Performance woes with new hardware setup

[Tehtsuo]

Hey all, I'm in a quandary. Just spent big bucks (well, relative to my budget at least) on some new components for my main system. Up till now, I've been running a 5 man team with one window on my main system and two each on my IBM t60 and t30. The laptops run two windows like a champ, even though one has a Radeon mobility and the other an Intel Express. My main computer I reserved for just one window because I had an integrated video card with shared RAM. Well, I've upgraded it like I said, here are the specs now:

Athlon 64 x2 5200
2 gigs DDR2
8800GTS w 512mb ram (Clock speed 678mhz)
Two HDs - one SATA, one IDE
Vista 64 Ultimate
Using the newly released Vista 64 Omega Drivers

Now, I realize that my RAM is definitely going to be my bottleneck, I currently have 2 1gig sticks in, and the mobo has 4 slots. I'm ordering a pair of 2gig sticks to bring the tally up to 6 gigs, I figure why get 1 gig sticks with current prices so low. However, I'm still concerned with the current performance I'm getting out of the system. After trying 5 windows on the system just to see how bad it would be, I toned it down to three windows, which I expected would work fine. However, I still ran into simply terrible fps figures with the following configuration (Using Maximizer)

1920x1200, all visual settings set to highest
800x600, all visual settings set to lowest, framerate capped at 8fps
800x600, all visual settings set to lowest, framerate capped at 8fps

The two small windows (On my second monitor) would stay at 8fps, and the main screen would max out around 11fps. Therefore, I told myself "Ok, you're multiboxing. Expect a little less" so I decided to see if it's the multiple windows that's dragging me down. I figured with this brand spanking new video card that I dished out the big bucks, WoW should run like a champ single boxing. I closed everything down and opened one WoW window, without maximizer, with maxfps set to 80, fullscreen. I set it to 1920x1200 and put all the settings to highest.... 32fps. Now, I know I'm running a pretty demanding resolution, and I have all the video settings going full blown, but WoW isn't exactly Crysis. Shouldn't I be seeing better than 32fps with one window?

Note: My sincere apologies for the monster wall of text, I tried to format it for easy readability, but I wanted to stuff a lot of info in there.

[Shigan5]

Couple of things,

First off you should be fine with your current setup and what you have your wow set at. Should get good FPS just about anywhere, depending on populations etc. So something else is throttling you which brings me to number 2.

64 bit os....... bad idea. its been passed around and agreed upon that most programs, unless optimized for 64bit tend to use double (or near double) the memory of what they use on a 32 bit system, thus your 2gb of ram is being throttled by wow and vista running in the background. Is vista also running at full settings? Did you get the dual core optimizer drivers from AMD?

[Tehtsuo]

Couple of things,

First off you should be fine with your current setup and what you have your wow set at. Should get good FPS just about anywhere, depending on populations etc. So something else is throttling you which brings me to number 2.

64 bit os....... bad idea. its been passed around and agreed upon that most programs, unless optimized for 64bit tend to use double (or near double) the memory of what they use on a 32 bit system, thus your 2gb of ram is being throttled by wow and vista running in the background. Is vista also running at full settings? Did you get the dual core optimizer drivers from AMD?

I have vista running in full performance mode, Aero disabled and all (Looks like crap, yehaw), but I don't have dual core optimizer drivers. One of my goals today is to go over the system with a fine toothed comb and make sure all my drivers are current, including chipset. I'm hesitant to drop down to xp 32 because a)xp doesn't utilize dual view correctly b)I plan to add more than 3gb memory c)I don't want to have to bother keyclone again to change my key. He works hard enough already. However I'm inclined to believe you about the 64 bit OS being a bottleneck for me, so I'll change if it neccessary; I'll probably try a dual-boot, test it out, and then repartition and reload if it does end up being my solution.

One of the things I'd like to get is some feedback on what I should be expecting with my setup, running one client fullscreen at 1920x1200. If I'm standing in the middle of nowhere, lets say in Thousand Needles, should I expect to see 60fps+, or does the 1920x1200 resolution mean I should expect around 30fps?

[Shigan5]

i ran the following setup for a very long time:

amd athlon 3800+
2gb ram
8600gt 256mb vram

and i would get 20 fps in shat, and normally around 40 - 60fps everywhere else. I was running vista full aero settings and wow at full gfx as well, at 1680x1050. I could also run things like the zune software and teamspeak in the bg and not get any problems. this was with one wow. i could run two at lowest settings and get around 30fps in the starting zones.

So overall you should be getting much better performance than i used to. (ive upgraded since)

[Oswyn]

One of the things I'd like to get is some feedback on what I should be expecting with my setup, running one client fullscreen at 1920x1200. If I'm standing in the middle of nowhere, lets say in Thousand Needles, should I expect to see 60fps+, or does the 1920x1200 resolution mean I should expect around 30fps?

I'm running AMD 64 5000+ with one HD 3870 and 4GB of DDR2-800 and easily get 60fps in windowed mode at 1920x1200. In IF, it can drop to low 50's depending on how much is going on.

[Tehtsuo]

Cool, glad to get some feedback. I've stepped back to XP 32 bit (My apologies to Keyclone for generating work for him) and am in the process of loading up drivers for my devices. Hopefully I should see some better performance.

[Tehtsuo]

Got myself back to XP 32 finally, and after 5+ hours of fiddling, including trying out a half dozen video drivers to combat a power supply issue I was seeing (Somehow, it didn't want to accept my Mad Dog 600W power supply had enough juice) and finding out about the AMD dual core optimizer, I was able to see the kind of performance I was expecting. 1920x1200 with full visual appearances and special effects (Including 8x Multisampling!) and I'm running at 80fps in the pig farm outside Orgrimmar. I'm going to take a lap around Orgrimmar and see how the card performs before I move on and start setting up my multibox configuration.


:Update: - Lowest I saw in Orgrimmar was 60fps around the auction house. Let's just say I'm a happy man. :thumbup:

[Xar]

Having issues in Vista 64 too but have overcome most of the problems with just 1 video card and two monitors, when I go to 3 monitors on two video cards there's problems.

The biggest 2 fixes when running Vista 64 (SP1) and nvidia video was to set "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" to "Single display performance mode" (another dual-boxing person suggested this in another thread and I'm sorry I forgot who it was) AND setting Vsync to OFF in WoW. I have since forced Vsync on in the nvidia panel and it works great. So if you ever go back to Vista 64 you could try that.

[pinotnoir]

Having issues in Vista 64 too but have overcome most of the problems with just 1 video card and two monitors, when I go to 3 monitors on two video cards there's problems.

The biggest 2 fixes when running Vista 64 (SP1) and nvidia video was to set "Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration" to "Single display performance mode" (another dual-boxing person suggested this in another thread and I'm sorry I forgot who it was) AND setting Vsync to OFF in WoW. I have since forced Vsync on in the nvidia panel and it works great. So if you ever go back to Vista 64 you could try that.

What about ATI and Vista 64? I am having low frame rates and I dont think I should with my hardware. Even 4 boxing seems choppy and I have a Core 2 Duo 6600, 4gig ram, two hard drives, and two quality video cards. 3870 and x1950xtx.