System Ram or Video Ram bottleneck?

[Sam DeathWalker]

I run 4 toons per computer well with 3 gig ram and 256Meg video card. I'v been considering going to more system ram with Win2K advanced server (8 gig) or a 64 bit os (but given that 8 gig is fine why go to 64 bit os?).

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555223/en-us

Check out this deal for a 8 gig os:

http://www.royaldiscount.com/wi20se.html?ovchn=SHOP&ovcpn=shopping&ovcrn=Microsoft+Windows+2000+Advanced+Server+10+CA Ls+(CD+++Key)&ovtac=CMP

10 CAL for $89! Hope its ligit heh...



Anyway after reading around it seems that most who do more then 4 have 512meg or 700plusmeg video cards, and not using a lot of system ram.

Wonder if the real bottleneck is the video ram morso then the system ram, given that most of the information will be in the system ram and reads to the hard drive should be minimal, even with a 4 gig operating system.

[Wilbur]

I'd say Upgrade the GPU's. Everquest is good in that you can drastically reduce its memory footprint if you want. What GPU's are you currently running? Over how many screens, how are they setup? Desktop Span, etc?

The *best* way to run several characters is probably to buy two fast GPU's with a fair bit of DDR3 in them, DON'T set them in SLI Mode as this'll reduce overall performance, and then have the Primary Slot on each GPU take a monitor. Decent Large Monitors and you should be able to span a couple of characters at least across 'em.

[rjenkins8142]

From my experience (albeit limited), it seemed the bottleneck for multiple wows on the same computer seemed to be Disk IO. I don't care how much system Ram or video Ram you have, WoW will always have to go to the disk to read information.

Here's what I tried this weekend:

2 computers.

1 Intel Mac - 2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66gz, 5 gigs Ram, Radeon 1900 XT 512MB
1 PC - Athon 64 4200+, 2 gigs Ram, Radeon 1900 XT 512 MB

2 30" Dell Monitors running at 2560x1600

Mac was the main computer, running a customized Synergy w/broadcasting.

PC had 4 instances of WoW, each running at 1280x800 w/ Maximizer, with Keyclone sending the broadcasted keys from Synergy to all 4 windows.

So main Mac monitor on the left has a big 2560x1600 window, PC monitor on the right has 4 WoWs, nicely tiled.

The 4 WoW windows all got a pretty consistent ~30 fps with this setup. The only hiccup was when I ran up to Ironforge... As soon as it started reading in the Ironforge data from Disk, all 4 accounts froze for a couple seconds until all 4 were able to catch up. Once everything was loaded, fps returned to ~30 fps again. This happened at the entrance to Ironforge, then again close to the Mage trainer, and at roughly the same places going back out again. Not too bad, but annoying.

So, I think the real bottleneck is Disk IO. Probably moving each account to a separate disk drive and/or controller would help. Adding more Ram won't magically make WoW load things it doesn't know it needs. There's always going to be times when WoW has to read things off disk.

[Wilbur]

Difference with WoW and EQ is that with EQ when you Zone in, a Loading screen pops up, and all textures are loaded then. WoW you are pretty much continually loading up textures. So chances are that it Won't be a huge bottleneck.

Still, if you wanted to, a Raid 0 array of 2 Sata 2's is pretty cheap nowadays.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I have 6 computers with 4 characters on each, just using 6600's (some with 128meg ram) on 5 of them and 1 with a 7800. All AGP. Time to upgrade at least the main computer but tyring to see if I should ditch win2K and go for more then 3 gig ram or just get 512meg video cards instead.

Thinking of getting a raptor (10K rpm) for the main also. Raid is almost impossible to repair if there is a crash so I have avoided it like the plague. Idealy you want everything needed in ram so you don't have to go to disk. If you are suggesting faster disk then basically you are saying you need more ram ... Sure once something is in ram it won't load it to ram again ... so there are no zones in WoW lolzors!

[Starbuck_Jones]

I found the CPU to be the bottleneck. I have a 4 disk raid 0 on 10krpm WD Raptors. 3gigs of ram and dual GFX7900's. One instance of wow eats up about 25%-50% of my cpu. Fire up a second and its pegged at 100%, Fire up more and things just get progressivly worse from there. I dont have a wussy cpu either. Its a 3.8 dual core P4. 5 accounts running on this box and Vista only ate up about 1.9gigs of ram. roughly 300-350megs each instance depending on ingame settings.

However when I minimise some of the windows the cpu overhead drops sometimes down to only a 30% load. But AHK doesnt play well with minimized instances of wow very well... For example if the windows are not minimized, it works ok in game. Minimize them and it creates funny ingame lag. Ill run and stop and the ones on /follow will keep moving past then spin around and run back. weird....

So currently I run my 5 accounts this way. 2 on the main box (XPS700) and the other 3 on thier own Dimention 9150's. I use synergy to keystroke broadcast to the 9150's and AHK on the XPS. Works out well

[Sam DeathWalker]

I would think that the cpu dosnt do all that much in these games ... guess I am wrong. Is it possible your cpu is doing some of the work the gpu should be doing for some reason?

Also you don't have a throttle that makes the CPU slow down when it thinks there is no load (some games look to the CPU to be nothing so they throttle down if its set to do so).

[Starbuck_Jones]

Ive talked to a few people about why WoW in windowed mode chews up so much CPU when I get to running multipal instances. Best explanation ive been given so far is the directX overlay. OK....

Its not the GPU. Ive hooked up seperate monitors to this box off each video card and it made no difference to the performance to have 3 instances on one card and the other 2 on another, or all 5 on one and enable SLI/disable SLI. Also to note. If the instances are running with low ingame settings (4 drones are at the lowest setting, main account is pegged out) or higher settings, it did not seem to affect each instances frame rate. Just the ammount of ram each instance chewed up. WoW just doesnt take up much GPU resources.

It would be very nice to get all 5 accounts on one box. With 4 boxes in one room, it gets hot and costs about the same each month in power to run the setup and AC as does account fees. I know my power bill would get cut in half if I could manage. We have cheap hydro power here so I dont have the scary $400 power bills like Xzin, but $120 is steep when before multi-boxing it was around $45.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Ahh here is something I forgot. When I get more than 2 instances running. The sound gets realy messed up. Even though I have gone into the settings on the drone clients and shut off all the sounds. I think they are realy just mute buttons and not actualy turning off the sound. Prolly take an edit of a config file to realy disable the sound.