Windows 7 RC1 MBxing performing worse than on Windows 7 Beta

[Noah]

I have been MBxing for around 2 months on one PC. The system setup is an AMD 64bit dual core, with 8GB ram, 1 x Nvidia 9800gt Graphics card, and 2 raid 0 drives.



i mutibox using innerspace, using 2 screens.



Initially I was using windows 7 Beta, and everything worked really well, I did not get the FPS that many seem to have but I did have 25+ consistantly which is very playable. All other aspects were very smooth.

Yesterday I did a clean install of Windows RC1, The install was even easier that the beta as the install recognised the raid drivers without needing third party input. The install shows no conflicts or errors, Windows 7 performace thingy gives a rating of 5.9, withthe processor and graphics individually ratting 7.1 and 6.9

I have have set up wow in he same way as before - no changes.

I am now seeing a significant reduction in video performance and have significant sound distortion, where i had no probrlems under the beta.


I would be interested in knowing if anyone else has experienced any issues, and advice on where I can look to resolve sound and performance issues as W7 is a glorified Vista.

thx in advance.

[zanthor]

Have you tried to update your video drivers to manufacturers drivers instead of the included?

[grap]

for me the same between beta and rc.
juste less log files to deasble on the rc

[Lax]

I am running Win 7 RC, and for me the performance is superb. If you didn't update video drivers like Zanthor mentioned, make sure to do that. The ones that come with Win 7 RC may BSOD you ;) Of course, I've had the newest NVIDIA drivers cutting out on me and giving the "driver stopped but recovered" thing during play, maybe 3-4 times over the last week. That's about the only issue I've had.

[Noah]

Graphic drivers from nvidia have been checked - they are showing as the latest.

Any thougths ont he sound issue -Significant distortion when sound comes from all 5 instances.

[Lax]

Graphic drivers from nvidia have been checked - they are showing as the latest. On Windows Update? Or did you go to nvidia.com and download version 185.85? (or use their update widget thing)

Also, make sure you disable Aero.

The thing that matters most in the WoW config is your multisampling setting, in the resolution tab of the video options. If that's not set at a 1x multisampling setting, you're going to get a significant performance hit. So I'd maybe double check that, since it's not usually the most obvious thing in the wow video options.

As far as sound from all 5 instances, that sounds like you have "Make game believe it is foreground window" checked in ISBoxer -- I'd uncheck that.

[Noah]

Thx Lax

The driver is from Nvidia.

I am being a noob, how do ou disable aero?

checking the other settings.

[Lax]

Control Panel under Appearance and Personalization, select "Change the theme" and select Windows Classic. This will disable Aero and give you a high performance no-frills Windows theme much like Windows XP.

[Enndo]

But aero is so shiny! lol Plus the sidebar is nice to monitor CPU/RAM usage and I have an add on for it to monitor my WoW server status lol

[MiRai]

I had never used the 'beta' version of W7 so I cannot comment on that. I did however upgrade from Vista Ultimate x64 to W7 RC1 and everything is so much smoother. I even keep Aero enabled while 5 boxing on this one computer. I have an Intel C2D e8400 and an nVidia 260 GTX [216 Core] and I can stay above 50 FPS on the window I have focus on [Azeroth/Outland]. I was doing some searching a little less than a month ago and someone with WoW FPS problems [non-multibox related] had loaded the Vista video card drivers instead of the beta W7 drivers and it fixed his problem. I tried that myself but saw no changes what-so-ever on my end. I don't think the Vista drivers use the WDDM like the W7 drivers do though, which is supposed to be superior.

[Jafula]

Here is an offical Blizzard Win7 RC thread for wow in case you missed it.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16474156609&sid=1

* note - NVIDIA beta driver includes a new feature called Ambient Occlusion for shadowing. Turning this on will have a big performance hit on World of Warcraft.

[Noah]

Still suffereing with this one. I do not think it is W7.
I recently Bit the bullet and Upgraded my Machine to an i7 processor with 12gb ram.

I have a ATi 4870 graphics card with 512mb of ram

and 1 set of raid 0 hard disks with 2 partitions, all the warcraft stuff seperate to the OS.
I user innerspace as the Mboxing tool, and run 5 clients.

I use one install of Warcraft, and use the inerspace virtual files to seperate out the settings.
When running solo, the game is very smooth, and seems to hit a limit of 45fps.
Once I start mbxing, the fps Dives significantly. In Hellfire peninsula ( after login) Hot character is running at 6-18fps which is proving hard to play.
I would like any advice on improving the perfomance, - i have checked throughthe settings and worked throughthe threads listed above.


I used the perfomance benchmark built into W7 and have a score of 5.9 because the hard disk is the lowest, Graphic scroes are 6.8, processor and memory are 7.5.

I am happy withte overall performance of the machine, especially in general applications where it seems to "fly".

The odd aspect is that on the lower spec setup using a geforce 9800gt graphic card, I had a lower benchmark score, but seemed to get higher fps in game.
Is it the Graphic card that is limiting the performance?

Are nvidia cards better suited to Wow than ATI?

Would making 5 copies of the instalaltion improve performance?

I have read about symbolic linking I have assumed this does the same as the virtual config in innerspace. Is it different / would it improve performance? Symbolic linking appears to seperate out a couple of other folders whilst sharing the big ones.


CPU Affinity, the i7 has 4 cores but has 8 threads that can be used. Should I reserver the first 2 cores (4 threads) for the OS, and split the rest for Warcraft?

If so- on the i7 - do threads 1and 2 belong to core 1? or is it 1 and 5?



Lots of questions :)
Any advice would be appreciated.

[Noah]

I should be working - however i have been researching and problem solving.

My limitation to 45fps is a setting in the config.wtf file. whilst innerspace shows a default setting of 60 (max) and 30 for the background, my config.wtf file has settings for 45 and 5. I do not have an issue with 45 - it is super smooth compared to what i am used to.

The issue does not appear to be the Graphics card, or the way i have configured the folders (single install using innerspace virtualfiles)

I reasearched processor affinity, to find that all of the settings in the character.wtf files were set to "3" which means all the accounts were focusing their attention on cores 1 and 2. (i7 has 8 processing cores/threads recognised by wow). within innerspace i had set the individual character slots to use specific cores, however, after testing that is not what was happening, just as the max fps within innerspaceis set to 60, a figure of 45 was being used by the .wtf setting.

I then manaully edited all 5 character.wtf files and the config.wtf file, changing the processor affinity number from "3" to "255". The number has something to do with its binary configueration ie: 255 = 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 which looks like ticking each core for use.

See this thread http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311&sid=1 and you will see a setting of "3" if forcing wow to use cores 1 and 2. A setting of "15" would tell wow to use 4 cores (0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 = 15).

Without changing any other settings or altering my isboxer configureation, I ran Innerspace loading all 5 clients, which loaded into hellfire peninsula. Where prevously i was getting 6-18 fps without doing anything complicated, the screen is reporting 45fps on the main char withthe others sitting at 5.

I ran about, swapped chars cast ae spells etc, and the 45fps onthe main screen did not change. I have yet to try it in Shattrath but I am looking forward to a positive result, or at the very least being able to walk about smoothly.

The key item of interest is that the pc affinity setting within innerspace and the FPS settings, do not appear to be carried across to the game.

i may have done something stupid in my setup, and would be interested in getting it resolved.

Back to work now.

[Lax]

The processor affinity and FPS settings in ISBoxer get carried to the game, just not written to config.wtf. The affinity setting in config.wtf is the default (set upon launch), and ISBoxer is going to override it (a short time later). As far as the FPS settings, the lower of the two between the one in config.wtf and the one in ISBoxer is going to take effect. I would recommend setting your background fps to at least 10. On a similar system to yours -- 8 cores, 8800 GTX, 12GB RAM -- I leave mine at 60/30, and under most circumstances, I am actually at 60 fps in the main window and 30 in the background windows. That is, when I'm not in Dalaran, which drops me down to about 20 fps on all.

My CPU selections per Slot are as follows:
slot 1: 1,2
slot 2: 3,4
slot 3: 5,6
slot 4: 7,8
slot 5: 6,8
... and again, my affinity in config.wtf is still "3". If you do not set the CPU per Slot in your ISBoxer Character Set, the game's selection is used.

You can double check the CPU affinity via Task Manager in the Processes tab by selecting each process and selecting the Affinity... option. I don't know why it would work for everyone else and not for you :)

[Noah]

Thx for the reply Lax



I'll try to ge to the bottom of what I have changed.

I have not changed anything to do with ATI and grphics - I have no experince with them so far.

I did change the cpu affinity in the individual WTF files to 255 as stated above, however from what you have said, it becomes irrelevant as the ISboxer setting takes over.

Within IS boxer, the 3 character sets i have tried have all had the affinities changed so that 1,2 are ignored, 3,4 are used by the main char, 5 = slot 2, 6= slot3, 7 = slot4, 8 = slot 5.

The other tweak I have done since then is on the 4 alts, i went into the grpahic settings and moved the slider to the lowest settings - whereas, i have controlled it via a macro in the past.



what ever I did, it has made a huge diffeerence, the closest description is like playing on ice - everything glides about smoothly.



As a test I'll use a 4th group and change the wtf setting back to 3, and see how it behaves.



I'll also run a permance monitor for an hour tonight while playing.

[MiRai]

This may be completely unrelated. But last night I attempted to play around with some of my IS settings on a new set of DKs. It was completely horrible. I mean my mouse repeater was stuttering like crazy and my FPS were around 15 FPS on my main window. Here's a list of what I had changed with my new DKs when I started having major major problems:

-Changed my CPU Affinity around a bit [Dual-Core]
-Max FPS [Background]
-Window Layout Regions
Rendering Size 'Unchecked' Main Window Region 1680x1050 [In Game Resolution 1440x900] Main Window Region 1680x1050 [In Game Resolution 1280x800] Main Window Region 1440x900 [In Game Resolution 1440x900] Main Window Region 1280x800 [In Game Resolution 1280x800]
Messed with "Desired Rendering Size"-Chose an in-game ISBoxer GUI toggle hotkey

After troubleshooting my FPS problem for close to 2 hours of changing settings back to original one at a time, exporting, restarting ISBoxer suite, restarting InnerSpace numerous times. I just couldn't figure it out...nothing I would do would help my FPS one bit. I deleted my DKs from my ISBoxer profile, exported to InnerSpace, and restarted my computer [first restart I had done since having super shitty FPS]. After the restart I redid my DKs and everything is fine...perfectly fine...like nothing was ever wrong. I wish I could offer more insight to having fixed the problem I had last night which sounds similar to your problem...but I cannot. But I posted this in case this could help you in some way.

[Noah]

I ran performance monitor for an hour, while I took a run through the ramparts.
System Performance Report
Computer: W7I-PC Collected: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 7:54:37 PM Duration: 3600 Seconds
Summary Process Total CPU% ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#862512221'): 19 Top Process Group ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#862512221'): Wow.exe Group CPU%: 18 Total CPU% ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#988904405'): 0 Top Process Group ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#988904405'):
Disk Top Disk by IO Rate ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#506144919'): 0 IO/sec: 8 Disk Queue Length ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#728078088'): 33
Memory Utilization ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#224161024'): 30 % Memory ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#934055310'): 12279 MB Top Process ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#674645836'): Wow Private Working Set: 516,656 KB
Network Utilization ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#224161024'): 0 % Top Outbound Client ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#342555628'): 80.239.233.29 Sent: 60 bytes Top Inbound Client ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/#445149851'): 80.239.233.29 Received: 651 bytes

Diagnostic Results Performance
Resource Overview
Component Status Utilization Details CPU

Normal 23 % Normal CPU load. Network
Idle 0 % Busiest network adapter is less than 15%.

Further into the report you can see what cores were being used. Core 0 and 1 (or 1 and 2) were hardly used, 2-7 (or 3-8) were used extensively, which reflects the settings set in Innerspace.

Graphically fps on the main screen did not drop below 45 fps.
I am still not sure what i have done in the setting to make such a massive difference in performance.