are you sure about those resolutions? I thought normal non-widescreen resolutions were 4:3 aspect ratio. 1024x768 and 1600x1200 adhere to that, but not the two in the middle.

1280x1024 and 1280x960 are both considered "normal" non-widescreen resolutions.

You're correct, however I seem to remember that my monitor said it was 4:3 even though it has a native resolution of 1280x1024 ... weird huh? I don't know what the explanation on the 1280x1024 resolution is, but I would definitely like to know.

hm, not sure. I think TVs stick more closely to the aspect ratio, but computer monitors do not nescesarily follow the same guidelines . Also, I missated one of those resolutions.. it should be 1152x864. if you get larger monitors you also get 2048x1536, or others. heh, video specs have always been a sorta alphabet-soup of resolutions, formats, refresh rates, aspect ratios, blah. It only gets worse when you are trying to hook your computer up to a TV =/

FWIW, I've had horrible video performance on test and on live since the patch hit. Even lowering everything all the way down seems to have no affect. It's pretty absurd, I have an overclocked 6800GT, AMD 3800, 10K RPM primary and cache drive, and 2 gigs of RAM.

I think they changed one of the video settings.. it was something that was turned off by default in previous patches, but was set to be on by default in this patch. I tried turning it on and off a few times last patch before they enabled it, but it only changed my average fps by 5 ish. sooo..i dunnnno.

I guess as usual with wow, its probably not a video problem.. I have the same card and comp, and when my FPS takes a dive its nearly always some mod thats throwing a spanner in the works. A 6800 GT is mooore than enough video card to handle anything wow can throw out, but as we saw with the vael "optimizations" the UI coding can make a huge difference in our play experience. I'm not really sure how this works when you are running top of the line overclocked processors, but hey, I'm not a coder. <_<

something to do with pixel shaders, I think.. I dont remember the exact setting now, and I dont have the config.wtf file that I'd enabled it in on this comp.

as silly as this sounds, try disabling your sound settings when running wow.

I was getting at most 20 fps.

Then I ran wow.exe -nosound (The way to do this is to create a shortcut to wow, then modify the shortcut's target to read : "c:\wowdirectory\wow.exe" -nosound

60 fps everywhere - 40 in if. I'm not even kidding.

YMMV

How is that different from just turning sound off? I've been doing that for a while in raids and the difference is insane, much more notable than turning graphics settings down.

it depends a great deal on what you use for sound. if you have an integrated chip, you will see quite a large gain, if you have a standalone card, it wont be quite as much. Integrated sound chips use the CPU to render their sound, and the CPU is a bottleneck in wow. so, no sound, direct FPS improvement.

I think the difference in doing it from ingame as oposed to the shortcut on launch, is that when you turn the sound down in the game, it still has the sound code loaded, cached, whatever.. turnng it down doesnt make it go away, sorta. Starting the game with that switch would mean the sound stuff isnt being loaded at all.

I completely deleted the old Natur Enemy Castbar and updated it, and it seems to be working now.

As far as that warmup mod, well, it's a good idea. Unfortunately, the mods that take up the most memory space are CT_RA, Autobar, and NEnemyCast (Also Gatherer, but I disable that while raiding).

if a crash happens only after playing for a while, then its nearl always going to be heat related (I guess it could be a memory leaks, but...) Do you have the stock cooler on your card? you could try just taking the side of your case off and pointing a fan at the thing, and seeing if that helps at all. If it does, then you might wanna get an aftermarket cooler for the card. From what I know of the ATI issues that plague chromaggus and nef's rooms, it was a problem that caused the card to heat up a good deal more than it should have. that's the only thing I can think of that sounds similiar to our problem

If you have an antivirus program running in the background that can really slow down your CPU and give you performance issues. It's a good idea to ctrl alt del and check what processes you have running every once in a while.

A few weeks ago I was getting horrible performance. 5 FPS in most places. I couldn't do anything to fix it. New drivers, defragging, etc, all of it did nothing. Then I opened my case up and cleaned it out. I was instantly back up to 30+ FPS. Maybe now I'll keep my room clean, hehe.