Been playing around with framerate issues since launch. Finally found my wife's main issue. Questhelper, kills your framrate everywhere! Disabled that and the FPS seems good everywhere except Dal. Watch those add ons!

In Dal, I found the old trick of staring straight down did not improve my framerate at all, but I did find staring straight up did imrpove the rate. Hit Ctrl R to bring up the active FPS counter.

I run my teams on a single a quad core AMD, 8GB, multiple hard drives (seperate installs split across 3 drives to try and speed up drive access), Nvidia 280 for my main screen, 8800GTX for secondary screen, Vista x64 U.

My framrate on my main screen in Outlands sits above 60 fps all the time, in Northrend it averages around 40, Dalaran drops it to 20ish. I recently installed the most current Nvidia driver and saw no improvement, even though other games do supposedly see a 10% increase in performance.

I think Dal just has too many bells and whistles, and now with more people using Dal... well it makes a graphics intensive location even worse with all the poistional data delay added in. Other zones seem to have huge lag spikes like ZulDrak and Storm Peaks, but this might be my realm which seems to have reverted back to some iteration of craptastic stability last seen when ZG came out. Or possibly the phasing code doesn't play nice with positional data transfers and is generating heavy DB load on the back end? But I don't know the architecture of the application... so it's all just a guess.