Single machine 10-boxing survey/speculation

[Ishar]

For starters (as would be hinted by the post in screenshots) i've started dabbling in 10boxing. Since I can't resist raf I'm at least 2 months from getting serious about leveling my off team, so it will be awhile before i've got a single set of 85s=p. In the meantime I am playing around with it, logging all 10 in for fun and flying around getting discovery xp and such. So, some performance issues I've noticed:

Unless I'm waay high up my CPU stays at 100% utilization. In dal/sw my FPS is pretty bad and very jerky. Playable, but not fun. (Contrasted with 6 instances, it screams, no lag at all.) So not sure whats causing the FPS hit. It may or may not be related to the CPU utilization. CPU is pretty high with 6 too, but not 100% constantly. My ram is never full; sofar the most i've seen is 11.9 Gigs used. (this is without closing Firefox or any applications at all, so is not all wow. ) Considering its out of 16, that seems like its going to be plenty for the immediate future. My 3d card is a bit harder to gauge...according to catalyst its at 70 or so percent activity...but playing around in inner space and capping the frame rates of the dps at 10 (they are small anyway) when in bg and the healers/off tank at 20 was a drastic performance improvement...lag in Dalaran went away entirely. (well, its tolerable at 20-25 or so fps for the viewpoint. ) Sitting at the main bank/ah in Stormwind is like 6-10 fps tho. Playable, as long as all i have to do is navigate through the area, and not pleasant at all. Its incredibly crowded 24/7 tho, and probably more characters than will ever be on the screen at once, unless I raid a capital city or something...

I can always run 4 hardware on my old slave machines later for when I want to do serious stuff on all 10; it'd be nice to do them all on one machine tho. Anyone else done it/doing it, and got any tips or thoughts? My 3d card is pretty beastly, but could probably get a bit more mileage by backing off of the eyefinity 6 thing, but dang its nice looking hehe. Maybe i'll grab another and crossfire it; though this may or may not help matters. And upgrading to a 8 core next year or so wouldn't hurt matters. (As pure speculation, anyone thought about using a server mobo and getting several cpus? Kinda a radical idea, i suppose. but according to perf mon each wow has about 55 threads going, not sure why; addons probably. ) Backing off that 100% CPU util would not hurt at all. Strangely as part of my debugging process i've been culling addons and considering stripping down to nothing, but simply disabling all addons and logging in didn't seem to have a great impact; though disabling gatherer on non-harvesters seemed to have a bit of an impact.)

Mostly I'd just like to hear from anyone else with experience 10boxing on one machine. Like I said I got plenty of workarounds=0. 5 perfectly good machines in the corner, atleast one of which can comfortably run 2-3 instances.

System specs:
Amd 1090T,
16 gb ddr3 1333
sapphire Radeon HD 5870 2GB Eyefinity 6 edition,
OCZ Agility 90 gig ssd (wow and windows on it)
Mobo is an ASRock 890FX delux 3.
other miscellanea: using ISboxer and dynamically turning down clip plane/settings on slaves on switch.)

[EaTCarbS]

I run 9 - 10 on my machine

Intel Core i7 930 @ 2.8GHz
Asus P6X58D-E Motherboard
x2 nVidia GTS 250
12GB DDR3 Corsair Dominator RAM

[Ishar]

What do ya do with em? any fps drops around lots of people? PVP? PVE? (I mean, what are the limits of what ya can do with 10 on that machine=0, if any) How are ya using the 3d cards, i.e. hooked to different monitors w/ wow windows on each? Also kinda curious, do you ever get to 100% utilization?

Interestingly, changing it from 5 extended desktops to 1 display group (3x2 configuration) yielded another performance boost; in fact my processor even managed to get down to 95% once while watching people be generally crazy outside the bank. (Still wouldn't say performance was great, but it wasn't 6 FPS either...) . 3d card activity went down quite a bit as well. I dunno if this is a fluke or not, guess I'll find out. Before ya wonder why i bought an eyefinity card and was running em in extended desktop mode, my monitors were mounted ind different orientations, and its an utter pain to unmount them, rotate them, and remount them by yourself. I actually finally took that step so I could see sc2 in all its glory. (As an aside, I'm unsure if I like playing a RTS at that resolution, hehe. It does look really nice, though.)

An aside that took me a few minutes to figure out, is because I don't have wide screen monitors, when I tunred them into a display group my 'composite monitor' was wide screen...so my instances of wow had a distorted aspect ratio when forced into the 1280x1024 size by ISBoxer...except one, who was set to windowed mode, as opposed to windowed (full screen). Switching them all to Windowed mode fixed it. yay. The funny thing, is i had never paid attention to that setting before =p. lol.

[Fef]

Quite a bit on info on this (rather old) thread :

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=14660&highlight=10-boxing

You might also want to implement a FPS saving strategy on your slave clients by implementing something like that :

http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=32654&highlight=FPS+saving+macro

Even though this might not be useful since your bottleneck is probably more on the CPU than GPU?

[Bollwerk]

Would probably see better performance if you switched to Intel.
If you could afford it, maybe even go with a 2 socket MB and get a pair of quad core i7 procs.

Intel > AMD for WoW Cataclysm (http://www.dual-boxing.com/showthread.php?t=33360)

But if you want to save money, I'd suggest using some of your old machines to run some slaves.

Also hope you're using Windows 7, since you have an SSD.

[EaTCarbS]

What do ya do with em? any fps drops around lots of people? PVP? PVE? (I mean, what are the limits of what ya can do with 10 on that machine=0, if any) How are ya using the 3d cards, i.e. hooked to different monitors w/ wow windows on each? Also kinda curious, do you ever get to 100% utilization?


It gets a little bad when I'm in high concentrations of players, but otherwise it runs great. I'm also running 4 monitors - 2 on each card.

[Ishar]

Got mine running pretty good now (combination of frame capping + the performance boost that I suspect has to do with overhead managing extended desktops that I no longer have now that windows is treating my 6 monitors like one big monitor, more or less; though the decrease in GPU activity would indicate some decreased load on the GPU as a result of the same.) Except in gobs of players. eg, SW bank hehe.

I actually read the your thread fef and implemented it. Its a fairly awesome thread, and I was aluding to that in the last line of my first post, but perhaps not too clearly. It was kinda a mixed bag, trade off between switching speed and the min settings. I'm still trying to find a happy medium between slave clip plane and switching speed; also I tend to look at some slaves windows, particularly my healers, to keep an eye on my casters during fights, since I lead from my tank. Capping the FPS of the minimized slaves a bit lower had a drastic impact on performance too; I wonder if it wasn't partly GPU issues. I was sort of abusing the 5870's expected use by runing 6 monitors in extended desktop mode. And I believe this might have lead to some additional CPU overhead as well?

That thread looks really familiar...I'll have to reread it.

I'm not doing anything WRT purchasing components in the immediate future, tho I might get a high end cooler and tinker with OC'ing it. Kinda a forward looking thing. I dunno, I think its somewhat up for debate....for sure Intel has the performance crown...and I concede the findings of that report, but its important to keep in mind that a comparison of a single wow instance on a 1090T and a single wow instance on a quad i7 is not really a fair comparison point for what we do. (5-10 instances of wow is a significantly different beast.) I honestly went with AMD because I felt that more physical cores were better than throughput for my application; and couldn't justify the expense of a 980.

Currently I'm leaning towards thinking that going with a multi-processor mobo in the future might be a pretty good idea for this sort of thing, even if its a server-based board as long as it supports 3d card goodness. As a programmer, I'm sure I could take advantage of N cores, so having a ridiculous amount of physical processors just excites me, bleh.

And yes, I'm running windows 7. Moved temp folders and the page file to another hard drive. Firefox is also installed on another drive.

[Fef]

Please keep up posted about your progress. Running 10 is still a very tempting idea to me. Especially since I heard Santa is going to bring me a 5870 to replace my 4870. Faster, and double the RAM. Tempting indeed.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I did a full write up on stuffs for 5 or 10 boxing at my website with best spots to buy.

[Ishar]

Torn between creating a new thread or just updating this one with progress. Hmm. Will reply to this one instead; since its the same subject.

Holy cow RAF is rough. I now have 42 or so new level 60s though, and raf is over. Main 'team' is 84/83 and finishing up Deepholm. I found questing as a 10 man pack slower than a 5 man pack but quicker than doing 5 then 5. (if more stressful because of follow issues.) A lot of quests have mechanics that you can get credit on all 10 at once, the primary ones that do not are kill quests (for us, travel time to and from kill area is usually greater than the kill time, so this isn't a great burden. And face-melting is even faster with 10...) and well, collection quests. but they suck always anyway. With two paladins i can usually control who gets credit just by using avenging shield. And its an excuse to use all 10 at once. I've also been having fun beating up BC-era raids. Gonna start in on WOTLK raids once i get to 85. Not that 10 is reallly necessary for any of that; but its fun.

Performance wise, SW sucks. but overall its not so bad, even with 10. PVP is kinda rough (At least AV was rather laggy, but playable)...but I think that might be addon issues. (I have an addition. A very bad thing for a 10-in-one boxer.) Honestly one mis-behaving addon can bring this setup to its knees. already had that issue once hehe. (well, when its misbehaving x 10 and your system is near-the-wall performance wise anyway). Definitely playable.

One strange issue I had is that I bought one of those fancy nic cards (the thought was that even a 1 or 2% reduction in CPU usage is a good thing when your at 100% cpu usage all the time in populated areas hehe) but it lead to a random hard-freeze issue. I think I'll take my hat in hand and go ask the manufacturer if they have any clue. (Its a once every 3-4 days freeze, so really hard to debug. took me awhile to associate it with the NIC card since it takes so long to show up...) Not helped by the whole raf-second-job thing, LOL.

Just a quick update. I'll take some screenshots of the insanity and up them later, maybe.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I'v put up a new post on my website about a 48G machine that I am very sure will do 10, if you wait for non-ecc 8G ram then you can use most any i7 or sandy bridge board. Although in a few months bulldozer info's as to ship date and availability from AMD should be available.

I suppose with 10 the best option would be a lessor video card for the main and another card for the 9 tiled slaves? Ya gonna be rough running the slaves at the same resolution as the main. How many monitors do you have and how are they attached to the video card?

A server board with 2 cpu won't share the ram between both so putting the wow folder in ram on a 2 cpu board won't happen unless you go to 96G ram.

[Ishar]

I have 16 gigs of ram, never fill it up.

Right now i have 6 17 inch monitors plugged into an eyefinity 6 edition radeon hd 5870. It runs them all pretty good. (I run each instance at 1280x1024. Im sure I would need more if i wanted to push out crazy res's on them. main thing i wanted eyefinity for was productivity.

Im waiting to see about the new 8 core procs. I don't think sharing ram would be an issue, since I have a pretty fast SSD, I really don't think my hard drive is the bottleneck.

[Sam DeathWalker]

With 6 clients then each is getting 2G/6 or about 333Meg of video ram.

333Meg isnt a lot considering the texture files (in the data wow directory) are over 20G.

Its easy enough to test, spin in place if you get good frame rates while spinning in org then video card is OK. If not you need new gpu.

If you get good rates while spinning but not while running through org you need better SSD/SystemRam/VideoRam connection. The CPU dosn't do a whole lot in wow, in my opinion, its the textures that go from the HHD/SSD to the system ram then to the video ram every time a new character appears in your view space that causes the texture lag.

Wow has 20G of textures and you can store 333M on the video card at best with 6 clients and a 2G video card. Is 333M going to be enough for all the new characters you will encounter in Org? I think it should be enough for Org itself (the city) but given the amounts of armor and items and pets and stuff avalible seems that 333M is going to be way short. Hopefully Win7 will keep some stuff in system ram so you don't have to go all the way back to the SSD/HDD for new characters but ....

Of course you don't fill up 16G of ram running the OS and 6 or even 10 Clients. The object of 48G is to put the whole wow folder (over 36G) into a system ram drive which is faster then SSD, and never degrades.

[Sajuuk]

With 6 clients then each is getting 2G/6 or about 333Meg of video ram.

333Meg isnt a lot considering the texture files (in the data wow directory) are over 20G.

Its easy enough to test, spin in place if you get good frame rates while spinning in org then video card is OK. If not you need new gpu.


Sam, sam sam... Right now I don't have the time or wherewithal to make queries to support my response, so I'm going to say you're wrong. I don't have the knowledge of programming to dictate an intelligent response discussing the behaviors of multi-application use of video ram, so rather than saying "BUY A NEW GPU" or some other assumption-filled drivel I'm going to state this:

Ten boxing is hardware intensive. Most people use two or more computers to multibox. Since you are using one, if you feel a certain part is a bottleneck, replace it or supplement it. In your case, why not acquire another 5870 (or other video card, it doesn't matter), put it in your system and direct innerspace to have some of your slaves render on the other card, cutting load off of the first one.

If that doesn't solve it, try another part. Hell, you could always switch to intel schtuff and get a gulftown cpu. Who really cares? You've stated that you've got hardware you could offload your slaves to. That would be cheaper than getting another GPU.


tl;dr if the strain is too high offload some of it to another machine. With requirements for the game only increasing you'll get more longevity that way.

[Ishar]

Yeah...Sam is going rather overboard.

I did not intend to come off as whining or anything. Was mostly just an update in the nature of 'meh, still here. tried some things...nothing definitive =0. Though my personal feeling is its fine for PVE. PVP is slightly more problematical but I think with some software tweaks I can get it to work. (Lack of an active PVP team = I just haven't bothered.) Other people had expressed interest previously, meh.

As strange as it sounds I don't really think the GPU is is the main issue, I think thats more sams' texture theory. Your post does sum it up rather nicely =p. Though I still want to do it on one machine. Just cause, lol.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I guess you can say its a "theory" but seems to be the best guess based upon all evidence we have at this point.

Go to your wow folder and see the data sub folder there are over 20G of .mpq files in it.

These contain most all the data the game uses including zone information and graphics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPQ

The game requires somewhere between 15G and 20G of graphical data, obviously none of the other information stored in the .mpq files is anywhere near the texture data. Clearly you cannot load textures for every character in the game to the system ram or the video card. Thus when a new character comes into your line of sight you have to load its textures. In a BG or raid there will only be 50 or whatever characters so thats no problem but in Dal or Org almost any character can enter your view in a random manner. So the game has to get the texture from the .mpq file on your HDD or your SSD; then move it into system ram, then move it to video ram so the gpu can access and use it. Thats why these zone have the most lag. Go to Dal now, there is very little lag as there is are not enough people there anymore to lag you out.

Now think about running 10 clients, each of which don't know about the others, and you increase the amount of data you need to move around by a factor of 10, and you reduce the avalable video ram for each client to 1/10th of the total also.....

You can lag if the gpu has the data but cannot render the screen fast enough but I am of the opinion that most lag is the texture kind as show by the spin in place or run through the city test. A faster gpu just lets you use more resolution or better effects, if it dosnt have the data it is no matter how fast it is it can't render anything.

You have seen it yourself many times, you log in and the pets and mounts show up first and then the characters a bit later. The gpu cant render the characters immediatly because their textures are not yet in the video ram. Of course pets and mounts are first to load as you can load them all from one location. For a character you have to go all over the place to get spicifc armor ....

I do think though that with lower resolutions and less effects each texture is smaller and you can move more around in the same time period.

[Sajuuk]

You have seen it yourself many times, you log in and the pets and mounts show up first and then the characters a bit later. The gpu cant render the characters immediatly because their textures are not yet in the video ram. Of course pets and mounts are first to load as you can load them all from one location. For a character you have to go all over the place to get spicifc armor ....
That has nothing to do with GPU ram, it has to do with hard drive latency.

Throughout our experiences we've all found wow to be more CPU-reliant than the GPU. When I first started multiboxing, it was in BC with a 512MB 9600GT. It worked fine for me. Sure, textures have increased, so have other art assets, but just because he's doubled (or tripled) the relative load on his card (with 2gb of VRAM vs my previous 512MB) doesn't mean the graphics card is at fault.

Your comments regarding textures are theory in my opinion simply because they are speculation. Now if you/we had more knowledge of the nature of how textures are pulled into VRAM, at which point they are purged from VRAM, and if caching occurs for textures within VRAM(And if that caching could possibly be shared between instaces of WoW), and the relationship between the number of textures and how they are applied to the usage of VRAM, well...until then it's still SPECULATION.

[Sam DeathWalker]

That has nothing to do with GPU ram, it has to do with hard drive latency..

Well ya the system of HHD(SSD) to system ram to video ram is what I am talking about and the slower the hard drive latency (no doubt the slowest part of the system) the worse this effect (loading pets and mounts first) will be.

Texture lag is not caused by the video card per se. Its getting the data to the Vram as you say.


Now if you/we had more knowledge of the nature of how textures are pulled into VRAM, at which point they are purged from VRAM, and if caching occurs for textures within VRAM(And if that caching could possibly be shared between instaces of WoW), and the relationship between the number of textures and how they are applied to the usage of VRAM,

Very correct but based upon current best knowledge we can conclude that texture are pulled into vram as needed, they are purged when VRAM is full and new textures are needed, caching will occur in VRAM untill its full, "and if that caching could possibly be shared between instances of wow" sad to say I REALLY doubt WoW was designed with multiboxers in mind.

Actually what we don't know is how much gets cached in system ram


We really don't need to know the details to make the follwing conclusions though:

More VRAM is better.

Faster HDD/SSD is better.

System ram up to some point is better. (i.e. no need for more then 16G for 10 clients).


If you run through Org and you lag on the lowest video settings and you have a gpu that is 460 or better and your ping is green the ONLY possibilty is that you need more VRAM or you need Faster HDD/SSD to system ram connection.


I don't really see how any of that can be stated as speculation as what other possible speculation is there. The data from the data folder is not getting into VRAM fast enough to allow the gpu to render at the fps you want.


And the maximal solution to the above is a system ram disk with the whole wow folder in it as system ram latency is WAY WAY WAY less then HDD latency.


Tons of people have stated on this forum that moving to SSD from HDD has improved their FPS a lot, by extention moving from SSD to System Ram Drive is also going to even more improve fps.


Computers now days have DMA built into the north and/or south bridges. Maybe if all this memory movement was controled by the cpu then cpu would be important for wow but when you think about it the cpu dosnt really do much of anything, calculates some formulas and orders the DMA to move the data from the HDD to the system ram then to the video ram. Keep in mind I run 7 clients on a Athlon X2 3.2ghz. Sure if the CPU had to render graphics it would be very important but thats the gpu job ... Even the NIC work is offloaded to the NIC chip... There is nothing much left for the cpu to do nowadays in an MMO.

The game is GRAPHIC intensive not computational intensive.

[Ishar]

Eh, I left the resource monitor open while running around the AH in storm wind last night with 10; the top 3 processes in terms of data reading were (in order) system, wow.exe, wow.exe. and they were reading something like 70 B/sec each. While this might introduce a latency issue, the low relative speed. (I/O can go much faster) I wouldn't think that this IO is necessarily texture related (Why would textures trickle in?). (and even if it were, the other 8 wows had even less / no IO at that point, and the lag is not isolated to just one instance of wow. Nor is it as bad as when I say, /reloadui on several chars while others are logged in. My point is that while IO might be an issue, I don't think its the main one.

Though now I'm wondering if a low level of I/O is normal for wow.

And btw Sam, "Theory" is not a disparaging term.

[Sam DeathWalker]

You have to run THROUGH stormwind not around a spicific area, at prime time. You want NEW CHARACTER's whose textures have not been loaded to be required to be loaded as they enter you viewing area. Put your characters on auto follow and run from one end of SW to the other and lets see what the monitor says.

Also are you lagging if you are doing 30fps or better then I would call that no lag. Also try it at lowest video resolution and then at the highest (with lowest shadows).

Also whats your video card, system ram amount, motherboard chip set (X58?), and whats the drive that holds the wow folder, and what resolution you running at?

Of course it trickles in as when you run around the AH only people moving to the area in your view will require new textures to be loaded.

Ya 70B/sec is nothing basically. Lag probably will hit at about 10MB/sec or more as a completly wild guess.


It would help to know how much ram textures take that is for sure, it is possible that if you had a very large video ram per client that old textures would not be wiped as you read in new ones. And knowing how robust the wow caching algorithems are also would be a plus.

Does anyone know of a program that will tell you what files are being open when in a log fashion and how much data is being read into system the video ram and when and by what processes. I am sure that there is I might look into this tonight and get to the bottem of all this for sure.

[Ishar]

Well I logged in at the bank and was walking round outside and lagging <30 fps) a bit. Worth noting that I throttle some windows to 20FPS background and otehrs to 10 FPS background. ) Strangely I can ususally fly over stormwind (even past the bank etc) np. I only lag when I get on the ground with all those people jumping and spinning. And its a constant thing, it doesnt go away. I have experienced things in the world very occasionally that might be closer to what you are thinking of, where I lag for a few seconds then im fine again. This also might be related to phasing, as it happens about 200x more in phased zones.

As I posted above, video card is a radoen hd 5870 eyefinity 6 card (2 gb ram), 16 gigs of ddr3 1333 ram, and 890fx chipset.

Wow is on the windows drive (C) which is also my SSD.

[Sajuuk]

Seriously sam, learn to read the OP. :)

I should try playing SERIOUS SAM. Heh.


Does anyone know of a program that will tell you what files are being open when in a log fashion and how much data is being read into system the video ram and when and by what processes. I am sure that there is I might look into this tonight and get to the bottem of all this for sure.

That'd be spiffy.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I been playing with this a bit:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645

With a single client; There are tons of reads from .mpq files in the data folder but they are very small (some as small as 32 bytes). Only large 2M plus files when you zone. Rest are typically like 16K. But there are a lot of them. But no where near 5M Byte a Sec from what I can see. So its not really throughput its drive latency that is most important as the game wants tiny little bits from a number of .mpq files and not one big sequential read. Which makes sense; it want one boot texture from what 1000 plus possible different boot textures?

Also data from the server is very very minimal.

Does seem that latency of the storage system is a lot more important then the raw maximum read speed.

I also have this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/dd535533

Seems that one client will take up 1.5G of virtual ram on my 4G ram system.

Well its going to take a lot more study. Hopefully some others will check out these issues so we can have more information. Would be nice if we had a program that told us when data is found in ram but seeing the number of times the system goes to disk (which perfmon will tell us) is also very usefull.

Still the faster the game can access the .mqp files in the data folder the less texture lag there will be, but you can lag from weak gpu.

As pointed out above though texture lag will stall you then you will go back up to normal; whereas gpu lag will keep your fps always low, as would cpu lag if it occurs. I don't think there is such a thing as ping lag as that just makes your gpu render guys in the wrong spot (character "overrun" their location then snap back with the server sends updated positional data)



There must be textures for "far away tiny" characters and "close larger" textures. It does not make sense to load in maximal character textures when all you need is 10percent of the pixils because the character is far away. Otherwise you couldn't hardly fly over anywhere.



Sry I missed the fact that the poster I was responding to was the same as the op ....



This needing of a lot of tiny bits of data is kinda why I can play well with my outdated (but fast cpu speed of 3.2ghz) system. Its not total throughput thats important like I once thought (something which the X58 systems excell at). Clearly even the junkest system can support throughputs under 5MByte a second.

It should be trival to see if the gpu is insufficient; just lower the effects, if you still get lag at the lowest settings then the gpu needs replacement.