What needs upgrading to increase fps?

[pinotnoir]

Ok I am no computer expert and I need some advice. I am playing 5 wows on one machine using keyclone. In BC I never had any problem with lag. I use a small number of add ons and have my grahics settings very low. Leveling in wotlk was not too bad until I hit dalaran and other places that contained a ton of people Even a 10man raid sends my games into choppy sinclair mode. In order for me to continue playing this game I think there needs to be some upgrading.

Here is a list of my computers specs....

Intel Q6600 Processor
8gig Corsair Dominator DDR ram
Asus P5w dh deluxe mb (pretty old)
Vista 64
Seagate Barracuda 500g drive ( right now I use 1 wow directory located on this drive)
WD Raptor 150g drive ( this use to be my main drive until I changed from XP to vista 64)
2 ATI 3870 512meg video cards (not in crossfire)
3 LCD monitors ( 24 main and 2 20inch sides)


This setup worked fine in BC. However, its damn near impossible to play in some areas. In the bg's it can get pretty choppy making game play even more frustrating. If you tech guys know how I can improve my game performance let me know.

[pengwynman]

do you have your wow directory symlinked? this can help decrease load times and generally improves performance in large cities
try messing with cpu affinity. also overclocking my Q9550 from 2.8 -> 3.4 gave me a HUGE boost in fps

[wowphreak]

Its not the hardware.

There isnt enough info there to really help yeh.

have yeh set maxbkfps maxfps ?

have yeh set cpu affinity?

what res are yeh running at?

have yeh setup vista for performance?

are yeh loading from separate installs?

what addon are yeh running? are yeh running addon on all instance of wow? some addons are considerably more resource intensive.

Yeh have the latest drivers installed for yer hardware?

Have yeh minimized the amount of services running in vista?

[pinotnoir]

Everything runs from 1 wow directory on my c: drive. I do not have anything symlinked or know how to do that.


Its not the hardware.

There isnt enough info there to really help yeh.

have yeh set maxbkfps maxfps ?

I have it set to 15fps alts up to 40fps max on main or whenever my alts become mains.

have yeh set cpu affinity?

Yes I have this set in keyclone.

what res are yeh running at?

The resolutions are setup in keyclone for each maximizer section. My side monitors have two blocks that are 1048,840 and my main screen has 1 block thats 1870,1125.


have yeh setup vista for performance?

Under advanced system settings I have the visual set for performance with true type fonts selected only.

are yeh loading from separate installs?

One install on my seagate drive.

what addon are yeh running? are yeh running addon on all instance of wow? some addons are considerably more resource intensive.

I have jamba, cartagrapher, bagmon, deadly boss mods, titan panel, quest helper ( on my main only ), Auctioneer I turn on when I do a scan and buy stuff, Vanaskos ( driving me nuts with notes popping on my screen everytime someone is close. I may turn this off. ), and bankstack.

Yeh have the latest drivers installed for yer hardware?

As far as I know yes.

Have yeh minimized the amount of services running in vista?

I have not changed much from the default install. I dont know anything about vista services. I do have indexing turned off on both drives.

[jettzypher]

deadly boss modi may be wrong, but dont the boss warning exist in-game now? last time i had one of these add-ons was bigwigs before BC came out. havent had one since and stil get those raid warnings that pop up. unless it does something completely different than raid warnings.

EDIT:
purpose of post...so this would be a waste of memory, no?

[Coltimar]

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=4854') is a good thread. I STRONGLY recommend a second hard drive to run WoW from. Windows sticks it's nose into anything running on the same drive that it is on. Symlinking will probably solve your problem, as it did mine.

[pinotnoir]

PowerShell script to create symbolically linked (mklink) copies of WoW ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=4854') is a good thread. I STRONGLY recommend a second hard drive to run WoW from. Windows sticks it's nose into anything running on the same drive that it is on. Symlinking will probably solve your problem, as it did mine.

You think I should move it to the Raptor drive and symlink? I am going to check that symlink thing out.. I dont know what it is. Going to read it now. Right now I only have 1 wow directory. I dont use 5 different installs. Do I still need to mess with symlinking if I only use 1 wow install to run my 5 accounts?

[aboron]

The one main thing i'd try in that setup is get the WoW folder over onto the raptor. This will have 2 good effects for one action:

1) the wow data files will be on the faster drive
2) the operating system files and swap will not be running on the same drive/channel as wow is using.

[pinotnoir]

The one main thing i'd try in that setup is get the WoW folder over onto the raptor. This will have 2 good effects for one action:

1) the wow data files will be on the faster drive
2) the operating system files and swap will not be running on the same drive/channel as wow is using.

I had my swap file on the raptor... But today after reading someone elses post I disabled my swap file. I guess if you have 8gig of ram you dont need one according to the post. Since turning off swap file I have not noticed any difference from when I had one eneabled. Moving the wow folder to the other drive will be pretty easy. On a side note I remember reading somewhere that this seagate I have is equal or faster than the raptor. It's been awhile. This is one of the first 10k rpm sata raptors so maybe it was talking about the first ones.

[aboron]

To speed up the large number of random seeks for little bits of wow image data, I'd go with the drive that has the lowest average latency. The raptor 150 is listed as 2.99ms and the seagate at 4.19ms .

[Tsunami]

Blizzard increased the minimum system requirements for wotlk. there is more detail now than with BC. so there is more information for your system to handle. My guess is you will need to turn down the detail on your alts. your system is ok. but I think your weakest link is your video cards. Is your main screen being run on one card and the 2 alts screens being run on the other cards? This would be the best set-up. but either way 3 big screen on those video cards is really pushing them, my best guess is the detail increase from wotlk on your already strained video cards is too much for them to handle. i think wotlk is the straw that is breaking your video cards back.

My advise would be to upgrade to 2 4850's. should be able to get them for under $170 each.

[Ellusionist]

Ok I am no computer expert and I need some advice. I am playing 5 wows on one machine using keyclone. In BC I never had any problem with lag. I use a small number of add ons and have my grahics settings very low. Leveling in wotlk was not too bad until I hit dalaran and other places that contained a ton of people Even a 10man raid sends my games into choppy sinclair mode. In order for me to continue playing this game I think there needs to be some upgrading.

Here is a list of my computers specs....

Intel Q6600 Processor
8gig Corsair Dominator DDR ram
Asus P5w dh deluxe mb (pretty old)
Vista 64
Seagate Barracuda 500g drive ( right now I use 1 wow directory located on this drive)
WD Raptor 150g drive ( this use to be my main drive until I changed from XP to vista 64)
2 ATI 3870 512meg video cards (not in crossfire)
3 LCD monitors ( 24 main and 2 20inch sides)


This setup worked fine in BC. However, its damn near impossible to play in some areas. In the bg's it can get pretty choppy making game play even more frustrating. If you tech guys know how I can improve my game performance let me know.I have the same processor, overclocked to 3.2GHz on air, and it has proven to be VERY stable and stays cool at the same time. I'm using a huge heatsink/cooler on it, though.

8GiB of RAM should be fine. You're probably using just a little over 4GiB while running 5 WoW's, but who wants something like 6GiB RAM? 8 is a better number. :)

The motherboard should be irrelevant. As long as the computer isn't crashing or restarting spontaneously, I can't see the motherboard having anything to do with your FPS.

Vista x64, same operating system I'm running.

Seagate Barracuda + Western Digital Raptor: If you're using the Barracuda as your main drive, I'd have to say switch to the Raptor. That alone should fix the problem. Otherwise, if you don't want to do that, just run your main WoW from the Barracuda and the other 4 WoW's from the Raptor. I currently use three drives: Main on Drive1, Slave2+Slave3 on Drive2, Slave4+Slave5 on Drive3.

2xATI3870's: I don't have experience with how ATI's numbers compare with NVIDIA's, but I do know that a 9800GT (512MiB) can be bought for around $120+shipping. I'd say stick with what you have and try all video setting combinations possible until you find something that works. Turn ALL settings down on all clients, especially the slaves. Then set your MAXFPS and MAXFPSBK values. Lastly, you can increase your main's in-game video settings until it starts to chop. It really shouldn't chop at all on the main if you have one card dedicated to your main character.

That is all. :D Good luck!

[Coltimar]

My setup is like this

C: = slower drive for Windows. Having a 10k C: will just make you boot faster, lol.

E: = 2 Raid0 10k 74GB drives
- World of Warcraft
- WoW0
- WoW1 - /data, /cache, /interface folders are symlinked to e:\World of Warcraft
- WoW2 - /data, /cache, /interface folders are symlinked to e:\World of Warcraft
- WoW3 - /data, /cache, /interface folders are symlinked to e:\World of Warcraft
- WoW4 - /data, /cache, /interface folders are symlinked to e:\World of Warcraft

Symlink is basically a fancy shortcut. I symlink my Interface folder to make updating addons easier :/

I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 bit and I also use an ATI 3870, just one, and I have 0 lag now.

[Smahs]

I was a lil laggy running two WoW's but don't lag any more. I reset my modem and tuned vista down a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTxjwzMJXcU
guide to turn down vista, may help

[blast3r]

The only thing I can think of would be upgrading the video cards (outside of what others have already told you). I'm running the new i7 processor with 9 gigs of ram and am experiencing very little lag. The only thing I get that is noticable is in Dalarn it just feels slightly more sluggish (but it isn't chopy and laggy at all). My video cards are two nvidia GTS 8800 GTS with 640MB ram.

[pinotnoir]

I changed to the raptor and will see how it does. I have my big screen and 1 side plugged into my main card. I didnt think about plugging my two side monitors into my second card. I will give this a shot. My game runs pretty smooth until a bunch of stuff is going on. For instance, wintersgrasp can get very choppy when there are a lot of people fighting at the base. All my characters have their video settings turned down to the minimum. I was thinking my weakest link was the video cards too. These cards were great when I purchased them. It was before they came out with the new stuff. I could overclock the cpu but I am not clear on how thats done. My heatsink is a very nice zalman and Ishould be fine overclocking. I just dont know what to change in the bios to do it.

[pengwynman]

I changed to the raptor and will see how it does. I have my big screen and 1 side plugged into my main card. I didnt think about plugging my two side monitors into my second card. I will give this a shot. My game runs pretty smooth until a bunch of stuff is going on. For instance, wintersgrasp can get very choppy when there are a lot of people fighting at the base. All my characters have their video settings turned down to the minimum. I was thinking my weakest link was the video cards too. These cards were great when I purchased them. It was before they came out with the new stuff. I could overclock the cpu but I am not clear on how thats done. My heatsink is a very nice zalman and Ishould be fine overclocking. I just dont know what to change in the bios to do it.if you want to oc it, just google "overclocking guide" and you'll get a bunch of helpful guides you can follow. there's kind of an art to it, i really enjoy trying to get that extra performance boost out of my system.. and oc'ing my q9550 really improved my fps in most areas. pre-oc my main would sit around 40 fps while questing in northrend, now the only place it drops below 50 is in dalaran. i agree though that the video cards could be a weak link, not necessarily just the performance of the cards themselves, but issues with running 2 of them separately with different instance of wow *shrug*

[Tsunami]

I think you will see some improvement when you put your 24in on one card and your 2x20 on the other. this will help even out the work load. try it with the 24in on video card 1, note the fps, than switch the set up to see if it works better on video card 2.

If i remember right, the main video card does all the rendering or shading and then passes that information to the other card. so reducing the load on the main card should help you.

i don't think overclocking will solve your problem, it may help a little, but I don't think you have a problem with your processor running 5 instances of wow.

these are from the spec sheet on those ati 3870's:
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2

my guess is your 24 in. display is close to the 1900x1200 single display limit. adding a 20in on top of that is running the card at max. output. than add the extra detail rendering needed to run wotlk and you have bottleneck.

let me know if this works.

[pinotnoir]

I think you will see some improvement when you put your 24in on one card and your 2x20 on the other. this will help even out the work load. try it with the 24in on video card 1, note the fps, than switch the set up to see if it works better on video card 2.

If i remember right, the main video card does all the rendering or shading and then passes that information to the other card. so reducing the load on the main card should help you.

i don't think overclocking will solve your problem, it may help a little, but I don't think you have a problem with your processor running 5 instances of wow.

these are from the spec sheet on those ati 3870's:
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2

my guess is your 24 in. display is close to the 1900x1200 single display limit. adding a 20in on top of that is running the card at max. output. than add the extra detail rendering needed to run wotlk and you have bottleneck.

let me know if this works.

I plugged in my 20 inch that was in the main card into the second card. Then I spent 30 mins trying to get the settings right in ati's control pannel. I couldnt get them setup right so I went back to the 24 and 20 in 1st card 20 in second. I dont know what the deal is but it would not setup my screens to pass the mouse to each. One monitor was just there and you couldnt access it via the mouse. I will try again but after this last wintersgrasp lag fest I am about ready to bite the bullet and buy a new pc. I cant take this choppy play any longer.

I was reading up on the 4870 1gig ddr5 cards. I dont want to waste the money on two 4870x2 cards. Another option would be to get the 4850's. Would changing my desktop res on the 24inch to a lower setting help? I have it at the 1920x 1200 now.

[pinotnoir]

Could this be the card for me? 4 DVI outputs! http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/products/products_overview.php?gpid=265&grp=3 ('http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/products/products_overview.php?gpid=265&grp=3')

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102809 ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102809')

[Tsunami]

I discussed breifly with my I.T. guy what you have and your problem. what he says is happening is your main video cannot handle the processing load put on it, that card can only handle one monitor running at 1900x1200, so the cpu has to do extra work to render the 20 inch monitor. he said you should be ok if the 24 in was on one card and the 2x 20 are on the other, because than it will be within spec for the cards. this will take the load off your main card and your cpu. one way to check this is to drop the resolution of the 24in. to the same as the 20in (so they are both at the same lower resolution) and check the performance than. If it gets better than change your monitor config.

the 4850x2 is a beast, I recommended it on another thread as being better than running 2 cards in sli. just make sure it will fit in your case ( it is 12" long) and you have the power supply to run it(650 watts or 1000 watts depending on what wires you have)

[pinotnoir]

I discussed breifly with my I.T. guy what you have and your problem. what he says is happening is your main video cannot handle the processing load put on it, that card can only handle one monitor running at 1900x1200, so the cpu has to do extra work to render the 20 inch monitor. he said you should be ok if the 24 in was on one card and the 2x 20 are on the other, because than it will be within spec for the cards. this will take the load off your main card and your cpu. one way to check this is to drop the resolution of the 24in. to the same as the 20in (so they are both at the same lower resolution) and check the performance than. If it gets better than change your monitor config.

the 4850x2 is a beast, I recommended it on another thread as being better than running 2 cards in sli. just make sure it will fit in your case ( it is 12" long) and you have the power supply to run it(650 watts or 1000 watts depending on what wires you have)

I finally got the 24inch on the main card and the two 20's on the second. I dont know why it was messing up yesterday. It wouldnt give me the option to extend it the other day. I will give it a shot and see if it's still laggy. My next option would be to get that 4850x2 card with 4 dvi outs. I have a nice 750watt thermaltake power supply and should have room in my case. I read its very loud. I am spoiled with my 3870 Sapphire Toxic vapor cooled video cards. If they are making any noise I cant hear it.

[pengwynman]

I plugged in my 20 inch that was in the main card into the second card. Then I spent 30 mins trying to get the settings right in ati's control pannel. I couldnt get them setup right so I went back to the 24 and 20 in 1st card 20 in second. I dont know what the deal is but it would not setup my screens to pass the mouse to each. One monitor was just there and you couldnt access it via the mouse. I will try again but after this last wintersgrasp lag fest I am about ready to bite the bullet and buy a new pc. I cant take this choppy play any longer.

I was reading up on the 4870 1gig ddr5 cards. I dont want to waste the money on two 4870x2 cards. Another option would be to get the 4850's. Would changing my desktop res on the 24inch to a lower setting help? I have it at the 1920x 1200 now.yeah i actually wasn't paying enough attention to your monitor/resolution setup. the desktop res on the 24 inch shouldn't matter, but what res are you playing wow at? try putting all 5 windows on your main monitor with a low resolution and see what your fps is

[pinotnoir]

I tried the 24inch in the first card and the 20's in the second. Same performance. My game rez is: The resolutions are setup in keyclone for each maximizer section. My side monitors have two blocks that are 1048,840 and my main screen has 1 block thats 1870,1125.

I guess I need a video card upgrade. I wonder if my motherboard is causing problems because my second pci express port is not 16x like the first. I think the second one is half. The q6600 with 8gig ram and moving my wow directory to the raptor should be ok. All my graphics are as low as possible. I'm thinking about getting that 4850x2 with 4 dvi or two 4870 cards.

[spannah]

IMHO

Re-install windows on the faster raptor drive, and install all the WoWs and symlinks on the slower drive.

Why?

Remember folks, the game communicates to your hardware through Windows, basically your OS needs to be fast. WoW will also load reasonably fast if it is not on the system drive - it loads most things at start up and then additional 3d geometry and textures as you move around. Actually it writes very little, if anything, to the HD until you logout or exit the game.

This may not be the root cause, but I think worth a try.

Edit: spelling and grammar.