Getting Dalaran Smooth..

[Clanked]

I am currently unable to play the game. I havn't even touched the expansion. So I have no idea how bad the lag actually is, all I know is from reading people saying "Wow, this city sucks to be in"
However, that doesn't mean that I'm not sitting here planning out a computer to build when I get home.

I am currently looking at a 3 screen setup, with 1680x1050 on each screen. Two of them rotated 90 with two clients each. The main screen would have one client using all 1680x1050.
The cards I am looking at are 2x 4850's.
I would like to be able to run around in wow without getting choked up.

It seems a lot of people have trouble being in the new city. What do yall think is the bottleneck?
Is 2x 4850 rendering the above monitors capable of this task? Is 2x 4870?
Does having extra GPU memory help it? (ie. a 1GB 4870 over a 512MB 4870)

If you have a solution to get Dalaran smooth across multiple clients, please share.

[mikekim]

I think the problem at the moment is the changes that Blizzard have made to the Graphics engine, they had the same issues when TBC was released. you will find that they will look at making changes soon to increase performance (also 1gb gfx card would be better than 512)

[Kaynin]

It's mainly the Physical memory and harddisk that lag cities and such indeed.

Upping your RAM or getting a fast s-ata (or an SSD) would greatly improve these situational lags.

[pengwynman]

i get about 10-15 fps in Dalaran, here are my machine specs:

Core 2 Quad Q9550 OC'd 2.83 -> 3.4 GHz
8 GB DDR2 @ 1066 MHz
BFG GTX 280 OC2
5x symlinked wow folders on 2x 500gb HD's in raid1

gotta say, performance in shatt has gone up since no one goes there anymore :rolleyes:

[entoptic]

My main machine, running only one copy of WoW -

Core2Duo 3ghz
Geforce 8800gt 256mb
2GB system ram
Faster SATA HDD.

When I'm in Dalaran, my WoW.exe hits 1gb + system memory used. Due to all the players there, it jumps way up.

ANYWHERE else in Northrend its about 500mb used.

ANYWHERE else in Outlands or Azeroth its about 400mb used.

Dalaran actually causes my system to start paging memory to HDD at times. Its f'in horrible. Running multiple WoW's on one box? /shudder. Make sure you've got like 6GB+ of ram. I'd probably vote for 8 honestly.

Fur has it spot on.

I had to upgrade to 8 gigs of ram so I could walk around. I am finally able to crank the graphics and walk around just fine. Thank god!

[zanthor]

(also 1gb gfx card would be better than 512) I disagree with this overly generalized statement.

8500GT with 1GB Ram - $65 ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814145164')

9800GTX+ with 512MB Ram - $230 ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150327')

I guarantee the 512MB card will blow the doors off the 1GB card.

[Siaea]

I was so utterly frustrated and pissed off the other day. My team hit 74 and got ported to Dalaran, and 3 clients crashed before they all finished loading in. I have had at least 1 or 2 clients crash every time I enter or fly out of Dalaran. I hope that gets smoothed out, because I thought I had a pretty beefy computer before that :(

[pinotnoir]

I was so utterly frustrated and pissed off the other day. My team hit 74 and got ported to Dalaran, and 3 clients crashed before they all finished loading in. I have had at least 1 or 2 clients crash every time I enter or fly out of Dalaran. I hope that gets smoothed out, because I thought I had a pretty beefy computer before that :(

I am adding a second pc to run 3 wows while my current pc will run 2. I am going to wait until after christmas to see if prices drop on the stuff I want. If you have not setup symlinking I would highly suggest it. It helped me some but dalaran is still laggy as hell. Here is an easy way to setup symlinking.


From Crucials Post on symlink
Not sure why everyone wants to overcomplicate this....

1. Copy Wow directory for each clone (ie. Wow1, Wow2, Wow3, etc)
2. Delete Data, Interface, Screenshots, Cache in the clones folders
3. Paste into text file called makelinks.cmd (change drive letter of course)

mklink /D Data D:\Wow1\Data
mklink /D Interface D:\Wow1\Interface
mklink /D Screenshots D:\Wow1\Screenshots
mklink /D Cache D:\Wow1\Cache
pause

4. Run that in each clones Wow directory, they are now all pointing to Wow1 as the source for those directories.
5. Done "

[Nitro]

I had to move from 4gb windows xp to 8gb Vista64 to get dalaran playable, my current specs are:

Striker Extreme Mobo
Q6700 Processor
8GB Ram
GTX 280 SSC Graphics (overclocked by about 20% with evg's precision tool)
Vista 64bit (only thing ive done with it is turn aero off)
1 raptor drive per wow client (7 harddrives total in my machine)
Tons of well placed fans

I run pretty decent in Dalaran now, usually 8 to 15 fps and my current bottleneck seems to be my CPU, it runs at 100% on all cores when I am in Dalaran. I'm thinking about OC'ing it to see if it improves performance.

[Clanked]

Is there a way to measure GPU Memory usage?
I guess my biggest question is whether the graphics cards are running out of memory or not.

I am not going to get a SSD. Too expensive, and I plan on having plenty of ram so paging won't be an issue.

[Clanked]

I run pretty decent in Dalaran now, usually 8 to 15 fps and my current bottleneck seems to be my CPU, it runs at 100% on all cores when I am in Dalaran.Thank you, thats what I'm looking for. ID'ing the bottlenecks. Since you say all four cores I assume you have affinity setup?
I was planning main + 1 on cores 1/3. Then 3 followers on cores 2/4. I might have to look into Q9550. I might even head into the i-920 if the price drops in the next 3 months.

[Clanked]

I am now looking at the i7 920. Here is my current plan of attack: Wishlist on NewEgg ('http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=5689869')
I already own a Antec P182 I picked up during Black Friday. Then I am looking at 2 of these Dell LCD Screens ('http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Displays/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=320-6107') to be the flanking monitors. Pivoted 90 of course.

Basicly a Core i7 920, 12GB of Triple Channel Ram, 2x 4850 with 1GB each.

Hopefully that is enough memory between the System RAM and the GPU RAM that I won't have to pull anything off the hard drive once its loaded.

Think that will run Dalaran?

[turbonapkin]

That spec should do the job. I run a similar setup, 6GB ram, 4870x2 and two SSDs in raid0. My main runs its own copy of the game while all the slaves run off a second copy.

I load into Dalaran in around 5 seconds, there is about 10 seconds of intense read activity on the SSDs and once over those bumps I get a sustained 60fps on my main, while the slaves are all background-limited to 10fps.

There have been a couple of instances where i have hearthed all chars to dalaran at exactly the same time and my SSDs completely siezed up to the point where I became impatient and hard reset the pc. I now tend to stagger the hearths by a couple of seconds to spread the read requests on the ssd out over time.

edit: Check out this thread ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=17526') on core i7 affinity once you are set up. Very important to get your core affinity right in order to reap the benefits of your i7.

[blast3r]

I think the problem at the moment is the changes that Blizzard have made to the Graphics engine, they had the same issues when TBC was released. you will find that they will look at making changes soon to increase performance (also 1gb gfx card would be better than 512)

I'm running 5 clients on one computer and have absolutely no problem going anywhere. I bought a cheap gateway with the i7 processor and upgraded the ram to 9 gigs and it is very smooth everywhere i go. Even in city raids i don't miss a beat. I think the key is getting memory up to 8 gigs or better. The BUS bottleneck of writing to disk is where the majority of 'nearly unplayable' situations arise. The computer costs 1200 bucks at bestbuy and memory was about 200 bucks. Worth every single penny! I hope to 10 box one day and will likely get the same setup for my second group to run on.

[pinotnoir]

I am now looking at the i7 920. Here is my current plan of attack: Wishlist on NewEgg ('http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=5689869')
I already own a Antec P182 I picked up during Black Friday. Then I am looking at 2 of these Dell LCD Screens ('http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Displays/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=320-6107') to be the flanking monitors. Pivoted 90 of course.

Basicly a Core i7 920, 12GB of Triple Channel Ram, 2x 4850 with 1GB each.

Hopefully that is enough memory between the System RAM and the GPU RAM that I won't have to pull anything off the hard drive once its loaded.

Think that will run Dalaran?

I suggest getting http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Displays/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&sku=320-6523

20 inch Ultrasharps instead of the 22. The 22's have shitty TN pannels and the 20's have very high quality pannels. I made the mistake of getting a 22 and it looked terrible. If you moved your head so much as 1 inch the colors would change. I have a 24inch Ultrasharp in the middle. I think all my lcd's use the same panels. You may as well get another hd and set it up to raid 0 for $50. Not a huge upgrade but every bit helps. $50 is cheap.

[Clanked]

Thanks for the tip on the monitors.
Am I correct in assuming you owned both, but now use the 20 inch screens?

I need to be convinced of RAID 0 before I even consider it.
I don't really see what the benefit would be other than faster load times. Load times aren't that bad to begin with imho.

[Menthu]

The way I got Dalaran smooth is:

After 2 years of boxing, I finally made 2 seperate WoW folders.

1 folder with a WoWclient that has high gfx settings in WoW.
1 folder with the lowest gfx settings possible.

My main shaman uses the one with high settings, and the other 3 use the clients with the absolute minimum settings.

I play 4 clients on 1 comp, 4gb memory and a 8800gt 768mb vid card.

-Menthu

[Gadzooks]

The way I got Dalaran smooth is:

After 2 years of boxing, I finally made 2 seperate WoW folders.

1 folder with a WoWclient that has high gfx settings in WoW.
1 folder with the lowest gfx settings possible.

My main shaman uses the one with high settings, and the other 3 use the clients with the absolute minimum settings.

I play 4 clients on 1 comp, 4gb memory and a 8800gt 768mb vid card.

-MenthuMy experience with Dalaran is wierd - the first time I went with 3, I DC'ed on two accounts, just loading it.

The second, I got in, but moving was impossible. Hearthed out one at a time.

Now, I can go, and it takes about a minute or two to settle out, then it's fine. Occasional blips as I move around, but it's not that bad. 20-30fps on all clients. Slightly better performance when my toons enter shops or the bank. My habit is to park the toons at the bank, and run each one to the trainers or whatever they need to do. This is during peak hours, I was in Dalaran last night at 8pm Pacific, and the place was packed.

I'm also not running many addons, especially auctioneer, or gatherer - while they're nice, they degrade your performance. When I start farming for mats, and playing the AH, I'll turn them back on.

24" iMac, 4 gigs ram, 2600Pro HD card.