Help Improving FPS in WoW

[jonathan1107]

Hey guys, Im having a ROCK solid 60 FPS whenever I play WoW in dungeons, questing... except for some more graphic intense areas...

But more importantly, whenever I'm in an Area with lots of people, it drops by 20fps sometimes...

I have a beast of a computer, and I had hopes that it would EAT alive WoW... But I'm very disappointed...

Any advice ???

 

[erocker]

Network latency and WoW. Google it and you'll see how many have asked before you.

 

[jonathan1107]

u sure the latency is a problem? I have 28ms home and 128ms world latency... is that bad?

 

[Frizz]

Hey guys, Im having a ROCK solid 60 FPS whenever I play WoW in dungeons, questing... except for some more graphic intense areas...

But more importantly, whenever I'm in an Area with lots of people, it drops by 20fps sometimes...

I have a beast of a computer, and I had hopes that it would EAT alive WoW... But I'm very disappointed...

Any advice ???

Yep, my advice would be to deal with it as it has nothing to do with your hardware being inadequate. Even my mighty sandybridge drops below 30 in Orgrimmar's most populated area, my guess is that WoW's optimization begin to start seeing limitations in those areas and since its mostly CPU based a better CPU will help you but not by much.

 

[Aceman.au]

See my build.... I still sometimes drop to below 40 fps in populated areas... I turned down my settings bit which helped.

 

[jonathan1107]

yeah, I noticed turning down my settings help a bit (which hurts my pride a lot, about my PC) lol

What do u guys think of this?

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html

 

[GotNoRice]

Wow relies on the CPU quite a bit. I noticed a difference when I went from my Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz to my Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz. I noticed an even bigger difference when I went from the Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz to my current Core i5-2500k @ 5Ghz. Don't make the assumption that just because you already have a "good" CPU that you won't benefit from something even faster. The i5-2500k reminds me of the first time I played World of Warcraft on a Core 2 Duo years ago. Coming from a P4 or even an Athlon X2 was like night and day.

Do you run the game in DirectX9 or DirectX11? I've seen situations where one or the other is faster depending on the system configuration.

Do you run WoW off your SSD? Going into a big city or somewhere were you're loading a bunch of textures is going to hit the hard drive all at once, and kill your FPS as your system struggles with not getting info from the hard drive fast enough.

What are your settings? These are the settings I use with great results:
http://gotnorice.no-ip.org/WoWScrnShot_091411_203133.jpg

Definitely turn ground clutter radius down a notch and same with the shadow quality.

But still, anywhere with so many people is always going to be a bit rough, that's just how MMOs are.

As far as latency goes, I wouldn't mess with any ghetto tweaks or hacks. The best thing you could do is get an Intel CT Gigabit Desktop adapter (PCIe 1x) and use that instead of the bottom of the barrel realtek onboard.

 

[techtard]

What he said. When I played MMO games, I noticed in very populated areas I would get FPS drop.
I moved the game from my HDD to my SSD and the fps drops were reduced by a huge margin.

 

[jonathan1107]

Really? U guys saw a difference with moving the game to SSD??? How big of a difference?...

And remind me how much space that will take off my SSD ??

 

[CrAsHnBuRnXp]

If youre in a city such as Orgrimmar and or Stormwind, expect to see frame drops.

Really? U guys saw a difference with moving the game to SSD??? How big of a difference?...

And remind me how much space that will take off my SSD ??

If you want to know how much space it takes up on your SSD, just look at the World of Warcraft forlder installed on your hard drive now.

 

[bbmarley]

wow take up near 34G on my ssd lol 33.6 GB (36,153,049,088 bytes)

you should be able to run wow on ultra with your build,i play on ultra but with shadows turn down because it gives me 20fps back, give it a go

im in GB and play on US servers, never come across latency problems, i get around 120ms leatrix is good alot use it myself inc

 

[LordJummy]

I can verify it runs much quicker on SSD. Runs even faster on my SSD RAID-0 setup. However, even with a six core cpu OC'd at 4.2GHz, OC'd dominator ram, crossfired 6970's , and a SSD RAID-0 setup I still get moments of graphical lag in org during popular times. Same for other heavily populated areas, especially if it's wide open. The view distance is set to max, so its loading characters from far away even.

Every little bit counts, but I wouldn't go out and buy ssd's just for WoW. Not unless you have the money to burn...

 

[GotNoRice]

a six core cpu OC'd at 4.2GHz

World of Warcraft is not particularly highly multi-threaded. It still does the vast majority of it's processing in a single thread. On top of that there are several independent threads that handle model loading but in practice they don't produce enough additional processor load to even fully load the 2nd core on a dual-core chip. When it comes to World of Warcraft, the the chips with the highest single-threaded performance will produce the best gaming experience.

 

[LordJummy]

World of Warcraft is not particularly highly multi-threaded. It still does the vast majority of it's processing in a single thread. On top of that there are several independent threads that handle model loading but in practice they don't produce enough additional processor load to even fully load the 2nd core on a dual-core chip. When it comes to World of Warcraft, the the chips with the highest single-threaded performance will produce the best gaming experience.

Right, my point is even with super high end hardware you are going to see performance dips in a game like WoW. Thank you for the additional info.

I actually do some tweaking with affinity and such to get a boost in multithreading. It's not drastic but it does help. Not sure how helpful it is with AMD CPU's though. From what I've read WoW runs poorly on AMD processors in comparison to Intel's.

 

[techtard]

MMORPGs will always suffer from dips due to intense data transfers from storage drive to cpu, coupled with internet latency. It could be something as simple as a bad route between your ISP and the game server you play on that introduces bad stutter or lag.

The weird thing about WoW is that it will run fine on older hardware (at least when I used to play), but you see people with extremely powerful computers still having trouble playing it.

If they ever release a new modern multi-threaded client most of the performance issues would go away.

@LordJummy Yeah WoW and SC2 favor strong CPUs, and right now us AMD users are left a bit behind. You just have to crank you chip as far as it will go overclocking wise.

Hopefully Blizzard will learn how to code multi-threaded engines.

 

[GotNoRice]

The weird thing about WoW is that it will run fine on older hardware (at least when I used to play), but you see people with extremely powerful computers still having trouble playing it.

The graphics settings in World of Warcraft are very scalable and in many cases have different technologies available to handle the very same tasks depending on what settings you chose.

Like for example, right before Wrath of the Lich King was released they released the new shadows engine. This shadows engine was different than the one that was released with the game back in 2004 and very CPU intensive. But the new shadows engine did not completely replace the old shadows engine. Even today, if you bring your shadows slider down to Good or Fair it will switch over to using the classic shadows engine.

The water has been changed and re-done quite a few times. It's almost funny to see how the water changes as you move the slider around. It doesn't necessarily look better or worse as you adjust the slider but completely different for each setting. Some actually feel that the water looks better using one of the lower settings.

Stuff like View Distance they have generally increased over time. So what might have been max view distance back in 2004 is probably now the equivalent of "fair" or "good" on the view distance setting today. In a big city it makes a big difference if you're trying to load everyone in the city at the same time or just the people within ~100 yards of you.

So while WoW certainly can run fine on older hardware, it will only do so after a certain degree of compromise in the video settings. Most of the people having "trouble" with powerful computers are likely trying to run everything at Ultra.

In any case, the best experience with any hardware will usually come from carefully evaluating each setting and how it works with your hardware and making compromises as necessary. Setting everything to Ultra just because "it's the highest setting" without bothering to at least try and understand what each setting does and what you get out of it is silly.

 

[LordJummy]

^ exactly.

 

[jonathan1107]

Yup, I did play around with the settings, and I did get some FPS increase when playing with shadows and a little bit of FPS when tweaking view distance...

However, I feel like there's nothing I can do against the lag caused by the relationship between my machine and their servers and other people's computers... I keep thinking about the fact that no everyone out there has a good internet connection and a good computer... There are some that are always laggin around...

Also, my game is not installed on my SSD... I'm very tempted to put it there, but I don't think I have enough room... it's a rather fast 64gb SSD... but my windows installation is on there with maybe my video card drivers, leaving me with 25gb free lol...

 

[Deleted member 24505]

I just tried wow after my upgrade. It ran freaking sweet, all on ultra at 1920x1080 dx11. My connection is a 20mb unlimited (really unlimited) buisness line.

 

[jonathan1107]

Ok, I went to check, and WoW takes 24.4gb on my Hardrive... (it says 26.4gb on disk) My SSD has windows and AMD drivers on it, nothing else...

The SSD has 28.6 gb free... Should I move WoW there for better performance until I'm done playing WoW (at which point, I'd just remove it from that SSD) or U would not advise me to do this?

 

[Deleted member 24505]

If its ging to make a major difference, do it. if not is it worth it?

 

[jonathan1107]

And If I do move WoW, how do I proceed? should I do a clean uninstall and re-install on SSD? ...

Or I can just "move" all the files over to the SSD ?

 

[GotNoRice]

It will make loading time very quick. It's nice to be able to go through a portal and come out the other side almost instantly, instead of waiting for 10-15 seconds at a loading screen.

You won't get as much stuttering as you go into crowded areas since the SSD will actually be able to handle loading so many different things at once.

But it's not going to do much for you in situations where your hard drive isn't being stressed.

Just copy the folder over and double-click on the launcher.exe inside the folder, it will make/fix all the registry entries it needs to all on it's own.

 

[jonathan1107]

ok....... so Clean Un-install and Re-Install or just "Move" files over to SSD ???

 

[GotNoRice]

ok....... so Clean Un-install and Re-Install or just "Move" files over to SSD ???

Just move the folder over and run the launcher.exe from within the folder.