Low FPS in Dalaren

[pinotnoir]

Anyone else have very low FPS in Dalaren?
I have a q6600, 8gig ram, 2 ati 3870 video cards, vista 64. I remember reading threads about 3 monitors and 2 video cards causing bad fps. I never had a problem in shat but Dalaren is terrible.

[Frosty]

I'll let you know if I ever make it there!!

::writes on board:: "I will not make more Alts!"

[TheBigBB]

Dalaran is not good at all right now. Actually, this is one of the worst things for me at the moment. I HAVE TO run this script whenever I leave Dalarn or I risk locking up WoW: "/console gxrestart" To restart my graphics. There's some issue with Dalaran that goes beyond regular town lag. I never had it this bad in Shatt.

[Parsous]

It's because Dalaran is floating above 4 zones and all their tilesets are getting loaded into memory. If I go there on a fresh load/log in at Dalaran then I'm usually in and running around NP. However, if I am flying around Zul'Drak and teleport to Dalaran it usually takes my mages client (I run 3 mages on one system, and tank/healer on their own systems so they are unaffected) quite a while to become responsive, and even longer for me to be able to move around town reliably.

[Nitro]

I went to Dalaran for the first time last night and it was a nightmare. My pc would lag so bad that eventually my clients would start to freeze up for several seconds at a time and eventually begin artifacting then I would crash out.

After some investigation I noticed I was reaching the maximum size for my swap file so my pc would freeze up while it was relocating and dumping memory to make more room.

System Specs:

Q6700
4GB Ram
Windows Xp Pro
GTX 280 SSC

Old swap file setting were:

Min: 2048
Max: 4096
Swap file was on OS drive C


The normal setting may be to let your system manage your swap file but I think I found some reason to set it myself in the past so you may not have this issue. After a little research I made a few changes as follows.

New swap file settings:

min: 6144
max: 12288
Swap file on a separate drive from my OS

It is recommended to set your minimum swap file size to 1.5 x your physical memory and your maximum swap file size to 3 x your physical memory as well as placing the swap file on a drive other than your OS drive.

[Tehtsuo]

You mentioned all your computer stats except for your hard drive. What kinda storage are you using? I ask because on one of my secondary systems I was having real problems - hearthing to Dalaran meant a 30 minute walk from the horde inn to the fp, I was getting about 1 frame every 30 seconds. Then I sat down and thought to myself "I know this is because Dalaran is FULL of little doodads and textures" and determined that my chokepoint was the 5400rpm IDE drive I was running in that system. I looked in my closet and found the 10k SATA Raptor I hadn't found the time to install, plugged it in, copied my WoW directory over, set up symlinks, and fired it up.

Just like that, the system was smooth as butter with two clients getting 15fps steady in Dalaran.

[TheBigBB]

I guess my system is amazing to even sort of run 5 clients in Dalaran at all. I feel a little better about my computer now after hearing these stories.

[Fizzler]

FYI

My Core2Due 3.0ghz /w 2gb ram and a 8800gt geforce video card gets lagged in Dalaran at times - And its only running one copy of WoW.

Its just another EPIC FAIL on blizzards party making the central hub for both factions. And its smaller than Shattrah to boot.

Seriously....... WTF did they think was going to happen?

I agree I do not like the idea of large neutral cities. If they allowed porting between all main cities than they would not have this problem. Make it level restricted 68+ for the use of ports to Northrend.
If they did this I would spend all my time in the old cities or the least laggy ones like Silverymoon.

Playing other games we always figured out a way to spread out or get to locations quickly. in AC we had subway which was a serious of caverns with ports to points all over the map. Even in UO some enterprising folks would bind teleport runes to locations and place them in visible placesfor folks to use for ports. My favorite was a boat in the middle of town in a canal with teleport stones to many major points.

[pinotnoir]

You mentioned all your computer stats except for your hard drive. What kinda storage are you using? I ask because on one of my secondary systems I was having real problems - hearthing to Dalaran meant a 30 minute walk from the horde inn to the fp, I was getting about 1 frame every 30 seconds. Then I sat down and thought to myself "I know this is because Dalaran is FULL of little doodads and textures" and determined that my chokepoint was the 5400rpm IDE drive I was running in that system. I looked in my closet and found the 10k SATA Raptor I hadn't found the time to install, plugged it in, copied my WoW directory over, set up symlinks, and fired it up.

Just like that, the system was smooth as butter with two clients getting 15fps steady in Dalaran.

I have a 10k Raptor and a Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 32MB Cache.

I run all 5 wows from one install. Both my video cards have 512meg ram

[Tehtsuo]

You mentioned all your computer stats except for your hard drive. What kinda storage are you using? I ask because on one of my secondary systems I was having real problems - hearthing to Dalaran meant a 30 minute walk from the horde inn to the fp, I was getting about 1 frame every 30 seconds. Then I sat down and thought to myself "I know this is because Dalaran is FULL of little doodads and textures" and determined that my chokepoint was the 5400rpm IDE drive I was running in that system. I looked in my closet and found the 10k SATA Raptor I hadn't found the time to install, plugged it in, copied my WoW directory over, set up symlinks, and fired it up.

Just like that, the system was smooth as butter with two clients getting 15fps steady in Dalaran.

I have a 10k Raptor and a Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 32MB Cache.

I run all 5 wows from one install. Both my video cards have 512meg ramNot sure what to say for ya, aside from Dalaran is like nowhere else in the game. The stress it puts on your computer is multiples more than any other location in the game that I've found. I can see where it might pose a problem for people 5 boxing on one PC. Your hard drive is going to be the bottleneck here. Have you thought about SSD or PCI Ramdisk cards?

[Trammel]

I dont know, I have 8gb of memory and a 4850 and I lag like crap in dalaran.

[offive]

Been playing around with framerate issues since launch. Finally found my wife's main issue. Questhelper, kills your framrate everywhere! Disabled that and the FPS seems good everywhere except Dal. Watch those add ons!

In Dal, I found the old trick of staring straight down did not improve my framerate at all, but I did find staring straight up did imrpove the rate. Hit Ctrl R to bring up the active FPS counter.

I run my teams on a single a quad core AMD, 8GB, multiple hard drives (seperate installs split across 3 drives to try and speed up drive access), Nvidia 280 for my main screen, 8800GTX for secondary screen, Vista x64 U.

My framrate on my main screen in Outlands sits above 60 fps all the time, in Northrend it averages around 40, Dalaran drops it to 20ish. I recently installed the most current Nvidia driver and saw no improvement, even though other games do supposedly see a 10% increase in performance.

I think Dal just has too many bells and whistles, and now with more people using Dal... well it makes a graphics intensive location even worse with all the poistional data delay added in. Other zones seem to have huge lag spikes like ZulDrak and Storm Peaks, but this might be my realm which seems to have reverted back to some iteration of craptastic stability last seen when ZG came out. Or possibly the phasing code doesn't play nice with positional data transfers and is generating heavy DB load on the back end? But I don't know the architecture of the application... so it's all just a guess.