Core i7 System, Poor Performance?

[BobGnarly]

I have a similar system, and I don't get much better in Dalaran. I hear these stories myself, and I've tried to pin down why some people get 60fps at max settings and I don't. My gut feeling is that they don't, or they are forgetting some setting that isn't maxed.

One thing that strongly leads me to believe that it's not something with my system is that I can walk around certain parts at (capped) 60fps, then I can look at the area just to the right of the horde bank and watch my fps drop in 1/2. I've done some graphics programming, and this reminds me quite a bit of a poorly optimized area, or just a general limitation of the graphics engine itself.

All pure speculation, but that's my guess.

As soon as we are able to get i7's with 24G ram lag will be a thing of the past as we can put the whole wow folder in the system ram (ram drive) and we will see no texture lag at all. And with 4G chips becoming more common and cleaper (Iv even seen single 8G chips lol) its just a matter of 1/2 a year or so I think before MB manufactures make 4G X 6 boards stable.

I don't expect 24G will help these problems. Your solution assumes the problem here is getting textures from store to ram. I don't believe that is the problem, and the reason is because if it were we'd see 100% utilized RAM. We don't. This means the problem isn't paging. In case you aren't aware, Vista and Windows 7 both cache used data in RAM. This means if you ever bring a texture (or anything else) into memory, it will stay until the OS needs ram for other new information. If the OS needs more RAM and none is free, it will page out some of this cache to make room. IOW, if we were thrashing the HD you might be right, but the fact that we can box 5 clients without even using all of 6G of ram leads me to believe that paging in textures is not our problem.

Now wow might be doing some restrictive thing that is causing the problem, but if so, more RAM still isn't going to help.

The only thing I expect having wow in a ramdrive to help would be a) loading up the program faster, and b) reducing the stuttering you notice when first zoning into a crowded or complex area (this is texture load stalling).