Bad performance, what did I forget?

[Pocalypse]

I finally got a new computer. I got it all set up and running, and at first things were running fine, but now I'm getting fps issues, and I have no idea whats wrong.

Here's my setup:

Core i7 940 2.93 GHz
12GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz
Dual 1gb GTX 280 (I know dual cards are not good for multiboxing, I wanted these for playing other games)
Vista Ultimate 64 bit

I have SLI disabled for wow, so it should only be using the power of one card correct?

5 clients, symlinked data/cache/wdb folders onto an OCZ 60gb SSD. The other files/folders are all on my C: drive.

I run 2x27" monitors, 1 client at 1920x1200 on monitor 1, the other 4 at 960x600 on monitor 2.

Set affinity for all clients to 255.
I use keyclone as multiboxing software, clients are set with 45 maxfps 25 maxfpsbk.
My video settings in wow are at all on full except for 0 shadows, 1/2 clutter density/radius and texture filtering.

All 5 of my clients never reach their maxfpsbk. They tend to stay around 10-15fps. I remember getting much better results (albeit at lower resolutions and settings) from my 3 year old computer.

When I first set everything up a few days ago, things were running fine, with much higher fps. This was running around IF and old content.

Now I'm in one of the Howling Fjord towns (pretty much empty), and fps has slowed to a crawl. I haven't even tried entering Dalaran, nevermind WG.

My task manager is showing between 30%-60% used on each core, and 7gb ram used. Each client is taking approx 750mb ram.

Did I miss something, did I forget about some crucial setting? I was expecting much better results than this. I keep reading on here about people getting better performance with less power.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Owltoid]

Holy crap, I certainly hope something is wrong because if you can't get some nice performance out of that computer then I'm screwed :P

[Pocalypse]

Holy crap, I certainly hope something is wrong because if you can't get some nice performance out of that computer then I'm screwed :P

Exactly, I expected to get amazing results with this setup.

On a further note, I tried it with WMP open on the now playing tab, and it brought me up a few fps to about 20-23 ish but with tons of dips into 10-15. Still not good.

Keep in mind I am testing this in an almost empty Howling Fjord town. I would expect this performance in Dalaran, but nowhere else.

[mrmcgee21]

I've never been able to get descent performance out of wow when 5 boxing, I have a similar setup and I have to play at nearly bottom level graphics in wow smoothly ( 40ish fps, with graphics up 10-15 ). The only setting I have turned up is my spell detail so I can see aura's on the ground, granted I do play in a rather high resolution (2560x1200) so maybe thats why.

[Pocalypse]

Damn, I was really hoping that wouldn't be the case.

Do you know of any video setting in particular that affects it so badly?

[Shaitan256]

WoW is SLI friendly btw.

I thought only 1 is for 3D performance or something like that?!

Some gave in a few threads the advice that Sli isn't that good for Boxing?! (gonna look for these Threads) Or does it only count for Xfire?!

[Pocalypse]

Did cap FPS on Alt WoW instance? (both foreground and background caps)
Yes, 45/25 on all slaves, 60/25 on main.

Did you set processor Affinity for each WoW instance?
Yes, 255 for all.

Did you turn GFX detail down on alts?
No, same settings for all clients. I often PIP and was hoping to keep this, but if it's the only way I'll do that.

Did you install all the latest drivers / service packs / firmware updates?
My windows is all up to date. This computer is only a few weeks old so I haven't checked much more than that.
I don't like installing graphic card updates unless theres a serious problem, it's caused me too much pain in the past.

Hmm, I'm running 180.44, latest is 181.22. I'll install that later today or tomorrow, thanks!

WoW is SLI friendly btw.
I can't use more than one monitor with SLI can I?
Edit: Ah, I see the new display drivers support multiple monitor SLI, awesome.

Did you disable all addons while testing?
No, though I'm not running a lot of addons.
Macaroon, Jamba, Pitbull, Cartographer, fubar with plugins, nquestlog, lightheaded on main.

Do you have some shitty anti-virus software running? :D
I have AVG free edition, which has never caused me problems before :).


So in conclusion, new display drivers!
(I feel like an idiot for not thinking of this myself btw :)).

Thanks Fursphere.

[Pocalypse]

Damnit, I knew there was a reason I didn't do this before.

Install new drivers, reboot, enable SLI, all looks well.

Run keyclone, run clients 1-5. Entire computer freezes on loading client 2 (on 2nd monitor).
A single press of ctrl-alt-delete forces a reboot.

Reboot, try again, 1 client at a time. First client loads fine (on 2nd screen). Second client, keyclone gives an error about buffer overflow and closes.
Exit client 1, retry keyclone, client 1 loads fine, skip 2, client 3 loads fine, client 4 causes entire computer to crash like earlier.

Reboot, try again without keyclone. Client 1 causes entire computer to crash, this time giving me a blue screen with a stop: error.

Going to try without SLI, I'm thinking maybe it doesn't support any 3d stuff on a second monitor, since it gives me an option to choose which monitor to run 3d stuff on.

And my keyclone.ini file got reset somehow :).

[Pocalypse]

Core i7 has 8 cores (4 of them virtual, or hyperthreaded, whatever that means).

Reading from some other threads here, the best setting seems to be to let windows do the work for you and assign cores.

Setting affinity manually to 255 in config.wtf (not in keyclone) is the way to do that.

[Pocalypse]

Ok, no SLI, no crashes, but also no noticable performance gain.

[Pocalypse]

Ok, for kicks try going into your BIOS and disabling hyper threading all together.

I know, its a long shot...

I don't think I'm ready to try that quite yet. I don't want to gimp my system in other respects.

Thanks for all the suggestions though, I'll try some more stuff out tomorrow and this weekend.

[Alptraum]

with nvidia cards you can't SLI if your gonna dual monitor..it dosn't work...IE: why it comes up and asks you which monitor you want to use, if you had say 3 video cards in that system you could SLI 2 of them together to max pump the FPS out..and use your 3rd card for your main..that might provide you a decent solution. I personally haven't tried it yet, but I do have a board that supports 3 cards and also own 3 idential cards.

Ok, no SLI, no crashes, but also no noticable performance gain.

[Maxion]

Indeed, SLI is made to run a single screen with two video cards, if you wanna use more than one screen you'll have to take off SLI and just run one off each card.

[Creazil]

(...)
Run keyclone, run clients 1-5. Entire computer freezes on loading client 2 (on 2nd monitor).
A single press of ctrl-alt-delete forces a reboot.

Reboot, try again, 1 client at a time. First client loads fine (on 2nd screen). Second client, keyclone gives an error about buffer overflow and closes.
Exit client 1, retry keyclone, client 1 loads fine, skip 2, client 3 loads fine, client 4 causes entire computer to crash like earlier.

Reboot, try again without keyclone. Client 1 causes entire computer to crash, this time giving me a blue screen with a stop: error.
(...)http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t82311.html

The problem is the same for the new driver. Aka windowed mode + a few other things makes it fail.

[Pocalypse]

Indeed, SLI is made to run a single screen with two video cards, if you wanna use more than one screen you'll have to take off SLI and just run one off each card.

How can I run a screen off each card?

I was under the impression that without SLI, two monitors would run off the same card, effectively ignoring the second card.

I currently have both monitors connected to the top (primary) card. But I have tried connecting the 2nd monitor to the 2nd card and saw no difference.


http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t82311.html

The problem is the same for the new driver. Aka windowed mode + a few other things makes it fail.

Thanks for that link. Hopefully Nvidia is working on some kind of solution.

[Sajuuk]

Are you disabling Sli via software or physically disconnecting the cards? -try removing the connector.
And it can't hurt to try disabling Hyperthreading in the BIOS, like Fursphere said (You can always re-enable it)

[emesis]

Did cap FPS on Alt WoW instance? (both foreground and background caps)
Yes, 45/25 on all slaves, 60/25 on main.

Did you set processor Affinity for each WoW instance?
Yes, 255 for all.


On slaves go 36/20 on slaves. No need to go any higher. (basically you'll tell WoW to stop trying so hard. :) )



You haven't mentioned if you've tried the above suggestion. Personally, I think this one is huge. While my system is not quite as nice as yours (i'm on an older quad core with 8 gb memory and a GTX8800), it's still pretty decent. I get non-linear performance degradation if I set my maxfpsbk too high. I have it set to something really low like 5, actually. The FPS comes right back up when I switch to a slave and 5 fps is fine for watching follow/placement of your non-mains.

[Catamer]

Vista x64, Nvidia 280
I tried different resolutions on my monitors and it was not good. ( 1920x1080 + 1680x1050 )
I get better performance out of ( 1680x1050 + 1680x1050 )

good luck...

[Bovidae]

While I don't have personal experience with SLI, NVidia claims that with two cards in SLI and two monitors plugged into the main card, It can support 3d gaming on both screens, in windowed more. The caveat is "on supported games"

http://www.slizone.com/object/sli_multi_monitor.html#display

I can't find a complete list of these supported games on the Nvidia site, but WoW has always displayed the SLI compatible logo, even before they actually did...

[Pocalypse]

You haven't mentioned if you've tried the above suggestion. Personally, I think this one is huge. While my system is not quite as nice as yours (i'm on an older quad core with 8 gb memory and a GTX8800), it's still pretty decent. I get non-linear performance degradation if I set my maxfpsbk too high. I have it set to something really low like 5, actually. The FPS comes right back up when I switch to a slave and 5 fps is fine for watching follow/placement of your non-mains.

I'll try this tonight, along with setting a few more video options to min.


I had a look at that SLI site, and while it claims to support dual monitor 3d in windowed mode, I'm certain SLI is what was causing the crashes.

I have been disabling it through software, haven't touched the cards themselves.

[Clovis]

What do you mean by 45/33 foreground / back ground FPS caps? Is there more to it then /console maxfps 30?

-Clov

[Owltoid]

What do you mean by 45/33 foreground / back ground FPS caps? Is there more to it then /console maxfps 30?

-Clov

You can set your maximum FPS for when the WoW window is in the background. Similar to "/console maxfps" I believe the command is "/console maxbkfps"

[Catamer]

hyperthreading is spliting a core into two.
if you have a 3GHz I7 you can have 8 hypers at 1.5Ghz each or 4 cores at 3GHz each.
if you only have a 2.4GHz I7, the you have 8 hypers at 1.2GHz each or you can have 4 cores at 2.4Ghz each.

I tend to think that WoW and other games prefer a faster CPU than a slower one.
imo... running WoW on a 1.2Ghz single hyper would be sluggish.

[Teakon]

"WoW is SLI friendly btw. "

Not for me its not i get to playing a bit into the game and she locks up or does a HUGGGE lag spike. Unless i'm doing something wrong but from all i have read....wow is not sli friendly.