Single machine 10-boxing survey/speculation

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.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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 ....

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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.

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Originally Posted by Sajuuk

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

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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.

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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,

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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.

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.

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.