Multiboxing Hardware Science!

[remanz]

sorry for hijacking the thread a bit.

Did they add new graphics changes with recent patches ?

My machine used to handle Org valley of strength ok upon cata lanuch (40-50 on main , capped at 30 fps on slaves). I was ok all the way until 4.1. Then valley of strength got pretty bad. My framerate dropped to 15-20 on all windows of wow. My hardware config did not change, nor the graphic settings.

Another obvious example is at the gundrak's snake boss chamber. With all those little snakes crawling on the ground, my framerate dips dramatically. It wasn't the case when I did it in 4.0.x

I am thinking about upgrading to GTX580, currently using the mega fail GTX 295. But I was monitoring the GPU usage with afterburner. It never exceeds 60% on both GPUs, even when my framerate is struggling. Does it mean the card never operates at full capacities ? If that's the case, would upgrading the card help at all ? Or this is more CPU bound.

[MiRai]

sorry for hijacking the thread a bit.

Did they add new graphics changes with recent patches ?

My machine used to handle Org valley of strength ok upon cata lanuch (40-50 on main , capped at 30 fps on slaves). I was ok all the way until 4.1. Then valley of strength got pretty bad. My framerate dropped to 15-20 on all windows of wow. My hardware config did not change, nor the graphic settings.

Another obvious example is at the gundrak's snake boss chamber. With all those little snakes crawling on the ground, my framerate dips dramatically. It wasn't the case when I did it in 4.0.x

My first guess was going to be that more people came back to the game on your realm and because 10 more
people are in the city on one screen... it's really 50 more people because it's rendering on five screens. But
then when you mentioned the FPS drop in the instance so, my first guess was quickly nullified.

I have not heard of any graphical updates since Cataclysm has been released but, I have been reading about
many, many people complaining about nVidia's 275.33 drivers. People are seeing FPS drops and overall
performance loss (on all games) with them. They're reverting back to 270.61 or even 267.91 and waiting for
the new 280.xx drivers before upgrading again. Might want to give it a try if you're using the 275.33 drivers.
Or if you're not using 275.33... then try upgrading.

I am thinking about upgrading to GTX580, currently using the mega fail GTX 295. But I was monitoring the GPU usage with afterburner. It never exceeds 60% on both GPUs, even when my framerate is struggling. Does it mean the card never operates at full capacities ? If that's the case, would upgrading the card help at all ? Or this is more CPU bound.

First and foremost (which I'm sure you already know) the GTX 295 is a dual GPU card sitting in SLI mode
(unless you've manually disabled it). I might try disabling SLI mode (if you've still got it enabled) just to see
what that does for you. Also, the nVidia 200 series GPUs are only DX10 compatible. While they're able to
emulate some DX11 stuff it's not a true DX11 card, so if you're using DX9 at the moment I would like to believe
that DX11 would help improve overall performance.

You're right in thinking that because the GPU never exceeds 60%, a video card upgrade probably won't give
you any real performance boost besides any gains that DX11 might give. Check those usage numbers again
after you've disabled SLI (again, if its enabled) and see where they fall. Other than that, WoW is definitely CPU
bound so when you're boxing and you see that performance loss make sure you've got your Task Manager open
to the Performance tab so you can see what CPU usage looks like. You can overlay the Task Manager on top of
your game windows if your layout covers all of your monitor(s).