Lag and graphics card

Hey, I am 5 boxing on 1 pc with 1 monitor atm and everything runs fine without any lag most of the time.
I run my 4 alts on 5fps background.
But sometimes in AV when it has to load allot of characters etc and in shattrah, I get huge lag spikes.
My cpu usage is only 40% and ram use is only 75% max use, so im guessing its my graphics card (8600gt) that is the slacker here.
I want to run dual monitors and I want that lag to stop obviously, its getting really annoying.
So should I use 2 graphics cards (buy another one) or buy 1 new one and just use that one alone?
I'm pretty cluelles about this stuff and I'm gonna give my pcshop a phone soon to order all the stuff so any help on what card(s) to get and how to set this up is GREATLY appreciated!

Just buy an 8800GT or GTS. Its your GPU thats most likely ruining your FPS, also what OS are you running?

I'm running Vista, dont know what GPU is ;X
and do you think going from 8600 to 8800 will make the difference between not lagging and lagging?

Thanks for the reply :)

GPU is another way of saying graphics card.

Yes, you will get better performance from an 8800 compared to an 8600, but dependent on your computer specs it might not be only limiting factor for your frame rate issue.

I doubt it that it would be anything else than my GPU then.
I'm running Vista on 3gigs of ram, 8600gt, Intel core 2quad CPU Q6600 @2.40ghz

and as I said it runs on 40% cpu, and 70% memory

Thanks for the great replys so far, made up my mind to buy a 8800gts!

Anyway what is up with this dual GPU? should I just keep my card in it and buy the 8800gts and let them put both in by the store? what is the difference?

This is most likely an addon problem. Try disabling all your addons and then see if it still happens. I had this problem a while back and it wasn't the card. I bought a new one and got the same thing. So I disabled all addons then readded them and found which one it was. For the life of me I can't remember which one it was.

I doubt it is any of my addons, I only use the multiboxing addon v2 when multiboxing.

Edit: Btw, I recently read stuff about vista not using your full ram or something? I am running vista home premium 32 bit and have 3 gigs of ram, will it use all of it or how do I get it to use it all? ?(
Also, I set my 5 wows up in keyclone to spread out over 3 out of my 4 cores. When I check at the taskmaster however it seems that all of the wows are still running on CPU 0 and 1, how do I fix this and will this be a performance boost?

I am running all 5 of the wows from different directories, should I let them run from 2 maybe?

I'm asking allot of stupid questions maybe but I'm abit of a noob at this and I would LOVE :love: any help!
thanks for the replies.

you have to enable quad core use in the config.wtf
if you change the line: SET processAffinityMask from "3" to "15" WoW will take advantage of all 4 cores.



also setup keyclone to use the following settings


wow1 cpu1
wow2 cpu2
wow3 cpu2
wow4 cpu3
wow5 cpu3


leave cpu0 untouched


setup wow to run from one directory using symbolic links - this will help performance


at the end of the day you will find your bottleneck is your Graphics Card - I had issues with one card and one screen (couldn't really get on with it), so i bought another card and installed it and the performance was worse!! in the end i upgraded an old pc to current standards and now get 60-110fps on my main pc and between 40-100fps on each of my other characters running on the second machine - it actually makes it a joy to play.


i have listed the thread detailing my specs:
New Setup

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mikekim',index.php?page=Thread&postID=83782#post83 782][color=#000000]you have to enable quad core use in the config.wtf [/color]
[font='Arial

if you change the line: SET processAffinityMask from "3" to "15" WoW will take advantage of all 4 cores. [/font]


also setup keyclone to use the following settings

wow1 cpu1
wow2 cpu2
wow3 cpu2
wow4 cpu3
wow5 cpu3

leave cpu0 untouched

setup wow to run from one directory using symbolic links - this will help performance

at the end of the day you will find your bottleneck is your Graphics Card - I had issues with one card and one screen (couldn't really get on with it), so i bought another card and installed it and the performance was worse!! in the end i upgraded an old pc to current standards and now get 60-110fps on my main pc and between 40-100fps on each of my other characters running on the second machine - it actually makes it a joy to play.

i have listed the thread detailing my specs:
New Setup

---

Where can I find this config.wtf ?

I have setup keyclone to those settings but it seems that it doesnt work because when I check the taskmaster it is still using CPU 0 and 1 for some reason. I always change them manually everytime i start my wows now.

So are you saying that I should run all of my 5 wows from 1 directory? ?(

Sorry that I don't understand you but are you saying buying a new GPU won't help or that I have to buy another machine?

Again sorry for my noobishness in this, but I'm totally appreciating all the replies so much!

Where can I find this config.wtf ?

-the config file in the wtf folder

I have setup keyclone to those settings but it seems that it doesnt work because when I check the taskmaster it is still using CPU 0 and 1 for some reason. I always change them manually everytime i start my wows now.

-quite odd, perhaps Rob (keyclone) can sort this for you - it might be because your confing is still set for dual core

So are you saying that I should run all of my 5 wows from 1 directory? ?(

-you will get better perfomance running them from one directory - do a search for setting up symbolic links

Sorry that I don't understand you but are you saying buying a new GPU won't help or that I have to buy another machine?

-the choice is yours, its just how smooth you would like your game to run. the majority of people on this site have used cards similar to yours with great effect and added additional cards and screens. there are posts detailing what settings and configuration that they have used.

I myself started running 5 on an 8800Ultra XT on one 24" screen (30fps on the main and 10-15 on each of the four others). i tried to add another card a GTX260 and got far worse performance rather than the better that i was expecting (probably due to my Motherboard not passing the full 16x on the PCI-E secondary). Also tried dual monitors on one card

In the end i went for the new additional machine upgrade - you dont have to, it was just that for me it was the best compromise to get me the FPS I was looking for on each character.

Again sorry for my noobishness in this, but I'm totally appreciating all the replies so much!

-NP I haven't been doing this long myself :thumbup: The learning curve is steep, but well worth it in the end

without even getting into reading this whole thing it is cleary your video card. You have a smoking machine and your video card is the bottleneck.

I would also run all instances of WoW off the same directory.

I would then change the cpu affinity on keyclone to use the correct cpu's. Also make sure nothing else is running on your computer. Get 1 more gig of ram as well since each instance of wow takes up about half a gig and then Vista a memory hog takes a chunk as well.

:thumbsup:

Allright I changed my settings in the WTF folder to use all cores, and I am only using 1 directory for all 5 wows now.

It helped SOO much! :P
I just got a smile on my face when walking in shattrah and AV with barely any lag at all!
I will still buy a new GPU tho just to make it even better :D

Great replies everyone and thanks for helping this newbie out! :thumbsup: