Getting Dalaran Smooth..

[Clanked]

I am currently unable to play the game. I havn't even touched the expansion. So I have no idea how bad the lag actually is, all I know is from reading people saying "Wow, this city sucks to be in"
However, that doesn't mean that I'm not sitting here planning out a computer to build when I get home.

I am currently looking at a 3 screen setup, with 1680x1050 on each screen. Two of them rotated 90 with two clients each. The main screen would have one client using all 1680x1050.
The cards I am looking at are 2x 4850's.
I would like to be able to run around in wow without getting choked up.

It seems a lot of people have trouble being in the new city. What do yall think is the bottleneck?
Is 2x 4850 rendering the above monitors capable of this task? Is 2x 4870?
Does having extra GPU memory help it? (ie. a 1GB 4870 over a 512MB 4870)

If you have a solution to get Dalaran smooth across multiple clients, please share.

[mikekim]

I think the problem at the moment is the changes that Blizzard have made to the Graphics engine, they had the same issues when TBC was released. you will find that they will look at making changes soon to increase performance (also 1gb gfx card would be better than 512)

[Kaynin]

It's mainly the Physical memory and harddisk that lag cities and such indeed.

Upping your RAM or getting a fast s-ata (or an SSD) would greatly improve these situational lags.

[pengwynman]

i get about 10-15 fps in Dalaran, here are my machine specs:

Core 2 Quad Q9550 OC'd 2.83 -> 3.4 GHz
8 GB DDR2 @ 1066 MHz
BFG GTX 280 OC2
5x symlinked wow folders on 2x 500gb HD's in raid1

gotta say, performance in shatt has gone up since no one goes there anymore

[entoptic]

My main machine, running only one copy of WoW -

Core2Duo 3ghz
Geforce 8800gt 256mb
2GB system ram
Faster SATA HDD.

When I'm in Dalaran, my WoW.exe hits 1gb + system memory used. Due to all the players there, it jumps way up.

ANYWHERE else in Northrend its about 500mb used.

ANYWHERE else in Outlands or Azeroth its about 400mb used.

Dalaran actually causes my system to start paging memory to HDD at times. Its f'in horrible. Running multiple WoW's on one box? /shudder. Make sure you've got like 6GB+ of ram. I'd probably vote for 8 honestly.

Fur has it spot on.

I had to upgrade to 8 gigs of ram so I could walk around. I am finally able to crank the graphics and walk around just fine. Thank god!

[zanthor]

[quote='mikekim',index.php?page=Thread&postID=15863 5#post158635](also 1gb gfx card would be better than 512) [/quote]I disagree with this overly generalized statement.

[url='http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814145164']8500GT with 1GB Ram - $65[/url]

9800GTX+ with 512MB Ram - $230

I guarantee the 512MB card will blow the doors off the 1GB card.

[Siaea]

I was so utterly frustrated and pissed off the other day. My team hit 74 and got ported to Dalaran, and 3 clients crashed before they all finished loading in. I have had at least 1 or 2 clients crash every time I enter or fly out of Dalaran. I hope that gets smoothed out, because I thought I had a pretty beefy computer before that

[pinotnoir]

I was so utterly frustrated and pissed off the other day. My team hit 74 and got ported to Dalaran, and 3 clients crashed before they all finished loading in. I have had at least 1 or 2 clients crash every time I enter or fly out of Dalaran. I hope that gets smoothed out, because I thought I had a pretty beefy computer before that

I am adding a second pc to run 3 wows while my current pc will run 2. I am going to wait until after christmas to see if prices drop on the stuff I want. If you have not setup symlinking I would highly suggest it. It helped me some but dalaran is still laggy as hell. Here is an easy way to setup symlinking.

From Crucials Post on symlink
Not sure why everyone wants to overcomplicate this....

1. Copy Wow directory for each clone (ie. Wow1, Wow2, Wow3, etc)
2. Delete Data, Interface, Screenshots, Cache in the clones folders
3. Paste into text file called makelinks.cmd (change drive letter of course)

mklink /D Data D:\Wow1\Data
mklink /D Interface D:\Wow1\Interface
mklink /D Screenshots D:\Wow1\Screenshots
mklink /D Cache D:\Wow1\Cache
pause

4. Run that in each clones Wow directory, they are now all pointing to Wow1 as the source for those directories.
5. Done "

[Nitro]

I had to move from 4gb windows xp to 8gb Vista64 to get dalaran playable, my current specs are:

Striker Extreme Mobo
Q6700 Processor
8GB Ram
GTX 280 SSC Graphics (overclocked by about 20% with evg's precision tool)
Vista 64bit (only thing ive done with it is turn aero off)
1 raptor drive per wow client (7 harddrives total in my machine)
Tons of well placed fans

I run pretty decent in Dalaran now, usually 8 to 15 fps and my current bottleneck seems to be my CPU, it runs at 100% on all cores when I am in Dalaran. I'm thinking about OC'ing it to see if it improves performance.

[Clanked]

Is there a way to measure GPU Memory usage?
I guess my biggest question is whether the graphics cards are running out of memory or not.

I am not going to get a SSD. Too expensive, and I plan on having plenty of ram so paging won't be an issue.