Recent upgrade problems

Just thought I Would share my experience of my recent upgrade. I had been using a
Sabertooth I7 3770
250 gb SSD , 2tb HDD
16gb mem
2 xAsus Strix gtx 970 in SLI
win 7 pro
for 5 boxing my teams across 2 monitors, for the launch of legion I have upgraded to my system to a
Gigabyte Gamer 7 I7 6700 @4 ghz , overclocked to 4.4ghz
M.2 550 gb, 3 TB HDD
32 Gb mem
I moved the 970s across to the new system as I thought to wait a while and see how the pascal market evolved with partners models before I went to a 1080

All seemed ok at first till I arrived in Suramar, when ever I approached the city 60/32 fps setup just dropped to nothing when ever there was other players about, I had also experienced this at the spawn point in Dalaran in the early evening, but the game became unplayable in and around Suramar. I dropped my video specs to fair, made little difference, so I used open hardware monitor to see what was happening.
Core 2 on my PC was at 100% load, changing the options in isboxer on cpu usage made no difference except to make the game run even worse, my Vram was at 98% load, so id decided to split my team across two PCs, 3 on my main and 2 on my 2nd PC, the result was supprising
CPU load on both machines were running between 15% and 25%, the vram on my main PC was still very high with a load of 90%, so lack of Vram was creating the problem ( also win 10, I had upgraded from win 7 pro, and the game had run ok, tho I had not used win 7 for legion).
anyway I have bought a single GTX 1080 @ 1708 mhz and the difference is wonderful, I have all my teams back on my main PC, CPU load 20% average, Vram load 55% average Vram mem usage is 60%.

Just goes to show what how the changes in windows 10 and Legion have affected WOW along with a shortage of Vram, can really do to your boxing experience.

I am glad to report, I am now a happy bunny :)

First of all, what is your monitor's resolution?
Second, what number on the slider does "fair" represent? Since the launch of Legion we've lost labels on the slider, and there are only numbers now.

I'm just curious because it helps to have these things defined for those who want to gauge their current hardware in terms of performance in Legion. I find it a bit excessive that 3 game clients using a "fair" slider setting were eating up 90% VRAM (assuming 1920x1080), and, currently, there's a bug in the game client which will force your game to use full ultra settings, even though the slider may say something else.

I also want to want to point out that anti-aliasing, a setting which can easily eat through video RAM and GPU performance, isn't affected by the slider. Were you using AA? I have helped fix issues for several people since Legion has launched by telling them to turn off anti-aliasing because, again, the slider doesn't.

Finally, do you have GeForce Experience installed? If so, GFE will automatically "optimize" the settings of the game, and because it has no idea you're multiboxing, it's going to result in absolute horrid performance.


Just some quick math for all involved... 60% of 8GB (8,192MB of VRAM on the 1080) is ~4.9GB total. Divide that up between 5 game clients and that's almost 1GB per game client at, what I'll assume since it wasn't mentioned, 1920x1080. We have to subtract a few hundred MB off of that total due to the desktop needing it, but, again, 800-900MB VRAM usage at fair settings does not sound normal to me.

However, three game clients at 90% of 4GB (4,096MB of VRAM on the 970) is over 1GB of VRAM per game client, which doesn't match up to the total usage of the 1080, so... it's a bit weird.

I just tested this out real quick on my machine, and here's what I saw at 1920x1080 for a single game client...

Code:

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Idle desktop eats up ~600MB of VRAM, but I will subtract that from the values below.
Character selection screen eats up ~120MB of VRAM.
My normal, almost full ultra, settings (w/ 4x MSAA) are using < 1,000MB of VRAM.
Full ultra settings (w/ 4x MSAA) are using ~1.4GB of VRAM.
With the slider at 2 and MSAA disabled, I'm using ~550MB of VRAM max.

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I ran around Suramar (the zone, not the city) for about 15-20 minutes picking up some mana and mining some ore, and my VRAM never surpassed 1,100MB.
1,100MB total - 600MB desktop = ~500MB of VRAM usage for the game client.

5x 500MB = 2,500MB + 600MB for the desktop, should be ~3,100MB, or 3.1GB of total usage for five game clients using a slider setting of 2.

Again, there just seem to be a lot of posts about who gets what performance (on all forums across the internet, not just this one), and people tend to leave out important details such as resolution. If you're playing at 2560x1440, then it's a different story, but at 1920x1080 your numbers seem a little high. My test was very quick and simple, and not in a true multiboxed setting, but should be close since I've done single game client versus multiple game client VRAM usage comparisons in the past.

I'll also say that I'm not trying to "lawyer" your or anything like that, but what's in my reply is what crosses my mind when I see a post/thread like this. :)