Quote Originally Posted by wowphreak View Post
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.