IsBoxer: Slave windows or video FX panels are choppy 7-10fps)

I'm running windows 10 with an Nvidia Geforce 780 GTX video card. For some reason, WoW always throttles down to very low FPS when the window is not the active window. Main window can be running at 70 fps and instant swapping is lightning fast and smooth. Does WoW have a setting for a minimum background FPS to keep it from dropping so low?

This happens even if I'm just running a single slave and have that background window displayed in a video FX panel or on my 2nd monitor. Anyone else experience this same issue? This makes it worthless to do anything but stack them all on a single panel due to how distracting the video lag is.

FYI, Doesn't seem to matter how low I change the wow settings on each client. The background windows always run at a max 10 fps.

maxfpsbk is the non-focused cap. ISBoxer has a per-slot option under the performance tab that can enable/disable that.

Yep, I'm using that to set the max cap to 60 fps for the active window and 30 fps for background windows. My issue is that either Windows 10 or WoW is throttling the background windows to a much lower FPS than that, usually 7-10 fps. I almost need a min background FPS setting to force wow to try and render non-active/background windows at 30 fps.

I know I can render all 5 clients on low details at 30+ since I usually solo with my non-boxing wow profile on ultra details (wow graphics level 9) at 1440p at 50-60 fps.

So it's not maxing things to the cap? Are you using some sort of quality/detail macro to turn down the settings on the background windows when you switch? Is this new or has it always been this way?

That is correct. Instead of the non-focused/background windows running at the 30 fps cap, they get capped down to 7-10 fps max by either Windows 10, WoW, or perhaps my graphics card. I manually set each slaves' wow client graphics quality to the lowest to see if that made a difference. It didn't and whether I have 1 slave or 4 loaded, it does the same thing. :rolleyes:

If I have my main char on screen 1 and a slave on screen two, as soon as I click the slave window to focus it, FPS instantly jumps to 60 fps, main instantly drops to max of 10 fps.

FYI, I tried multi-boxing a couple of Diablo 3 clients to see if the same thing happens and it does. So perhaps this is a Windows 10 performance setting or something in the latest Nvidia Geforce Experience optimization.

Share your profile and we should be able to help eliminate ISBoxer settings as a culprit.

Perhaps a silly question, but are all of your displays plugged directly into the GTX 780? If so, are you monitoring your hardware to see what it's doing?

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Originally Posted by MiRai

Perhaps a silly question, but are all of your displays plugged directly into the GTX 780? If so, are you monitoring your hardware to see what it's doing?

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Yep, both monitors are identical and plugged in directly to the GTX 780 (via DVI port and Display Port). I suspect it isn't a performance issue since I've multiboxed 5 clients with WoD on the 2nd highest graphic settings without any issues. I know legion has higher settings, but I tried lowering all details to near lowest for the Legion client and it still behaves same way. Active window runs FPS at 60 (low and settings up to 8) and non-focused client windows run limited to 10 fps. Mouse and keyboard broadcasting works perfectly with the slave windows when using Next Click actions for caster targeted spells, etc.

I'll try using software to monitor CPU and GPU usage to make sure there isn't a performance bottleneck there, but my impression is that my system is barely breaking a sweat esp with the clients all on lowest details.

My system also has the following:
Windows 10 Anniversary Update installed
Latest Geforce Experience & Nvidia Drivers installed
System Power Level set to Performance.

Thanks guys!

Well, there was a recent thread about how someone looked to be running out of VRAM on their GTX 970, which has 1GB more VRAM than your GTX 780, so it's entirely possible that that is what's happening to you. In that thread, I did a quick test on VRAM usage at 1920x1080 and found that I could use ~500MB per game client at the lowest settings, which was less than they reported, but would probably mean you'd be running short on VRAM if you began increasing any of your video settings beyond the lowest.

Also, and I feel like I'm repeating this left and right the past few weeks... if you're relying solely on the slider to adjust your video settings, then make sure that you have anti-aliasing completely disabled because the slider doesn't adjust for that. GeForce Experience is also going to "optimize" the settings of your games, so you should probably be disabling that because it has no idea how to "optimize" for multiple game clients.

There are plenty of other fixes in the link that I posted in my first reply above which will try to help you with your FPS issues, but usually the easiest way to see if your hardware is an issue, is to open one game client at a time in the game world to see when the FPS starts dropping.

Thanks for suggestions MiRai. I'll def keep an idea on vram usage and make sure anti-aliasing is disabled as well. FYI, thanks for all the guides and videos you've done for the community. Much appreciated! :)

Update: After monitoring GPU I believe I was experiencing issues as well related to VRAM shortage crashes and issues while 5 boxing last night at anything but lowest settings. I decided to upgrade my GPU this weekend to a GTX 1070 8GB card I found on sale as an early Birthday and Christmas present :)

Have a great weekend guys and happy boxing!