Multiboxing Hardware Science!

[MiRai]

You want Orgrimmar? You got Orgrimmar @ 7:42PM Friday night.






10 Boxing Test in Orgrimmar on Kil'jaeden.

All Windows @ 1920 x 1080 (Good Settings)
Using ISBoxer

2600K @ 4.6GHz [Venomous-X Cooler]
EVGA GTX 580 3GB
Intel 510 SSD

You didn't like Stormwind on KJ, so I give you Orgrimmar. Again, I had to use FRAPS's DWM recording
feature to capture the Windows Task Manager, GPU-Z, RealTemp, and ISBoxer's Video FX. The DWM
recording feature adds a large amount of CPU processing overhead (~30%) while in use so I decided to
cap the recording to 30 FPS -- I felt this gave more accurate readings across the board instead of using
60FPS and having the FPS erratically jump around.

If you're considering 10 boxing World of Warcraft this was just an initial test to see where my hardware
stood performance-wise. Actual PvP and PvE raiding may require additional tweaking or lower settings than a
simple major city walk through and I obviously cannot test either of those at the moment... maybe one day.

The big words "File Change" are for those who are curious where the FRAPS files split themselves. Some
people experience frame rate dips during the file creation and I was trying to show all angles of performance
here.

For the window swapping portion of the video I spun my mouse wheel like a madman to show that window
swapping was super fast and instant as it should be. Then I showed it in a much slower manner. My last test
included a custom window swapping macro that increased swap times, this video did not.

Yes, I realize that some of the Video FX on some of the windows are missing. I had a sync issue that I didn't
feel like manually fixing while FRAPS was eating away at HDD space.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Well you are at good effects, and 30 fps max but still the gpu dosnt seem to be stressed to much.

You do drop to 20ish fps when loading a lot of new characters (like when you first run out of the enterence). And it is far from clear if you would get more then 40fps if you were unlimited.

But no matter there seems no lag or stuttering and the game is very playable at anything over 20fps and even down to 10fps, as long as there is no lag or stuttering.

I didn't take into account that your cpu had to do fraps and stuffs so ya the cpu seems more then strong enough for the job and any fps loss is on the gpu I would think.

Ya the switching is excellent, as good as mine. Mine dosn't mess up the screen though but thats nothing. It is really amazing that you are rendering 10 screens at 1920 X 1080. The 9 alts are also at good efffects?

I really don't think I miss anything by not tileing, maybe you drop aoe targeted spells a lot better though, but outside of that the screens are just to small to be really usefull (even considering you put the 9 on another monitor). I would think for 4 though tiled on a seperate monitor you could see a lot more.

Still overall there is no question you can easy 10 box with your system, and that you have the best video card at under $550 for the job. Any more spent would have just given way to small return for the $.

[MiRai]

Well you are at good effects, and 30 fps max but still the gpu dosnt seem to be stressed to much.

You do drop to 20ish fps when loading a lot of new characters (like when you first run out of the enterence). And it is far from clear if you would get more then 40fps if you were unlimited.

But no matter there seems no lag or stuttering and the game is very playable at anything over 20fps and even down to 10fps, as long as there is no lag or stuttering.

I didn't take into account that your cpu had to do fraps and stuffs so ya the cpu seems more then strong enough for the job and any fps loss is on the gpu I would think.

Ya the switching is excellent, as good as mine. Mine dosn't mess up the screen though but thats nothing. It is really amazing that you are rendering 10 screens at 1920 X 1080. The 9 alts are also at good efffects?

I really don't think I miss anything by not tileing, maybe you drop aoe targeted spells a lot better though, but outside of that the screens are just to small to be really usefull (even considering you put the 9 on another monitor). I would think for 4 though tiled on a seperate monitor you could see a lot more.

Still overall there is no question you can easy 10 box with your system, and that you have the best video card at under $550 for the job. Any more spent would have just given way to small return for the $.

Yeah, instead of tweaking the video settings to get the very most out of them I figured it would be easiest to
just leave them at a set standard. The initial loading of all the people in Orgrimmar and Stormwind are always
big hits but everywhere you see the video at a solid 30 FPS I would normally be getting anywhere between 30
and 60 FPS. The slaves are actually capped at 15 FPS so I could even lower those 9 other screens down to 10
and essentially free up 45 FPS of CPU/GPU for even more main window performance.

There is some stuttering from time to time but I believe it's because the VRAM and CPU are completely maxed
and the GPU is having to swap textures around so frequently. If I wasn't using the DWM recording feature, or
even recording at all, the CPU would have much more headroom.

As for swapping, the screen only really gets messed up when I swap at lightning speed. I have a G700 mouse
and it has the ability to switch whether the mouse wheel is completely free spin or whether it's "clicked." I put
it in free spin mode and just spun it as fast as I could so the windows are swapping before they've been fully
re-sized. When I slowed down the swapping it looked much cleaner. Also, to confirm, the slaves are at good
with shadows turned down.

[Umbaalo]

Thank you for your donation in the name of multiboxing science!

[MiRai]

Thank you for your donation in the name of multiboxing science!

You bet. There has been a lot of talk recently about how powerful the current Sandy Bridge chips could be and
I thought I would just give those theories an initial stress test in World of Warcraft. Perhaps when I get a
break from school here in the next few weeks I can bust out some RIFT trials and see what I can do with that.
Trion might actually have add-on support out by then which could make testing more interesting... we'll see.

[Umbaalo]

Sounds very interesting! I'm really kicking myself over not waiting for the sandy bridge chips and started building my rig last fall. I'm happy with it, but I could have saved quite a bit of cash knowing what I do now. I guess that's the nature of the beast though when it comes to technology.

I've only pushed my i7 980x to 4.1GHz... But I always use a lot of caution with my hardware.

[MiRai]

Given that few are 2 or 3G (some are 1.5G but that seems insufficient) you choices are:

5 or 10 Box: 580 3G (5970 is a dual gpu card)

5 Box: 6970 2G or 6950 2G (or the more expensive and harder to find GV-R5876P-2GD may as well get the 580 3G instead of this)

1 Box or Budget: 460 2G

EVGA actually offers a GTX 560 2GB SSC and a GTX 560 Ti 2GB. It would seem that although the Ti is
technically better than the non-Ti 560, because it's an SSC card (stock factory OC'd) that it may be on par with
the big brother Ti version. Anandtech does a review on Asus's GTX 560 DirectCU II and it is also a factory OC'd
(slightly faster than EVGA's OC) card that seems to hold it's own against the Ti cards.

While I was looking at Newegg I realized that Asus's card is cheaper than both of those EVGA cards and would
perform better than them, but... it only has 1GB of VRAM. Guess that's where the price increase on the EVGA
cards comes from.

However, Tom's Hardware shows that the GTX 560 Ti is slightly better than the 6950 2GB. So, for anyone
looking for the nVidia equivalent of the 6950 2GB, EVGA's GTX 560 Ti 2GB would be it.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Good call, seems $50 cheaper then the 6950 also.

http://cgi.ebay.com/EVGA-GeForce-GTX...item4aabf5763f

Well $30 after shipping considered but still it seems a better deal:

http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-RADEON-HD695...item588e706982

[MiRai]

There was a prior discussion (starts around page 3) on Intel's Hyper-Threading here on the forums and I just wanted to do my own quick test on a 2600K before my trials ran out on this 10 box setup.

Video settings were identical from my 10 boxing Orgrimmar test run during all the screenshots taken. FRAPS is not running in this test and WoW is the only application which is using any CPU in all screenshots. Games were launched through Inner Space after a fresh system restart.

Orgrimmar [Tunnel] [HT = Disabled]

• 45% CPU Usage

• 60 FPS

Orgrimmar [City] [HT = Disabled]

• 100% CPU Usage (Pegged)
  

• 20-27 FPS

Orgrimmar [Tunnel] [HT = Enabled]

• 15% CPU Usage

• 60 FPS

Orgrimmar [City] [HT = Enabled]

• 75% CPU Usage
  

• 40-45 FPS

I also did a quick check to see how much View Distance on the main client affected FPS and it did not see to be that large of an impact. I was really just double checking to make sure that View Distance did not affect the distance at which characters could be actually seen. I do realize that if the View Distance setting actually affected this it would be a major dis/advantage for people depending on the machine they were using to play.

I always advocate that Hyper-Threading does not have a large impact on increasing gaming performance and that it has, at times, shown to actually decrease performance in certain applications. It does, however, happen to show a nice performance increase while 10 boxing World of Warcraft.

I have yet to do a 5 boxing test.

[honeypot2011]

great to see this and interesting to see the limits..good for anyone in future wishing to try to 10 box..

one thing..have you tried recording with a differant screen recorder and seen the results?say camtasia

the reason i say this..while ago now i rember a certain multiboxer streaming and recording using fraps..but he found that

it actually locked the wow fps to 30 fps when recording...of course this may have been an old version..and if there was an updated version this may not happen now..

was just curious..anyway great job

EDIT : ignore the 30 fps thing..probly should have watched your vids first :P