competitively, and tank reliably with near instant reactions to my environment. The service is more expensive than you mentioned (they raised their prices recently) but it's still very cheap (less than 2$ a month.)

I highly recommend this to anyone who plays WoW-US overseas. And if you aren't sure about it, you can try it for free (without submitting any card info) with the only limitation being a DC every 20 mins.

I have a question about the CPU. I have an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ running on Windows XP Pro 32-bit. Do you think I'll see an improvement by upgrading to a 64-bit OS? If the answer is yes, would I have to reinstall WoW to run it on 64-bit?

Thanks

The only difference between 32/64bit *should* be the drivers and your memory - 64-bit allows for accessing memory beyond 4GB which may have an impact if you are running a lot of things on your computer.

WoW is extremely portable - you just need to back up its files.

How much RAM do you have in your system (including the VRAM on your GPU)? If it the combined number does not exceed 4 GB it is unlikely you will see any improvements as WoW does not support 64-bit natively. All 32-bit apps are running in an emulator mode under Vista x64/XP x64.

I have 2Gbs of RAM atm (256mb VRAM), though I might get another pair of 1Gb sticks to reach 4GBs total.

Could you clarify what you mean by the different drivers? Are you saying the drivers run faster/more efficiently than 32-bit drivers? Or just simply pointing out that the 64-bit drivers are different?

Isn't the tunnelling service just doing for a cost what you can do for free with a tweak to the registry?

IE, set the following values to 1

TcpAckFrequency (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesTcpipParametersInterfaces{NIC-id}_
TCPNoDelay (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftMSMQParameters)