Running WoW in Windowed mode takes severe performance hit?

[Hachoo]

Not sure if this happened when I was running XP or not but heres what I noticed now that I'm running Vista 64. I haven't tried loading up multiple copies of WoW yet, but I have 2 different WoW installations for my main account, for solo or MB play. For Multiboxing my main account is in windowed mode at 1280x960, 2x FSAA, all graphics details on minimum except view distance at 1/3 and object distance at 1/2.

On my solo boxing WoW, I have 1680x1050, 8x FSAA, EVERYTHING maxed out except shadows at minimum.

Now, heres the kicker, I get HIGHER FPS on the solo boxing WoW, even when I run the MB WoW by itself with no other copies running! WTF? Something is seriously wrong with that picture. Aside from above, the only difference is that I run the solo boxing WoW in full screen. In org near the bank I get ~45-50 fps on the max settings solo wow, and ~25-30 fps on the MB WoW with low settings.

Now the question is, why the hell does this happen and how do I fix it, because I'm sure this is causing me a huge performance hit while 5 boxing.

[keghia]

Well, I can't say that I know the exact solution to your problem but I can tell you how I have mine setup.

I am running Vista x64 as well, and all clients have to have vertical sync turned off and make sure that the Aero toolbars is turned off as well. I found that even with the one client running maximised, the aero toolbars in the background would cause it to run terribly slow.

Hopefully your problem was as simple to fix as mine.

[Hachoo]

Well, I've had aero off, and oddly enough before I read this post I was goofing around with graphics settings and noticed when I turned off vertical sync on my clients my FPS jumped by almost 15. (WTF?) LOL. So anyway, that helped a bunch, but now I'm discovering another issue.

Vista doesn't support hardware sound acceleration. When I run 5 copies of WoW the sound is poppy and crackles especially when I'm in org or dalaran. Its almost unbearable but I can't turn the sound off, I like it too much

[Yamio]

Hachoo, I too like the sound, but I turned it off on all my guys cause of the performance hit I was getting. Now that I've turned it off, my performance boost is too much to turn it back on. The only sound coming out of the speakers on my clone PC is the keyclone sounds for pause, and my newly found favorite, pass mouse clicks. Those two sounds are like music to me ears.

[Hachoo]

Hehe. Well I only turn sound on on my main window, the other 4 have it disabled. Its really invaluable for PvP and addons that give boss warnings etc. I don't think I can play the game w/o it on even if its crackly, i dont like listening to music when I play, only the sounds in-game.

[keghia]

I think this is either a driver problem or a 'settings' problem. Again, Vista x64 is kinda to blame. Try changing your audio settings to a lower quality in the control panel. I dont have the same problems as you but I do have another unrelated game will bring up errors if the audio quality is too high; bump it down a setting, and the world is fine.

All I can recomend is to play with the quality settings, as I defintely think this is more of a simple 'change some quality settings' problem.

[Hachoo]

Well I did a lot of googling last night. Turns out the sound blaster audigy cards have massive vista driver issues that creative refuses to fix. But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. A guy named Daniel K in brazil a long time ago re-engineered and fixed the drivers. He was sued by creative but his driver versions are still floating around the net. I installed them last night and made sure I still had sound coming from my speakers but it was too late to test WoW - will find out tonight if I can now 5 box without sound issues.

Aside from that I'm not hitting a CPU bottleneck so I have to decide if I want to upgrade my CPU/motherboard :\

[FIra]

for your followers in chat type /console maxfps XX

XX = max fps you want that client to display. I personally set my followers to 20 and let my main go wild.

This should give you some performance gains.

[Bloodcloud]

Well I did a lot of googling last night. Turns out the sound blaster audigy cards have massive vista driver issues that creative refuses to fix. But there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. A guy named Daniel K in brazil a long time ago re-engineered and fixed the drivers. He was sued by creative but his driver versions are still floating around the net. I installed them last night and made sure I still had sound coming from my speakers but it was too late to test WoW - will find out tonight if I can now 5 box without sound issues.

Aside from that I'm not hitting a CPU bottleneck so I have to decide if I want to upgrade my CPU/motherboard :\

Cool, after you try them, I would like to give them a go too, if you can point me to the DL URL

[Bloodcloud]

for your followers in chat type /console maxfps XX

XX = max fps you want that client to display. I personally set my followers to 20 and let my main go wild.

This should give you some performance gains.

If you use keyclone, you can set the min/max FPS there as well per client.
works as a charm