10 box machine setup, first timer help

[Ualaa]

Haven't gone beyond five yet.
In the long RAF process.

There was no hit on performance with XSplit and graphics cranked to Ultra across the board.
But that is not ten-boxing or streaming with ten accounts.
Cannot really say how the performance will be in that regard.

[Multibocks]

With 64GB you could do a RAM drive. I stand by two medium level computers for 10 boxing. It's so much easier to get 5 clients up to a nice level than 10 on one machine.

[MiRai]

There was no hit on performance with XSplit and graphics cranked to Ultra across the board.

I must ask that you stop leaving out the fact that you're using DX9 when you say you're using Ultra on all of your clients. The difference of load placed upon your hardware between DX9 and DX11 are light years apart, and multiboxers who expect to get any type of performance out of their machine won't be multiboxing while using DX11 and Ultra on five (or more) clients.

Five clients using Ultra/DX9 probably use up less than 1.5GB of video RAM, where as, a single client using Ultra/DX11 can take up to an entire gigabyte of video RAM by itself. In fact, as I write this post I'm flying just outside of Niuzao Temple using Ultra/DX11 and some MSAA on a single client, and I'm sitting at 1.45GB of video RAM. I like this to be clear for current and new multiboxers who might get their hopes up when building a new machine or are being introduced to this new style of gameplay. I know that I love cranking up my settings in game and I don't like to use DX9 unless it's absolutely necessary since DX11 looks much better to me when I play.

[heyaz]

I'm going to build a machine that runs 10 clients on ultra with DX11, 60 fps, while streaming....
in shrine of two moons

ON ILLIDAN... DURING PRIMETIME

[MiRai]

I'm going to build a machine that runs 10 clients on ultra with DX11, 60 fps, while streaming....
in shrine of two moons

ON ILLIDAN... DURING PRIMETIME

challenge_accepted.png

[Multibocks]

Good luck! :P

[Ualaa]

I must ask that you stop leaving out the fact that you're using DX9 when you say you're using Ultra on all of your clients. The difference of load placed upon your hardware between DX9 and DX11 are light years apart, and multiboxers who expect to get any type of performance out of their machine won't be multiboxing while using DX11 and Ultra on five (or more) clients.

Five clients using Ultra/DX9 probably use up less than 1.5GB of video RAM, where as, a single client using Ultra/DX11 can take up to an entire gigabyte of video RAM by itself. In fact, as I write this post I'm flying just outside of Niuzao Temple using Ultra/DX11 and some MSAA on a single client, and I'm sitting at 1.45GB of video RAM. I like this to be clear for current and new multiboxers who might get their hopes up when building a new machine or are being introduced to this new style of gameplay. I know that I love cranking up my settings in game and I don't like to use DX9 unless it's absolutely necessary since DX11 looks much better to me when I play.

Three of the five clients were using DX 11.
Two of the five clients were using DX 9.

Saying I was using Ultra is true.
I did not say I was using Ultra and had them all set to DX 11.
My answer was actually in regard to the question immediately preceding it, in which they had asked if XSplit was a strain on the system; I replied that for my 5-boxing, XSplit did not make a noticeable difference in terms of performance.
I currently have the first core & logical core, not assigned to anything in warcraft... so XSplit is entirely separate from the CPU resources used to play Warcraft.
None of the other components are strained, for five-boxing; I did specifically mention, I had not 10-boxed with XSplit running.

With 3x DX 11 and 2x DX 9 (I had thought they were all DX 9), the graphics card was at 60% utilization according to GPU-Z.
Since setting them all to DX 9, and reducing my settings to medium the graphic utilization has not been more than 30% with five clients.

[Ualaa]

http://www.twitch.tv/ualaa/b/350065263

Here is a short video (9 mins, 21 sec) with DX11 x5, everyone on Ultra.

Was in and around Orgrimmar, which wasn't overly busy at the time.
18:40pm Friday the 21st December, 2012; maybe people were doing other things.

FPS ranged from 22-60, depending.
Follow was fine, with 310% epic mounts.
Region swaps were basically instant, because settings were the same across the 5 accounts.

Resource monitor opened at 3m55s:
Used almost 10GB of ram, around 30%.
CPU was up to 60% utilization.
Was using Firefox (w/ NoScript & Addblock, 13 tabs open including watching my stream in one of them), had iTunes going, XSplit broadcaster (1080p HD, 29.97 FPS), Resource Monitor/GPU-Z and IS Boxer Toolkit.

GPU-Z (4m35s) showed around 70-90% (average around 80%) on the GPU load, and used ~3.6GB of 4GB of graphics ram.
Temperature was 77c (ambient room temperature is 25c).

For some reason, changing to DX11 was not saving.
So I made a new character set with the existing toons, and chose DX11 as the wow profile for them; after doing that, they would launch with DX11.

[MiRai]

Look, it seems like you're really trying to prove something here, so I'll say this... I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you play at Ultra using DX11 all you want, but from what I can see in your video, it shows that you're completely maxing out your system and it's really struggling to keep the game at a playable framerate.

The recorded stream does not look fluid or smooth, it looks very choppy because your framerates are all over the place (as is expected when running all of your clients on Ultra) -- Your main client is literally bouncing around from 20-60 FPS and there is no fighting or any action happening on screen. When you're directly outside of the entrance/exit of Orgrimmar, and there aren't that many people around (maybe 15 at most?), your main screen is hovering around 20-30 FPS and only goes back up to 60 FPS when they're out of sight or when you're in the tunnel.

There's no doubt in my mind that your GTX 670 has more GPU power (and more video RAM) than my GTX 580, but 1GB of video RAM is 1GB of video RAM across video cards no matter what. After I made my post earlier I went back and re-measured my video RAM out in Pandaria just to double-check myself. At the very minimum, the Ultra preset using DX11 was taking up 800MB of video RAM (no MSAA, just the Ultra preset). I did a fresh login and spun my camera around so that everything in the scene could be fully load into memory -- No moving and no fighting. I measured both DX APIs in this fashion and DX11 used up 400MB more than DX9 did. Here's some math:

800MB x 5 clients = 4,000MB (or 4GB) at the very minimum. In your video, you show you're running at 3.6GB and there's hardly anything going on in your video (low pop inside and outside of Orgrimmar).

400MB x 5 clients = 2,000MB (or 2GB) - This is how much more video RAM is required to run Ultra/DX11 over Ultra/DX9 across 5 clients where I was in Pandaria.

The point of my post was that you tell people you're able to play using Ultra on all of your game clients at once, and while you technically are able to (your clients aren't crashing), I think you'd be crazy to find those framerates as acceptable. I don't think anyone wants their main client to be maxing out at 20 FPS during a big fight whether it's PvE or PvP. So, let me ask you this...

Do you find the performance you displayed in your video acceptable and would you take your 5-man team into a large-scale battleground or into a typical Zerg world PvP situation (e.g. Stormwind takeover) with all of your clients set to Ultra/DX11?

If the answer is 'yes', then feel free to keep telling people you're able to multibox using the Ultra preset across all of your game clients, but I ask that you include what API you're using, what framerates you're getting (be honest!), and what video card you're using.

By the way, your GPU and CPU loads were lower in the Task Manager and GPU-Z because your main client was out of focus and therefore locked at your background framerate with the rest of the clients at 20 FPS.

--------------------

Now, here's a little hardware science for everyone...

Note: The screenshots below are from some old Cataclysm tests I had ran. You can completely ignore the FPS in these screenshots because the framerates were all over the place and the numbers you see in the screenshots represent nothing of value.

Exhibit A:
http://i.imgur.com/nOvBz.jpg - CPU 51% // GPU 81% - Ultra Video Preset (No MSAA) (5 Clients @ 1920x1080)

If I was experiencing bad framerates with my setup while multiboxing five clients using the Ultra preset and I was instructed by someone to check my load percentages by running the Task Manager and GPU-Z, I would report back that my CPU was at about 51% load and my GPU was at about 81% load (screenshot provided above). Given those load percentage numbers, my CPU and GPU should still be able to push more FPS than what I'm seeing. So, why would I be getting such bad framerates in game?

Exhibit B:
http://i.imgur.com/YyJjs.jpg - CPU 96% // GPU 94% - High Video Preset (No MSAA) (5 Clients @ 1920x1080)

The answer becomes clear when looking at the same setup with a lower video preset. You can see that my load percentages are visibly higher when using a lower preset. Why?

Reason being, is If you are putting more load on your computer hardware than it can handle you're going to see lower than expected load percentages because your hardware is being overworked and it can't keep up. When this happens, you will see shitty framerates in game that bounce around all over the place when you're not really doing much of anything.

[Ticks]

http://www.twitch.tv/ualaa/b/350065263

Here is a short video (9 mins, 21 sec) with DX11 x5, everyone on Ultra.

Hey Ualaa,

Would you mind sharing which unit frames you use?

Thanks