Multiboxing Wiki - Multicpu, Multigpu, Multiharddrive, Multimonitor, etc and Bounded Issues. Revision 3. Work in Progress.

[vchi]

Ken-

Thank you for replying to this thread. Constructive criticism is always appreciated in making this a better wiki. I have been working on this wiki for about a couple of days now. Adding stuff here and moving stuff there. But always making improvements. No, your comments are not negative. Like I said earlier, constructive criticism is always welcomed. I do think my hardware setup and the observations made to setup A and setup B can be useful to other people and could also apply to other people's setups.

Most of the observations made are in reference to common computing principles that apply to most computer setups. I try my best to limit unknown variables. I use settings that could be used on other setups so the results can be replicated. I don't say using these settings will have the same exact results, but will be close enough within reason to be the same.

Getting to your first comment about the CPU, the reason for the recommendation was load balancing. But I think I may need to reword this part depending on the point of view.
Viewpoint 1: The recommendation was made because Blizzard made a statement that WoW had dual-core support. Now, this suggest that WoW may have certain parts of the application multithreaded to some extent and at a later point in the future will include more multithreaded support. In anticipation to this possibility, having the additional core would not hurt but like I stated earlier, this would not improve performance noticeably (if a future WoW application had increased multithreaded support there's a chance for improved performance on a multi-core system).

Viewpoint 2: For a pure fps increase, I would just allocate 1 WoW instance to one core and go for the fastest core you can find. However, putting one or more WoW instances on the same core will hurt the performance.

Viewpoint 3: If you are using a framerate limiter, then depending on core utilization for the WoW applications that are affected by the framerate limiter, placing more than 1 WoW instance on the same core, would or would not affect performance too badly.

I must disagree with the comment about the amount of cores required (to play 1 WoW instance) is determined by the speed of each of the core. In setup A and setup B, where I tried one-core, two-core, and four-core mask, there was no noticeable improvement in performance. Even with the higher clocked frequency in setup B, the different in core mask did not offer noticeable improvement. Studying the task manager and analyzing the load of 1 WoW instance, there are times where the load would split across the number of cores specified in the core mask. But when you add up the different core utilizations, it will always equal to about one core at full utilization.

In reference to your comment, a test case we can build to check and see if lowering the CPU frequency and testing it against different core mask. See if there is any difference in performance or see if the WoW application will split it's load among the different core mask to maintain a certain level performance. Those would be very interesting results.

You referenced that 1 WoW instance on 1 core with a 30fps fixed rate rendering resulted in 50% core utilization on that one core. Your fixed rate fps setting is probably the one that is producing that result. You are limiting your graphics card to the amount of information it will process and as result of this the GPU requires a lesser amount of information from the CPU hence the lower CPU utilization. If you were to remove the fixed rate fps setting, you would see similar results stated earlier in the guide. The settings I used (for 1 WoW instance) were:
for the CPU:
WoW1 - SET processAffinityMask "15"

for the GPU:
Video Settings -> Resolution Tab:
Resolution:1920x1200 (Wide)
Multisampling:24-bit color 24-bit depth 8x multisample
Refresh:60Hz
Vertical Sync:Unchecked
Hardware Cursor:Checked
Reduce Input Lag:Unchecked
Windowed Mode:Checked
Maximized:Unchecked
Video Settings -> Effects Tab:
Video Quality:Custom (Everything high minus the Shadow Quality: Low)