Which gives better performance?

[wowphreak]

errmm if yeh got performance issues, looking at hard drives to increaseit, is not the way. Yer barking up the wrong tree?

[Jamien]

Your graphics card will be taking the biggest hit trying to load 2 games at once.
I found moving my slaves onto a separate drive, and forcing them to use CPU1 while my main uses CPU0 increased performance a bit.

But realistically speaking, loading one wow is relatively simple, but loading two or more at the same time requires a lot of processing power.
Having 5, I use keyclone to restrict the slaves to max 15 fps when they aren't in focus and 55 max when they are, I can get about 75fps on my main with all mods (200+ mods ... >_>) running around ashenvale or such. As soon as I get in Org (flying) all 5 will lag for about 10 seconds when they start their flight into org then stop lagging once or twice during the landing sequence. Normally they lag out then load landed.
If you wanted to stop that your best bet is to drop all your grapics down to lowest, remove as many mods as possible and have as little eye candy as possible.
Short of putting some cards in SLI / Crossfire.

[Otlecs]

Your graphics card will be taking the biggest hit trying to load 2 games at once.

I have to disagree with this The biggest hit at load-time is indeed the disk I/O.

Short of putting some cards in SLI / Crossfire

Which would, unfortunately, have no positive impact on WoW.

I hope the original poster has the decency to come back and let us know how/if he fixed his problem, so that future visitors to this thread with a similar problem can see what the issue was.

[Jamien]

Doesn't wow make use of SLI/crossfire?

and yes, load time is disk I/O, but also a graphics issue.

[SuS]

If your running Windows XP thats the source of your FPS problems as for one folder or two? thats somthing that either one of the many Sticky thread's or a quick 'Search' would net great results. :S

[Otlecs]

Doesn't wow make use of SLI/crossfire?

I shall defer to the many here who know the detailed answer to this question better than I, but I've read alot of threads here suggesting this to be the case. Many threads suggest that SLI/Crossfire actually degrades WoW's framerate.

and yes, load time is disk I/O, but also a graphics issue.

We've obviously had different experience here

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.

[Jamien]

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.

hmmmmmmm
Maybe I need to look at some raptor drives

[Memn]

I dual box with only 2 toons, on 1 cpu. so at all times I'm using 1 monitor, and I control the slave toon using keyclone.


My question is would it be better (performance wise) for me to either:
1. Load WOW up from only 1 directory, and load up both my accounts from that 1 directory.
2. Load 2 directories of wow, so each of my accounts will have their own directory to load from.


in which area does it cause less stress on my system if any, and in doing either, does my fps raise some or not?

Neither of these two options will have a large impact on your FPS. Option #1 will result in faster load times than 2, especially if your system is tight on memory, as you'll get more benefit from disk caching.

Two common causes for FPS problems for multiboxers:

1. Using a Dual View configuration with an Nvidia card on XP.
Symptoms: System runs fast with one client, running on one full screen, but when adding a second, both are considerably, and consistently slower. For example, 80 fps when one boxing, but 10 fps when multiboxing.
Solution: Configure the displays to use Horizontal Span rather than Dual View & configure Wow to use windowed mode rather than full screen mode. OR Upgrade to Vista.

2. Memory Starvation
Symptoms: System runs fine most of the time, but "shutters" after prolongued sessions, or when entering busy zones (Shatt, Orgrimmar, Stormwind, Undercity) and performance is not uniform across windows when this occurs. High Disk IO observed during this time.
Solution: Add more RAM. The disk IO can mislead you into thinking you need to adjust your storage solution, but what is happening is your system is running out of memory, and trying to temporarily use disk to store that information. Crappy RAM is still MUCH faster than the fastest Disk, so optimizing your disk IO will not resolve this situation. Figure out how much memory a single instance of Wow consumes on your box in a busy area, and multiply that number by the number of clients you want to run and add another gigabyte for good measure. That should be around how much memory you need. My system uses about 700MB per instance when I'm in Shatt, I'm running with 6GB and I run 6 clients great from one folder on 64bit Vista.

I have first hand experience with both of these. I also tried running from multiple folders, but my load times were considerably faster using a single folder, even when using multiple drives for multiple folders.

[Memn]

I've never seen any of the GPUs under any serious strain from WoW, even on a VAIO VGA-AR31S noteboook. I have however seen lots of performance problems when zoning / moving around a populated city as textures, etc, are loaded in the background.

hmmmmmmm
Maybe I need to look at some raptor drives

This is likely a RAM starvation, not a drive speed issue. A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.

[Otlecs]

This is likely a RAM starvation, not a drive speed issue. A 5400 RPM is fast enough to service the IO required to load the textures used in Wow, interraction with the pagefile that is most likely causing this. If your experiencing this, max out your Ram before buying a 10k hard disk.

Thanks for the advice. I really don't see any evidence that my problem is memory-related though.

I have 4GB RAM, and never see utilisation go above ~70% when boxing. I don't remember my observed figures for page fault rates, but it was negligible even when I was seeing all that thrashing of drone disks.

8GB would perhaps be nice, but the 2GB sticks are slower than the 1GB sticks I currently have, which makes them an unattractive proposition.

The disks hosting the drones (which are not the same stripeset as hosts the pagefile) thrash when I enter an area with lots of other players (loading all those snazzy armour textures, I suspect).

So I'm as certain as I can be that my specific problem is related to disk I/O.

I've read threads here (from people who have analysed it in far greater detail than I) that suggest the problem is that WoW likes to load a large number of small files, so seek times are often more important than transfer rates.

My twin Velociraptors are on order (though not dispatched yet... so much for a weekend of experimentation!) so I'll be able to prove / disprove my bottleneck theory Real Soon Now(tm)