Getting back into WoW / Boxing, need hardware advice.

[spher0boom]

With DX9, and five accounts, Ultra across the board was playable at a decent performance.

However with DX11, and the same five accounts, while the game would load and I would consider if playable, it would have been less than fun in congested locations.
Orgrimmar, around the auction house (wasn't terribly populated at the time), was noticeably spikey in performance with FPS jumping all over the place.
A mass battleground combat would not have been smooth; I'd assume the same would be true for a 25-man type raid.

I pretty much only cared about the pvp aspect, towards the end (last couple years) of boxing Wow.

I was hoping for better, so I may have to return he card and get a better one. My interest is in 5 boxing my own instances, or doing 10-mans with a friend who also 5 boxes. PvP or 25 mans don't really interest me any more. If I do 10 mans I can use 2 computers and i'll be fine in dx9 in really low mode on the second one.

So, as far as settings went, I wanted maximum for view distance of characters and objects.
But didn't mind so much if the settings (eye-candy) was lower for pretty much everything else.
I essentially put the main on Higher settings, and then disabled Shadows, Water effects, Reflections, and turned down things like Spell effects and Weather.
The slaves did the same, but started on Medium settings, and then had view distance type effects cranked upwards to near maximum.

With IS Boxer, setting up a mapped key to run for the current window (and another for all other windows), which runs on any client switch was fairly easy to set up.
And the closer the settings were for between the two, the faster the swap was...
I lowered the mains settings a fair ways, to enable absolutely instant swaps between any two toons.
If I didn't mind a 1.5 seconds of... the game is adjusting effects and I cannot do anything... the main window could have been on much higher settings; I'd have likely gone that route, if PvE instances were still my focus and instant swaps weren't as essential.

My main is the only one i care about about the advanced effects for, and my intent is that it will be in a full-screen, non-swappable window on my primary 1980x1200 screen. A decent view distance is mostly what i care about for the slaves. I'll leave on what i can, but it wont kill me to turn off most things. Smooth game play is my primary concern.

My second monitor is a 1080p in portrait mode. I intend to have two slave windows at 1080 x whatever, in rows 1 and two, and two 540 x whatever windows side by side in row 3. Row 1 (healer) will not be swappable like the main. Rows 2 and 3 (dps) will be the only swappable windows. However, i haven't played with ISBoxer to see if this configuration is supported, so it may change if i can't do that. If i can i can easily segregate the quality settings only for the swapping windows as you described. However, the delay would be fine for me.

Another consideration for me, was the intention to 10-box on the one machine.
I built the machine with that in mind.
So I lowered the settings, quite a bit lower than I'd actually need for smooth 5-box performance, with the intention of not having to change the settings once the extra five accounts were added in.

Warcraft is more CPU dependent than Video dependent, for most of the graphics and effects in the game.
Video ram seems to be the limiting factor, when attempting to launch a boatload of accounts.
I'd imagine both CPU and Video card power, would determine how enjoyable the play experience is... but enough raw video ram is required to even launch the clients.

I was using a 6 core processor, a GTX 670 with 4GB of ram and 32GB of system ram.
GPU-Z showed the video card at 60-70% capacity on DX11 x5 Ultra settings; it also showed the ram at 3.5+ GB, and that in a lower graphic area (Orgrimmar, as opposed to a newer zone with better graphic effects and such).
The cores were not pushed hard at all.
And the system ram wasn't even slightly an issue.
The dual SSDs, in raid 0, weren't being pushed hard.

I have two i7s with 32GB and SSDs. I'll make sure to stick with a 4GB card if I need to upgrade, which it sounds like i may (i get the feeling I'm on the border). Any other upgrades would require me to build a new PC, and I'd rather buy 2 video cards and use the computers i have.

Thank-you very much for your post, the performance numbers give me a much better feeling about where I'm starting. I finally get time to play around with everything tonight, so i should know tomorrow if i need to get a new/additional card for the second PC.

[spher0boom]

I finally got to play around with this tonight, and it looks like the GTX 670 will do everything I need.

My Setup:
- i7-3770K (4 cores, hyperthreading)
- 32GB RAM
- Intel 240GB SSD
- ASUS GTX 670 4GB
- Main Monitor: 1920x1200 Windows Fullscreen @ Ultra with 4x Multisampling, DX11
- Secondary Monitor: 1080x1920 (Portrait) with 4 slaves @ 1024x768 with 1x Multisampling

With the slaves at ultra movement was a big jerky ... the video was mostly smooth, but the main seemed to stutter-step while running through Durotar (100+fps) and Orgrimmar (35-ish fps). Changing the slaves to high gave me smooth movement throughout Durotar (forgot to get FPS) and Orgrimmar (35-45-ish fps). Orgrimmar was not busy at the time. These are all level 1's, so I don't have a lot of areas to check ... I haven't activated my main accounts yet. The Video Card never got above 90% utilization, and the CPU never got above 75%. While not very scientific, it seems that the card should provide very playable results for me since I have a lot of leeway left in the video settings.

These settings were WoW native. I was not using IS Boxer as I couldn't get it to work correctly - it would load the first game but never hook it, and it gave me no errors in the console to track down. After 2+ hours digging through the forums and wiki i gave up and just loaded the games manually. I'm hoping i can get ISBoxer working, as WoW won't let me load anything bigger than 1024x768 on the second monitor because of it's resolution, so I can't create a 16x10 version and scale it using hotkeynet.

[spher0boom]

I finally got ISBoxer working with my initial configuration. ISBoxer not hooking the clients was due to a DirectX issue ... the installer must not have completed successfully during the ISBoxer install for some reason. Once I re-installed DirectX it ISBoxer worked great.

All my 'tests' are a set of level 1's running around Orgrimmar and Durotar.

My Setup:
- i7-3770K (4 cores, hyperthreading)
- 32GB RAM
- Intel 240GB SSD
- ASUS GTX 670 4GB
- Main Monitor: 1920x1200 Windows Fullscreen @ Ultra with 4x Multisampling, DX11
- Secondary Monitor: 1080x1920 (Portrait) with 4 slaves @ 1080x675 with 1x Multisampling

I initially had performance issues when using ISBoxer. I went through the Wizard and used the same settings as running wow normally, but performance wasn't very good, even though the numbers all looked good (FPS, RAM, VideoRAM, Memory, CPU). Movement was very jerky, especially for the main toon. ISBoxer was launching all my slaves on my main monitor and then moving them to the secondary. I found an old post in the forums that said you need to launch the game on the monitor you will use it on for WoW, and doing that seemed to have fixed the issue. With the main on Ultra and the Slaves on high the game was very fluid and swaps on toons 3,4 and 5 were instantaneous (1 and 2 were excluded from swapping.

Can anyone tell me if launching and playing on the same monitor still a best practice to avoid performance issues? The post I found was quite old, and I wondered if I might have done something else to fix the problem and not realized it?

I was unable to test all 5 clients at 1920x1200 in Ultra as MiRai suggested (since he said most users box all clients at the same resolution), as I couldn't figure out how to get it to work. I had 3 different swap groups defined, and since the main toon/monitor was excluded from swapping I think ISBoxer just sized the rest of the clients to the largest window (1080x675) in the swap group, rather than the largest being used. Therefore my setup is using 2 different resolutions.


This is the second setup I tested:
- i7-2600K (4 cores, hyperthreading)
- 32GB RAM
- Intel 120GB SSD
- ASUS GTX 670 4GB
- Main Monitor: 1920x1200 Windows Fullscreen @ Ultra with 4x Multisampling, DX11
- Secondary Monitors: 2 slaves @ 1680x1050 fullscreen, 2 slaves @ 1280x1024 on a 1680x1050 monitor, with 1x Multisampling

With the slaves at Ultra or High, movement was what I would consider jerky, particularly on the main. High was better, but Good finally gave me nice smooth movement across all the toons. When I set it up in ISBoxer I again initially had issues. My primary CPU was topping out frequently. Changing the CPU distribution in ISBoxer fixed the issue and gave me nice smooth movement again.

I added an old BFG 8800GTS 640MB OC card in to add two additional 1280x1024 monitors for the last two clients so each slave gets their own monitor. I was surprised it could handle the two clients, but it does without issue. The two on the 8800 had to stay at good, but this allowed me to up the other two clients on the 670 to High and still have nice fluid movement. However, the noise and heal will probably force me to upgrade 8800.

With both cards and each client full-screen on it's own monitor I get the following resource utilizations at 2am in Orgrimmar:
- GTX 670 - GPU load of 60% or less, with an MCU that was never over 25%.
- 8800GTS - GPU load of 75% or less.
- RAM - 1GB for the main, 725MB for each slave.
- CPU - Averages 45%, peaks at 75%.

The CPU was by far the biggest Constraint. I tried several CPU distributions to try and keep each CPU instance from topping out, which caused performance issues, but no matter what I did some were always peaking, and some were really low. In the end I assigned the main to all 8 instances, and then assigned each slave to 1 instance on two different cores. This worked well and really smoothed out the CPU graph and pretty much eliminated the topping out.

After playing WoW on 5 PCs for several years before taking a break it just shocks me that I can do 5 full-screen monitors / large windows on a single video card with very reasonable settings. A single PC and ISBoxer will make multi-boxing much more enjoyable than my previous setup.

Thanks for all the help guys, especially Ualaa and MiRai. Your posts really helped me narrow down my issues quickly and got me up and running fast with very little hassle. I really appreciate it!

-spher0boom