Alterac Valley FPS

Something seems to have changed since BC when it comes to my AV performance.

Here is my machine specs:

CPU: Q6600 Quad Core (AFFINITY: 1 wow per core for a total of 4)
GPU: OC GeForce GTX 260 896MB 448-bit GDDR3
Memory: 6gig DDR2 (at the most uses about 5.5)
Monitors: Primary 24" (Main Toon) Secondary 22" (3 Follower Toons)
OS: Windows Vista 64

When I enter AV and hit any large fight, my CPU cores max to 100% and my FPS drop quite fast to under 15 fps on the main (the others are forced to 15 fps). I seem to remember not having these problems when I boxed AV in BC but seems to be a pretty big problem now. Do I Just need to upgrade my system to be able to properly handle bigger AV battles, or might it be something else?

Do you have your affinity set correctly?

Affinity is setup with one wow in each core (for a total of 4)

I've not used a Q6600 myself, but with the WoW works with dual-core, I would expect that you'd be slightly better off with something like this:

WoW1 - core 1&2
WoW2 - core 2&3
WoW3 - core 3&4
WoW4 - core 4&1

This way if you end with a single threaded process that taking up a lot of one core (like your OS and background processes), at least WoW has some ability to spread the load around. Also in a setup like this - I'd make my main WoW3 (on core 3 &4). Core 1 and 2 will often pick up a lot of the generic background processes so you should get your best performance from cores 3&4.

How's your RAM utililization? I'd think 6GB should be enough, but it's at least something to look at. You can also make sure that your alts have appropriate gfx settings.

My ram usage is usually no more then 5.5g, but thats at the most. I'll give the affinity remap a try and see if it has better luck.

What kind of hard drive?

The HD im multiboxing from is just your standard 7200 RPM drive, thats slower then I want. I am planning on moving to my 2nd SSD as soon as I re-do my windows install with WIndows 7 next month.

Think it might just be the HD overchurning causing everything else to just slowdown when theres a few dozen people on my screen?

Others on this forum may have a better idea, but it seems like you have enough processor, RAM, and video card (though video RAM may be a little low), so the only thing left is the hard drive. I'm using a "cheap" 32GB SSD drive from RiData and it's working extremely well (one week out, who knows about deterioration). Although everyone says go Intel or go nothing, mine is wonderful so far with the only lag times being at the very end of a Wintergrasp battle where I think it's server lag, not me (running 5 accounts on medium-high video settings).

Yea i have 2 SSDs but due to some messing around I dont have either of them running my multibox setup. So i just pulled one out and put it into my system, formatted it and about to give it a try.

Yea i think the HD did it

Can you elaborate on the SSD fix? I just ordered a 2nd PC (found a cheap quad core rig on ebay) that looks about like your setup, minus the SSD of course.

Theocrafting warning here -

I have to think that if adding the SSD helped that much, it must have been because something was getting loaded from disk in the middle of the fight. I thought for BG's (and all instanced content) that WoW would have loaded all it needed into RAM. I wonder if something was getting loaded into virtual memory (i.e. back to the hard drive) because you were actually maxing RAM usage. If you were getting lots of lag and bad FPS at the start of the instance, then I'd attibute it to stuff still loading from the HD. Maybe I'm underestimating how much stuff WoW has to load on the fly?

When I had the problem in my system I was running it on as 72-00 RPM 180ish GB hard drive that was about 75% full (the idea is any hd over 50% full shows a performance drop). I had 2 SSD 32 GB hard drives, one of which i used for my normal single player wow (different addons..etc) and the other was running as a backup OS.

I reformated it, droped a copy of my multiboxing WoW on it and things got a lot better. Id say I received an increase of about 10fps from dropping it on my SSD in the larger battles. I didn't think it would make a difference, but looks like a lot more loading was going on in AV then expected during the larger battles.

I don't think i was maxing my RAM...i only 4 box and dont creep up too far past 5GB of RAM usage anytime im looking. During these trouble times I was running the nvidia system monitor to keep tabs on everything.

Windows Vista could of very well been doing something anyways with the drive during the larger AV battles.