5-boxing on my rig dies in Orgrimmar. [Thanks for nothing shadows]

I started multiboxing the other day, with 5 boxes running on my machine:

Dell Preciscion Desktop:

- 2x quad-core E5405 Xeon @ 2.00GHz processors
- 12GB DDR2 RAM (667MHz)
- 2x WD Hard drives in RAID-0
- BFG GTX 275 GPU
- Windows 7 64-bit
- two Samsung 204B monitors @ 1600x1200 through DVI connections


I started out in Mulgore running 5 boxes (1 on Display1 @ 1600x1200, 4 on Display2 @ 800x600) and things were moving along.

At some point, the slideshow began and framerates dropped to nothing. I don't remember what I was doing, but I wasn't anywhere populated or doing anything other than killing things in the wilds.

I offloaded a box onto a second PC so now I was running (1 on Display1 @ 1600x1200, three on Display2 @ 800x600) and set up Keyclone CPU affinity to isolate each of the four WoW sessions running to two CPU cores each. Things were fine again.

So last night I finally made it for the first time to Orgrimmar as a five box and things came to a screeching halt. The slideshow came back and I couldn't move in any way. I was forced to quit all of my sessions and march each character outside towards Razor Hill and then quit.

Clearly this won't do, but I can't figure out what to tweak since it seems like I should be able to run five boxes on this rig no problem, hardware wise.


What settings should I turn down so that I don't get stuck like that again?

Try turning off character shadows, or whatever the setting is for shadows.

Thanks.

Tonight I plan on updating the GPU drivers and while I'm at it, I'll turn off shadows.

Do shadows really make that big of a performance hit?



Edit: Is the "/console shadowLOD 0 " method still the way to do it?

yes the shadows kill my comp to just on solo play also id just turn them off and ull be set

Quote:

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Originally Posted by agrikk

Thanks.

Tonight I plan on updating the GPU drivers and while I'm at it, I'll turn off shadows.

Do shadows really make that big of a performance hit?



Edit: Is the "/console shadowLOD 0 " method still the way to do it?

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I'm sure there's a way to do it via a console command, however, the only way I know is through the advanced video settings.

I ended up turning off shadows in config.wtf and I ran four boxes as smooth as you please. I'm going to try five again later.

WTC is up with that? Stupid shadows killing computers? What a horrible horrible feature. :argh:

I have my slaves running out of different directory's to my main (I have 3 copys split over 3 different drives) All the slaves have their settings turned down to absolute minimum.
Having the directorys split over 3 drives means when I hit an bit area like Org it doesnt have to load 5 copys of it from 1 drive (When I had it all on 1 drive my HDD would go insane when I hit org)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Gormand

I have my slaves running out of different directory's to my main (I have 3 copys split over 3 different drives) All the slaves have their settings turned down to absolute minimum.
Having the directorys split over 3 drives means when I hit an bit area like Org it doesnt have to load 5 copys of it from 1 drive (When I had it all on 1 drive my HDD would go insane when I hit org)

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I tend to find that I get better performance from one directory and symbolicly linked files, rather than having multiple directorties across different drives.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikekim

I tend to find that I get better performance from one directory and symbolicly linked files, rather than having multiple directorties across different drives.

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I have heard of this but have never actually looked into it. However I would likely always keep at least 2 directorys (One for slaves) to ensure I can play my slaves as single toons from the primary directory.

But apart form the above what are the benefits of the symbolicly linked files? And how does it work in general?

Ther'es alot of changes you can make to speed it up, i can run around dala and get no lag some days.

in invidia panel there's graphics rendering settings, chuck them on high performance, i got big performance improvement.

i keep my main screen on 1280x1024 on my 24" hd screen, and rest on 800x600 on ultra low graphics, put the viewing distance down so min, everything.

main screen setup the minimum you need to see, so distance would be what would be acceptable viewing distance and particals etc, dont need ultra your boxing not solo playing performance is a very high priority.

my rig is:

Core2Quad Q9650 clocked@ 3.6Ghz 8Gb of XMAS3 @1600Mhz, Nvidia 275 super overclocked edition 2GB , and running WD raptors for each wow client, total of 5 drives. keep latency minimal. if you want epic performance, get SS drives, but only the best one not cheapos.

my system can handle 5 easily, im running windows 7 64 pro, and i have windows media player in background and few webpages, yet performance does not change.

if your getting issues, look towards tweaking, and optimising.

Probably it's more a problem of your rig than the game settings.

As long as I see you are running server kind of CPUs and Ram. Probably your motherboard is also suited more for server usage rather than gaming.

After retiring my old video processing cluster I tested wow multibox performance with lots of possible rigs. Found that 800 MHz RAM makes a big difference for wow, same as the CPU. A Q9650 @3Ghz will perform much better than a quad xeon 5405 @ 2Ghz like the one you have. In fact, I tested it with practically the same rig as you except the GPU.

The motherboard makes the difference between a viable and unviable rig, at least it did in my case. A typical server motherboard will be unable to run properly when you land in dalaran unless you are sitting on some really expensive mobo. A gamer one would work ok in most of the cases. For example, the Dell server mobos I tried weren't unable to handle dalaran x 5. Tyan ones worked relatively ok, but I don't think a 1k euro mobo is acceptable for a gaming rig.
If you have an Asus Striker motherboard around, just try it and you will see the difference even maintaining all the rest of the rig components.

The problem with the motherboards is that even if your GPU is PCIE at 16X, if the motherboard cannot adress properly that speed then it will downgrade performance alot. Server oriented mobos are more kind to handle a 10 GBit nic or some RAID controller than an insane GPU.
Also make sure your PSU can give enough power to your GPU or it will start running in low performance mode. Most dells tend to come with crappy PSU.

As for raw GPU performance, the Asus ENGTX275 is beter than the BFG. I use both instead of the nvidia tesla processors and the asus one has about 15% faster forformance. Not sure if it affects wow, but I have an asus GPU on my gaming rig.

The problem I see with your hardware setup is your processors. While you do have 8 physical cores, they are running at 2.0GHz stock. Even if you spread your clients across all cores, its still fairly slow. A single quad core running at 3.0+ will be better. Its simply a case of WoW not scaling passed more than 2 cores. If it could scale to all 8 cores, then things would be completely different.

I witnessed similar issues on a friends pc with dual xeons. I say chuck the dual proc setup and overclock an i7instead. Id be interested in what your core activity was reported as in taskm

It turned out that shadows fixed it and I'm now running all five on my 8-core just fine with combined processor utilization hovering at about 45% in Orgrimmar with no more hitching or slideshows. I also just found a GPU widget so I'll be collecting stats on my GPU load and memory use.

I won't be chucking the 8-core setup because I use this machine for audio/video production. It was never designed to be a gaming rig, but since I had the horsepower and the video card, I decided why not :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Powerwar

The problem with the motherboards is that even if your GPU is PCIE at 16X, if the motherboard cannot adress properly that speed then it will downgrade performance alot. Server oriented mobos are more kind to handle a 10 GBit nic or some RAID controller than an insane GPU.

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Huh? Where did you get this information, because it doesn't make sense. While I understand that gaming motherboards garner higher performance scores because of their overclockability, I don't see how a dual-cpu capable motherboard will somehow have its GPU PCIe lanes running slower to somehow make room for disk or network I/O.

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/422...osettingsg.jpg


Here's a screenshot of my Main's settings. Slaves are all set to the same but have "View Distance" down all the way, and "Projected Textures" turned off. Pay no attention to the "Resolution". I have Keyclone override that using PiP. Make sure you keep "Hardware Cursor" checked on all your toons, cause this, as I have found, will cripple FPS on all of them if not used.
Another thing I've done is went into my desktop settings and manually turned off V-Sync and Antialiasing to help with FPS. It did a little, but not much. Depends on your hardware you have. Dalaran, AV, and pretty much anywhere that has high level traffic will hinder your performance. I set my Hearth to the Argent Tournament grounds instead of Dal. Still stutters there sometimes, depends on the time of day, but not as bad as Dal.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by agrikk

It turned out that shadows fixed it and I'm now running all five on my 8-core just fine with combined processor utilization hovering at about 45% in Orgrimmar with no more hitching or slideshows. I also just found a GPU widget so I'll be collecting stats on my GPU load and memory use.

I won't be chucking the 8-core setup because I use this machine for audio/video production. It was never designed to be a gaming rig, but since I had the horsepower and the video card, I decided why not :D





Huh? Where did you get this information, because it doesn't make sense. While I understand that gaming motherboards garner higher performance scores because of their overclockability, I don't see how a dual-cpu capable motherboard will somehow have its GPU PCIe lanes running slower to somehow make room for disk or network I/O.

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While you are right to call him out on a ten gige setup serverboards aren't necessarily designed with kickass graphics specs. I ave another bee to throw in your bonnet as well serverboards don't really have speed test programs outthere to keep the brands honest either. The wprime test is the only test we found where the dual xeon board did well. I don't know if youhave a friend with five additional accounts you can borrow but the rig should slideshow after the eighth instance of wow topoint where toons in darl are randomly left behind. I asked how the core activity spread was because in our test with tenclients running arround on a weekend saw the first proc fully utalized but the second proc with vcores not utalized at all and rcores around 50 to 75 percent utalization.

Your setup is probably great for autocad and visual effects rendering. But for the cost 2 x i7's is cheaper setup for ten boxing

Unless you're a hardware boxer (1 Client per PC - so 5 PCs total), shadows are a no no. I only run them on my main PC - all 4 alt PCs have them turned off.

mine done the same thing until i upgraded the psu, may sound crazy, but in my 15years of pc building ive found that the psu is the one thing in a system you don't wanna skimp on, id say your dell may have a 450w or close to that psu, imo a 600w would be more suited to the task

I've heard about power supply issues and about poor quality PSUs gimping the performance on PCIe cards. But in this case, the PSU is 875w and after disabling shadows things are rock solid.

I played for several hours the other night, playing 5-boxes on my T5400 and performance was rock solid in Orgrimmar and elsewhere.

Thanks everyone for your help on this. Nice to see my 8-core DAW isn't totally worthless as a gaming machine. :D

Leatrix GFX
http://www.wowinterface.com/download...eatrixGfx.html

This addon that can reduce the graphic further than the game options. It can even reduce the framerate down to 5 when WoW is not the top most window. It doesnt affect the UI or text in the game; which is good. i installed it on my slaves and my main's framerate almost triple.

I am on a Mac so I dont know how it works with the PiP on some of the Windows software.

Check your CPU utilization and you may also need to set processor affinities. Note that it likely may be your GPU. I would crank down all the settings (uncheck everything in effects, and set every slider to the lowest. Turn down your resolutions to 800x600 also and see if that helps. Also set your maxfps on your clones to a low number.

Note that I 5 box on:
- A thinkpad t60p laptop with dual displays (Duo core cpu)
- It has a CAD workstation class GPU (FireGL 5250 256mb)

So it is possible but turn down your graphics settings. I consistently get 30+ FPS even in Dal and Raids. But my CPU can't handle dalaran well (it is pegged) but elsewhere and in raids it runs at between 60-80%

Good Luck.