Dual Screens is killing my GTX 260 - What Card will help?

[sqeaky4100]

As it stands with my rig, I can get 100fps consistent with 1 WoW on 1 monitor. Max Settings.

However, right when I throw in my Alts on my second screen. ( even at lowest possible settings ) ... My FPS is just completely butchered.


I have reason to believe it's because my card, gtx 260, somehow doesn't like the whole dual screen prospect.


Is there a card that will help me here?

[Owltoid]

How bad is butchered?

[keghia]

Ok, seeing as I run a GTX260 on dual screens with zero problems I thought I would throw my 2c in.

Make sure that vertical sync is turned off under the WoW settings.

What operating system are you running? What program are you running to get WoW on the second screen?

Also, what CPU do you have. How do you know its the video card causing the decrease in fps?

[sqeaky4100]

Ok, seeing as I run a GTX260 on dual screens with zero problems I thought I would throw my 2c in.

Make sure that vertical sync is turned off under the WoW settings.

What operating system are you running? What program are you running to get WoW on the second screen?

Also, what CPU do you have. How do you know its the video card causing the decrease in fps?Running Vista 64bit.

Using keyclone.

I have a i7 920... so it isn't the proc.


I know it's the video card because when all 5 are open, and I look at my Task Manager, both processor and RAM are only at like 25%

[Natch]

Do you get extremely low dps in all wow windows at the same time? Even in active window? Have you checked your maxFPS and maxFPSBk settings?

[Fizzler]

I second checking your maxFPS and maxFPSbk

What are you considering butchered fps by the way?

[sqeaky4100]

Do you get extremely low dps in all wow windows at the same time? Even in active window? Have you checked your maxFPS and maxFPSBk settings?
Well like I said, Im averaging around 80-90fps on a single WoW.

But when I add my team this happens:

- My main ( of which I want the good fps ) goes down to around 40fps
- My alts I fpsbk to 15fpsbk.

The main problem I see though is this:

With 1 WoW, everything runs perfectly smooth. But when my team comes in, on the second monitor... I get this weird "stutter", like the game freezes for fradtion of a second... it happens every 1/2sec to 2sec.... it just doesnt run silky smooth like with 1.

[Owltoid]

lol, 40 FPS is considered butchered.... ok. It sounds to me like the card is working well, but maybe you should spend 500 and get a card so you can go up to 60 FPS.

[Natch]

Do you get extremely low dps in all wow windows at the same time? Even in active window? Have you checked your maxFPS and maxFPSBk settings?
Well like I said, Im averaging around 80-90fps on a single WoW.

But when I add my team this happens:

- My main ( of which I want the good fps ) goes down to around 40fps
- My alts I fpsbk to 15fpsbk.

The main problem I see though is this:

With 1 WoW, everything runs perfectly smooth. But when my team comes in, on the second monitor... I get this weird "stutter", like the game freezes for fradtion of a second... it happens every 1/2sec to 2sec.... it just doesnt run silky smooth like with 1.
I get that stutter when I have FuBar_PerformanceFu "Show addon usage". Do you have an addon on slaves that monitors addon memory usage? Have you tried running just one of the slaves by itself and see if it still stutters?

[sqeaky4100]

lol, 40 FPS is considered butchered.... ok. It sounds to me like the card is working well, but maybe you should spend 500 and get a card so you can go up to 60 FPS.It isn't the 40FPS that I concerned about, but more the "stuttering" that occurs when running w/ my slaves, that's game ruining for me. Hell, I would be happy with 20fps, as long as it was consistent and smooth.


@ Natch:

Only Addons Im running are: Bagnon - Cartographer - QuestHelper - QuestGuru

I know QuestHelper is known to leak memory, but it didn't really help disabling it.





I run all 5 instances of WoW @ 1920x1200... is it possible to lower the alts resolutions and have them go up to 1920x1200 when I PiP? ... Im thinking it might be taxing my video card more running them all at 1900x1200 ( even though they really arn't, theyre only 1/4 of that size most of the time )

[Natch]

I have my four slaves running full resolution in 640x400 windows and barely noticed any performance decrease from running them in a lower resolution (running the slaves in a lower resolution will make them stretch when they are pip:ed to your main screen btw.)
Did you try disabling all addons? I know Bagnon is harmless (at least for me) but do you have a Cartographer module that's being nasty perhaps? QuestHelper can eat A LOT of resources if you have set its calculation performance over 100% (/qh perf.) Not tried QuestGuru so don't know about that one. Other than this the only thing I can think of is some kind of driver misconfiguration or bug, sorry. Maybe they can help you over at the nVidia forums?

[Frosty]

As it stands with my rig, I can get 100fps consistent with 1 WoW on 1 monitor. Max Settings.

However, right when I throw in my Alts on my second screen. ( even at lowest possible settings ) ... My FPS is just completely butchered.


I have reason to believe it's because my card, gtx 260, somehow doesn't like the whole dual screen prospect.


Is there a card that will help me here?
I've got a GTX 260 running 6 instances of EQ2. I can run them on one monitor or 2 and it doesn't phase it.

If you think it's a problem with dual screens, then disable one of them and try running all insances on one screen. I know it will be hard to see on the slaves, but you should be able to get a feel for your FPS on a single monitor solution. This might help narrow down what you are looking for.

[BobGnarly]

How many "alt"s are you running? If 4-5, you might want to look at binding each wow to a separate core if you haven't already.

I have a very similar setup (vista64, i720, gtx260), and if I just let the OS choose, it will run really choppy in certain places. Binding them helps quite a bit.

This is how I have it (remember, it's all zero based):

wow1(main client) - core 6 (logical hyperthread of core 2)
wow2 - core 1
wow3 - core 2
wow4 - core 3
wow5 - core 5 (logical HT of core 1)

that might seem counter-intuitive at a glance. Basically, I'm avoiding core 0 because it tends to get a lot of system tasks scheduled to run on it, which then competes with wow.

Anyway, not sure if you've tried this yet or not, but it helped me out quite a bit. You can bind the core affinity in keyclone, but there is currently a bug that will not save anything over core 3 (to apps, i7 looks like 8 cores). Rob is working on it, but in the meantime, you have to manually set the affinity via the Task Manager each time you start playing (after the clients are all started up).

[Owltoid]

You could also use Hotkeynet to launch your WoWs. Although I would recommend HKN for all your WoW multiboxing needs, you could just use the option that allows it to load balance. I have an i7920 and using the <SetAffinity All> makes all 8 virtual processors look nice and balanced.

http://hotkeynet.com/ref/setaffinity.html

[Owltoid]

With the following system I am experiencing 35-40 FPS in Dalaran and 50 FPS (capped to that it's not trying to squeeze everying at once) in 5-man instances (all slaves always set to 10 FPS):

i7 920
12GB 1600 RAM
GTX 260
SSD

I use one screen with graphic settings at 75% (except 100% view distance) so I know it's not directly comprable to your setup. However, if you're expecting to maintain 100 FPS (or anywhere close) then I don't think it matters how many screens you have... you can only run one instance of WoW to get that type of number. I'd suggest capping your main FPS and seeing if that removes the stuttering. Even at 50FPS it still looks nice and smooth.

[sqeaky4100]

With the following system I am experiencing 35-40 FPS in Dalaran and 50 FPS (capped to that it's not trying to squeeze everying at once) in 5-man instances (all slaves always set to 10 FPS):

i7 920
12GB 1600 RAM
GTX 260
SSD

I use one screen with graphic settings at 75% (except 100% view distance) so I know it's not directly comprable to your setup. However, if you're expecting to maintain 100 FPS (or anywhere close) then I don't think it matters how many screens you have... you can only run one instance of WoW to get that type of number. I'd suggest capping your main FPS and seeing if that removes the stuttering. Even at 50FPS it still looks nice and smooth.We basically have the same computer. Except I'm running RAID0 Velociraptors... but they basically get the same speed as an SSD.

What are your slave's settings? Are they all min. settings?


Right now I have it saved in my WTF config file to use all 8 cores for all 5 instances of WoW... I read somewhere that it's best to let Windows decide? Is it possible to set up the WoW's like you have it, yet within the config file?

[Owltoid]

I don't have different settings for my slaves. I am using PiP to switch my main screen and swap with a slave, so I don't want to have any settings different for anything. I play with one large window and 4 smaller windows lined up on the right side of the TV.

Have you checked to see if it's load balancing your processors?

[mikekim]

might be a driver issue, as i found that later drivers caused an issue.
I'm running a GTX260 dual screen 2x22" on a 8Gb Q6600 and i get 50-60fps on each instance (4 instances each running 1050x840)

still running the original Vista 64 Drivers (around the 177 mark if i remember correctly - edit 178.13)

[kiwa]

Hey i figured i would ask my own question about this subject since im having the same issue here are my spec

Q6700 oc'd to 3.2ghz the case has tons of fans on it so cooling isent the issue

6gig's of ram 2 HDD 1TB and 1 750 wow is installed on the 700gig

i have a sli set up on my pc but wow dosent let me run it on windowed mode so i disbaled sli im using only 1 gtx 260 216

24 inch widescreen

ok thats out of the way i play it on 1650x 1050 i think it is im at work cant check i have tried setting all the windows to low and my main on high settings but when i restart they all end up low so i dunno whats the problem there my main issue is i dont have gpu or cpu issues with any game but when i play with all 5 clients open my fps dies like it DIES i go from usual 120'sh to like 20 i have basic add on bagon cart,and questhelper i will try the setting quest helper resource thing down or even not using it to see if it helps i am very bummed i dropped lots of money to get my team going im using keyclone atm with3 windows im soso with 5 im dying so what could be causing this my cpu runs nothing in the background aside from just wow any questions just ask i forgot to add my boss was coming umm all my drivers are recent both gpu's are in the box atm only using the closest to my cpu and in settings its sli disabled ok thx for all the advice oh also wow is installed on the 750 hdd should i install a wow client on each HDD us my main on my 750 and alts from the 1TB? vistax64 bit btw lol

[Jafula]

Well like I said, Im averaging around 80-90fps on a single WoW.

But when I add my team this happens:

- My main ( of which I want the good fps ) goes down to around 40fps
- My alts I fpsbk to 15fpsbk.

The main problem I see though is this:

With 1 WoW, everything runs perfectly smooth. But when my team comes in, on the second monitor... I get this weird "stutter", like the game freezes for fradtion of a second... it happens every 1/2sec to 2sec.... it just doesnt run silky smooth like with 1. First thing; there was a stutter bug that was fixed with a recent patch (post 3.0.8).

I bet you have a hard disk drive problem rather than a graphics card problem. I have a similar setup to you; 5 boxing on a Q6600 with GTX260, two monitors.

How have you got your wow instances laid out on disk? Do you have 1 wow folder for each account? If so, you could try symlinking all their data directories together. This helped me immensely with stutter issues.

Steps (not 100% sure about syntax):

Say you have your main wow installed here:

C:WowMain\

And your alt wow installed here:

C:\WowAlt\

Rename the Data folder in WowAlt to DataOld and symlink the Data folder from WowMain

To symlink (for Vista), open a command prompt (Windows-R, type cmd, press enter)

cd C:\WowAlt
mklink /J Data "C:\WowMain\Data"

Oh, you will have to rename your old Data folder back on patch day... just rename and symlink it again after patch is done.

See if that helps any; also there are plenty of posts about on disk performance as well - it would not hurt to search for them.

[Jafula]

ok thats out of the way i play it on 1650x 1050 i think it is im at work cant check i have tried setting all the windows to low and my main on high settings but when i restart they all end up low so i dunno whats the problem there my main issue is
I get the impression from your post that you have only one installation of wow. If you want your main and others to have different resolutions and other video settings, you will need to run a seperate instance for the the alts.

Just copy your Wow folder and put it somewhere else and launch all your alts from that instead. When you set the gfx settings, they should stay low and not reset.

Hope that helps you.

[kiwa]

Just copy your Wow folder and put it somewhere else and launch all your alts from that instead. When you set the gfx settings, they should stay low and not reset.

ok so take it from my C drive where my main wow stuff is and paste it on my f drive the 1TB is what you mean or do you mean just copy my Main's folder and paste on my second HDD only for main also sorry to go off topic is there a way to set my alts fps to be locked like 10 or 15 fps i play in window mode that might help me with my fps issue i will try the affinty thing when i get home i have a q6700 so i will try the q6600 settings i think i might have questhelper resources at like 100% on all 5 screens that prob is killing measwell >< thx for the advice once again

[Catamer]

80-90 FPS

I'm sure this is a silly question but I see people say this all of the time ( any FPS number over 60) and I really can't understand.
When I start WoW and configure it, it never lets me select anything other than 60 Hz refresh rate although keyclone lets me set other numbers for maxfps.
my FU performace addon display never goes over 60 for me, even if I set maxfps over 60 ( I haven't tried the un-sync to refresh yet )

How do you see any FPS > 60 when that is the refresh rate of the monitor?
@80-90FPS your making your GPU draw some 20-30 images that you will never see. Isn't that just burning up your GPU for nothing?

[sqeaky4100]

Well like I said, Im averaging around 80-90fps on a single WoW.

But when I add my team this happens:

- My main ( of which I want the good fps ) goes down to around 40fps
- My alts I fpsbk to 15fpsbk.

The main problem I see though is this:

With 1 WoW, everything runs perfectly smooth. But when my team comes in, on the second monitor... I get this weird "stutter", like the game freezes for fradtion of a second... it happens every 1/2sec to 2sec.... it just doesnt run silky smooth like with 1. First thing; there was a stutter bug that was fixed with a recent patch (post 3.0.8).

I bet you have a hard disk drive problem rather than a graphics card problem. I have a similar setup to you; 5 boxing on a Q6600 with GTX260, two monitors.

How have you got your wow instances laid out on disk? Do you have 1 wow folder for each account? If so, you could try symlinking all their data directories together. This helped me immensely with stutter issues.

Steps (not 100% sure about syntax):

Say you have your main wow installed here:

C:WowMain\

And your alt wow installed here:

C:\WowAlt\

Rename the Data folder in WowAlt to DataOld and symlink the Data folder from WowMain

To symlink (for Vista), open a command prompt (Windows-R, type cmd, press enter)

cd C:\WowAlt
mklink /J Data "C:\WowMain\Data"

Oh, you will have to rename your old Data folder back on patch day... just rename and symlink it again after patch is done.

See if that helps any; also there are plenty of posts about on disk performance as well - it would not hurt to search for them.
Don't think it's a HDD problem, because I've tried several different ones.

Right now - Im just running all 5 from the same HDD. Which is 2x Velociraptors in RAID 0.

I've tried running 1 from my RAID0, and the other 4 from another raptor. Same deal.



And yeah, my 4 alts are symlinked. I used a small script program that let's you right-click things and easily create symlinks... So I have my main WoW folder alone - and then another one fore slaves, Then 3 that are attached to that main slave folder. Weird thing is though - before I remember my symlinked accounts all loaded things at the exact same time. Yet now my symlinks will load things independently. ( like loading bars will finish at different times )



Also Catamer:


Turning off Verticle Sync will let WoW run at whatever it can run at. Find this in WoW video settings ingame. However - I find this "can" cause more stuttering and laggyness, even if you're getting higher FPS than before. But it's pointless if you're not even egtting 60fps to start with.


It's funny- I've gotten to like 350fps with no addons, lowest settings, and starting at the ground. Talk about smooth gaming!