Framerate problems - need some advice

Hello all,

Well I finally got started thanks to a lot of help from Keyclone - I had to trim my original 5 team down to a duo as I just couldn't justify a new machine until I'm back in work.

All is going well with my warlocks in terms of killing, quests, everything really but I seem to have a terrible problem with my graphics degrading over time . My specs (not great I know):

PC

Pentium 4 Intel Dual Core 3.20Ghz
2Gig DDR Ram
ATI X800XL 256MB (stop laughing at the back)
I, frankly, have no idea what kind of hard-drive I have in here

Keyclone

Main is running at max30fps both settings
Slave is running at max15fps both settings

I'm using a 1280x1024 inch monitor, main takes up the whole screen with a small PiP of the other toon in the corner as the stretching was horrible having them maximised across half the screen. Looks like this:

http://solidice.com/keyclone/layouts...egions_pip.jpg

So I have a situation where graphics just seem to get worse over time, especially after a few switches between the slave using PiP

I've tried using two wow installations so I can tone the graphics down completely on the slave but that honestly just made things worse if anything. Also, toning the graphics right down on the ONE installation doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect it still, just, slowly degrades over time.

Does anyone have any suggestions please? Obviously the easy answer is get a better computer but it seems to me that I should be able to duo two toons without this much problem. If the graphics were straight up crap that's one thing but it's the way it degrades which is really starting to piss me off as I have to restart all the time.

I heard that you should not dick around with core affinity settings for two wows now because of a recent patch. If that's not the case, should the main go on 0 or 1 - ditto for the slave.

Thanks

Edit - by degrade I mean the framerate gets suckier and suckier and suckier and suckier - you get the idea...

You have probably already tried to do this, but i suggest changing the resolution to something like 800x600. Trying to think of more things, maybe the Maximizer eats up your computer. I Myself have just started dualboxing of course, but i just run 2 windowed WoW's and then manually set them to Keyclone.

Other than that i have no other info sorry

Your system should be able to handle two clients fine.

What OS are you using? If XP, try setting your display settings to span horizontally rather than being two seperate displays.
Configure Wow to use windowed mode instead of full screen mode.
If Vista, you may be running out of RAM. Try disabling all the graphical goodies in Vista, or get some more RAM.

There are some graphics settings macros in the wiki you could play with that might give you incremental gains.

http://www.dual-boxing.com/wiki/inde...phics_Settings

* BUMP *

I just wanted to bump this thread in case anyone else has a similar problem.

I've found that on this computer spec if there's one thing it hates above all else is rendering one big picture and then rendering a smaller box ON TOP of that.

So, I've made two equal size squares, one on top of each other on my 4:3 monitor with no overlap and the PC loves me for it. No more problems.

If you find yourself with similar problems try that. If you're dual boxing on a 4:3 monitor please feel free to PM me and I will send you the .max file for my Keyclone setup - after a lot of trial and error I've found what I think is the best possible solution.

I'd also trim out as many addons as you can for the slave, some addons tend to freak out sometimes (Arkinventory for example)