Maximizing performance

[vikemosabe]

Alright.
Thanks again

[HPAVC]

I would run resource monitor and see where you have your exact (as close as that will get at least) problems. Make sure that you have the symlinking working on your wow setup and the processor affinity worked out.

I would also try disabling sound entirely on the system, device level not just muting and see if that works. There are race conditions with software heavy drivers and each wow is going to make a new thread on a different processor if it can and all that noise.

[wowphreak]

If yeh drop the resolution you play at it will reduce the lag considerably.
After that kill shadows, reduce yer view distance, those are the big ones.

On all the other wows take the graphics affects bar, the big one, and drag it all the way to the left.

The problem yer running into is not enough memory the higher the res yeh play at the more memory yeh need.
Alll those affect require a considerable amount of cpu cycles. WoW does most of the graphics on the cpu.

[Mubox]

If yeh drop the resolution you play at it will reduce the lag considerably.
After that kill shadows, reduce yer view distance, those are the big ones.

On all the other wows take the graphics affects bar, the big one, and drag it all the way to the left.

The problem yer running into is not enough memory the higher the res yeh play at the more memory yeh need.
Alll those affect require a considerable amount of cpu cycles. WoW does most of the graphics on the cpu.

Just an update, I recently purchased a new laptop (Sager NP9280, i7-975, 6GB, NV 280M 1GB, WoW is on a Intel SSD) and I can now run all 5 instances locally, windowed, maximized. I get 60fps in the foreground, 30 background, no hiccups. I set all settings to max for one client (my primary driving toon) and set the rest to lowest. On my "secondary driving toon" I set the display distance to full.

The primary FPS killers on this hardware?

1) Shadows
2) Specular Lighting
3) View Distance

I knock shadows down, ensure that Specular lighting is disabled on all but one client, and knock the view distance down to half on all but one client. I get excellent FPS.

On my old Alienware (core2 2ghz, 4gb ram, NV 8900m), to achieve 30fps+ in the foreground: Windowed mode, 1024x768, all effects set to lowest, desktop BPP set to 16 bits. Going 'maximized' with just one client would tank FPS, increasing effects would also tank FPS. CPU for 5 clients was around 90-95%, on the i7 cpu is less than 15%. Same multibox configuration, and higher settings.

Thus, if you're CPU bound an i7 (desktop, not mobile) appears to be WAY more than you would need, whereas a T7200 core2 is sub-par for 5 toons. Likewise, the gfx performance of the 280m surpasses that of the NV 8900m with reckless abandon.

The only downside? My new rig cost me around 4200$ shipped. Most people don't have that kind of dough on hand for a laptop, but I would imagine a similarly configured Desktop would cost significantly less. If I had to 'guess', I can probably run 10+ clients in terms of available CPU/GPU on the Sager/i7, and 5 was pushing the CPU limit on the Alienware/Core2.

[vikemosabe]

Ok, thanks a bunch for all these responses.
I have a question about the symilinking.
I simply have a copy of wow that I run specifically for multi boxing.
Would symlinking give me a performance improvement in that regard?
Or would that only be if I cared about separate settings for each client?

Finally, about the sound you suggest I turn it off at the device level?
What exactly do you mean by this and how does one go about doing so in windows 7?
What I take it to mean is go into device manager and disable the sound devices.
Is that what you mean by it?

Also, as a follow-up to the maxfpsbk post:
You have to set the maxfps as well as bk for it to work, I found out.
And the command to do it is:
/console set maxfpsbk 3
You had it right except for the set in there.

[Mubox]

Ok, thanks a bunch for all these responses.
I have a question about the symilinking.
I simply have a copy of wow that I run specifically for multi boxing.
Would symlinking give me a performance improvement in that regard?
Or would that only be if I cared about separate settings for each client?

Finally, about the sound you suggest I turn it off at the device level?
What exactly do you mean by this and how does one go about doing so in windows 7?
What I take it to mean is go into device manager and disable the sound devices.
Is that what you mean by it?

Also, as a follow-up to the maxfpsbk post:
You have to set the maxfps as well as bk for it to work, I found out.
And the command to do it is:
/console set maxfpsbk 3
You had it right except for the set in there.

SymLinking gains are negligible, you would get more benefit out of a "good" raid+1 controller and high-rpm drives, or just go with a dedicated solid-state drive. The primary benefit in symlinking is isolation of game files (cache, logs, etc) so that you don't have wow contending for the same files on disk, or in the case of some sloppy add-ons, overwriting global savedvars between clients. On a personal note, I like the "remember login" feature so I only need to punch in a password when I launch 5 clients at once. Without symlinking or manually creating copies, I would have to visit each client to select my account before continuing with login.

It would be nice to see someone do a controlled test and post their tests and results. No such thing exists that I can find.

Under Vista and W7, disable sound within WoW should provide a small boost. Muting the device should have the equivalent effect as removing the device in terms of processing, the filter shouldn't process any audio when muted. Also, if you have a "Stereo Mix" device, disable it. Under Vista the device is disabled by default, in W7 it's not present. however, if you installed RealTek drives, it shoudl be present (though, again, disabled by default).

As with SymLinking, it would be nice to see someone do a controlled test and post their test steps and results.

[Mubox]

I have a laptop that I use for multiboxing and playing in general.
It is a this Gateway.
Except mine has 1920x1200 resolution and Windows 7.
It basically has WIn 7, 4 GB RAM, 1GB 9800m GTS, 320 GB HDD 7200 RPM, and 2.3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

This is very similar to my rig, I have an 8700m 512, 2ghz core2, (alienware m9750)

I found that, yes, by default it borders "unplayable" especially in content-heavy areas (so far ZF, STV, Dal).

My workaround was to open the NV Control Panel and edit the 3d graphics performance settings.

I disable AA, Aniso, force pre-render frames to 3, conformant texture to Clamp, and allows multi-core rendering.

The critical change, i found, was the texture performance. It defaults to "quality", I set this to "High performance".

I also found that, under W7, doing the game-specific settings didn't seem to properly apply to the game (probably the way I launch wow), so I had to set my graphics settings as the default settings and then make sure my wow profile inherited all settings from the global/default settings.

After doing this I can 5-box on my --laptop--, primary gets 30-60 fps depending on the zone. Where I would normally lag out like sh*t I get 25-45 variable, background clients always seem to do about 50% the FPS of the fore client.

Be sure to nerf the NV settings in addition to the wow settings and see how far it gets you, yoru system should be capable of handling 5 clients at 1024x768, 32bpp 1x multisample, all effects set to Lowest. It won't be the prettiest thing, but it should be running milky-smooth most of the time.

[Ticklebur]

I have a laptop that I use for multiboxing and playing in general.
It is a this Gateway.
Except mine has 1920x1200 resolution and Windows 7.
It basically has WIn 7, 4 GB RAM, 1GB 9800m GTS, 320 GB HDD 7200 RPM, and 2.3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.

I can hardly run 5 instances of WoW.

I can do moderately well with 4, but want to do 5.
I run 2 mb of addons on each slave and about 5 mb on master.
I have set all graphics to lowest possible and set resolution of each to 800x600.

I get about 10-12 fps on slaves and 20-30 on master.
I wouldn't expect it to be laggy at 20-30 but it's unplayable.

I'm always losing my followers cuz it lags out and they drop too far behind.

My ping is another factor.
It usually sits at 400~.
I don't think it's the issue because everything runs fine when I have 4 going and both my sisters each play one at a time.
But when I am doing 5 by myself it's just bad, so I don't think the ping is the issue.

Is there tips or tricks anyone can point me to that might help me eek out just enough more performance to pull off running 5?
Or am I simply crap out of luck?

This is weird...

My pc can run WoW x3 without lag and this is my system:

2.0 GHz intel p4 (single core)
512MB ram (rdram O.o)
512mb vidcard (ati radeon HD 2400 Pro, i think)
40GB HDD + 300GB HDD (last for games)
1024x768 resolution
Windows XP SP2

important to say: it's not modified.


So im a little confused here:

how come i can run WoW 3 times,
when your pc is way better,
but can't run it 5 times?


EDIT:
if anyone wants, i can post more detailed system info

[Mubox]

This is weird...

My pc can run WoW x3 without lag and this is my system:

2.0 GHz intel p4 (single core)
512MB ram (rdram O.o)
512mb vidcard (ati radeon HD 2400 Pro, i think)
40GB HDD + 300GB HDD (last for games)
1024x768 resolution
Windows XP SP2

important to say: it's not modified.


So im a little confused here:

how come i can run WoW 3 times,
when your pc is way better,
but can't run it 5 times?


EDIT:
if anyone wants, i can post more detailed system info

If I run 3 clients I get 60fps no problem using default gfx settings, with 5 clients I get 30fps avg with lowest graphics settings. While I'd like to say that WoW scales, it doesn't. running 2x the number of clients doesn't result in 50% of the perf per-client, it results in far worse. At some point a system hits its own limit in terms of CPU, GPU and Memory.

The first bottle-neck is the CPU, CPU-use does in-fact scale. The CPU use of 1 client can be multiplied evenly to determine your max supportable clients (without overheating, you can obviously push beyond the calculated limit at the expense of heat and FPS).

The second bottle-neck is GPU, GPU-use does not scale. I don't blame WoW for this, it's likely driver and or hardware specific. In my case, I had to turn texture filtering down to the lowest setting, so, in my case, I assume the bottle neck is the GPU bus-clock and/or pipelines for texture processing. A particular make of a graphics card usually only has so many pipelines for processing, and can only move data along those pipelines so fast. I don't know the spec of your gfx card, but it would be interesting to know what your FPS are with 5 clients on your machine. Like I said, 3x clients runs like butter on my rig (and probably most rigs which were 'decent' circa 2005/2006) but tack on another two instances and you may find that, while your CPU isn't pegged, WoW may be IO bound against the graphics card, first the bus, then the available pipelines.

Is there anyone who is DX/GPU savvy enough to detail how perf can be monitored for ATI and NV graphics cards? For example, is there any way to determine if/when you are IO bound on the bus of your gfx card, or constrained by the available GPU, etc?

As a side note, my P4 2ghz, 2GB ram and ATI X800 512MB could only 'cleanly' run 1 instance of WoW, the constraint was CPU. Running once instance of WoW eats about 90% cpu. Running additional instances reduced performance for each instance, the most I ran was 4 instances and performance at that point became unbearable. I ultimately bought a dual-core laptop with an NV 8700m, primarily for the CPU boost. Now I run 5 instances at 90-100% CPU, should do well until Cataclysm, at which point I suspect many of us will be upgrading graphics cards and/or RAM to keep up.

[Ticklebur]

If I run 3 clients I get 60fps no problem using default gfx settings, with 5 clients I get 30fps avg with lowest graphics settings. While I'd like to say that WoW scales, it doesn't. running 2x the number of clients doesn't result in 50% of the perf per-client, it results in far worse. At some point a system hits its own limit in terms of CPU, GPU and Memory.

The first bottle-neck is the CPU, CPU-use does in-fact scale. The CPU use of 1 client can be multiplied evenly to determine your max supportable clients (without overheating, you can obviously push beyond the calculated limit at the expense of heat and FPS).

The second bottle-neck is GPU, GPU-use does not scale. I don't blame WoW for this, it's likely driver and or hardware specific. In my case, I had to turn texture filtering down to the lowest setting, so, in my case, I assume the bottle neck is the GPU bus-clock and/or pipelines for texture processing. A particular make of a graphics card usually only has so many pipelines for processing, and can only move data along those pipelines so fast. I don't know the spec of your gfx card, but it would be interesting to know what your FPS are with 5 clients on your machine. Like I said, 3x clients runs like butter on my rig (and probably most rigs which were 'decent' circa 2005/2006) but tack on another two instances and you may find that, while your CPU isn't pegged, WoW may be IO bound against the graphics card, first the bus, then the available pipelines.

Is there anyone who is DX/GPU savvy enough to detail how perf can be monitored for ATI and NV graphics cards? For example, is there any way to determine if/when you are IO bound on the bus of your gfx card, or constrained by the available GPU, etc?

As a side note, my P4 2ghz, 2GB ram and ATI X800 512MB could only 'cleanly' run 1 instance of WoW, the constraint was CPU. Running once instance of WoW eats about 90% cpu. Running additional instances reduced performance for each instance, the most I ran was 4 instances and performance at that point became unbearable. I ultimately bought a dual-core laptop with an NV 8700m, primarily for the CPU boost. Now I run 5 instances at 90-100% CPU, should do well until Cataclysm, at which point I suspect many of us will be upgrading graphics cards and/or RAM to keep up.

So, what your saying is:
If i upgrade my CPU (be it a new CPU, or new pc) i can run more?

Btw, does it matter if i seriously tune my windows so that it's a gamers edition?
Cuz i tried making my own windows version, and i cut the RAM-usage back to about 30MB.

I don't know a lot about registry tuning, but maybe that will increase performance even more.
I hope so, cuz i don't have the money for a new computer.