Another World of Warcraft question, hooray!

I have yet to play WoW on this computer since receiving it mid August but recently I decided to get back into it to prepare for Cata. In game I'm getting around 60-70fps at a smooth steady rate with all settings set to HIGH and shaders turned down low. Though when running around in Dalaran the fps tends to drop a little bit but that's expected. My question here is that with everything set to high and on max resolution the image quality appears to be somewhat foggy and blurred the outlines of textures are not smoothing out to give that "hard edge" appearance and instead the game just looks rather cloudy like. But when I change the resolution to windowed mode + maximized the textures immediately smooth out and most of the blurry/foggy outlines seem to disappear. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this problem before and am curious if i'll ever be able to play without having to run it in windowed + maximized mode. Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to read this.

 

That's a nice story dear, but which video driver are you running that you have problems with? GPU-Z Info would be nice as a screenshot

 

Oh I guess that information would be kinda useful haha. I'm running the new dell beta drivers + vbios. I flashed the vbios manually from within dos and installed the drivers as they should have been though I did not do a clean Windows install like you so intensely recommend Mr. Grim.

But here's my GPU info for clarification:

 

I heard there were some issues with the 10.8 drivers all along with WOW, so what i read is that some issues have been resolved with 10.9 cat, but since there will be no cat 10.9 for mobility cards, you might have to wait for a newer driver or come play FFXIV with me

You can also test my latest creation, the 10.9a Catalyst Grim Edition for M15x and M17x ATI Cards, but i'm currently testing that on my own, but looks good so far, might provide it sooner or later if i feel comfortable sharing



Taken from 10.9 Release notes

Resolved Issues for the Windows 7 Operating System

 

Grim are you actively recruiting/converting? I haven't played a Final Fantasy game all the way to the end since Super Nintendo days. Running endlessly in the landscape hunting monsters collecting gold. But I finished that game and darned proud of it. I have tried some of them since then and though they are fun, sadly I admit Oblivion hooked me bad. I finally had an FPS style RPG and could go anywhere and mod everything. Totally addicted had to get away. I am contemplating the new FFXIV but wonder just how well it runs on our beasts and how engrossing. Will I get addicted, lose sleep, play for hours on end, forget what day it is? Sorry to derail the thread. I get that way as the night wears on. CHeers and hopefully the next mobility drivers will solve all our issues both WOW and BFBC2 etc.

 

I only played WOW on a Private Server once, and if i get all the silly people already there, i don't want to even imagine how people act on real servers. Noob, Greenie and all unthankful names they call you for being not the best of the best was very bad to experience. Oh well, i'm a bit too charmed to FFXI which i played 2 years and was a fantastic gaming experience with it's community and content, very pleasing, you needed skill and not an uber armor to play along. The gameplay is very encouraging. I'm sure FFXIV can top that or atleast put it on an equal level, i'm very excited, hope that feeling lasts and the Final Game will be nicely playable on this laptop.

 

What source did you happen to "hear" this from? I'm just curious if I'm the only person experiencing this though because if so then I guess it would just be one more thing to add to my list of things to do for Brian. But if that's the case then that's a bummer with 10.9 drivers being delayed. And I'm totally willing to play FFXIV, i've been playing the beta but the performance has just been really sluggish for the most part but then again it is only beta testing so I'll keep my hopes high for the final version and hope that our beats can indeed run this thing rather smoothly!

 

@ Lolinternets,

Ahoy, me hearties! Ye should drink e'er more rum, lad, to get 'em FPS up'n'high! Dalaran is a big land, fer lubbers and hornswogglers!
Weigh anchor, ye powder monkeys!

 

Aye - the more rum we be consuming the better evrthing seems ta be runnin. Aikimox - do you be sufferin from 'Cabin Fever'?

Grim - is there nothing we could do with RadeonPro to tweak either of the games in question? WoW or FFXIV.
and I tried WoW once, very intolerant players and I don't like payin a monthly fee. APB lost my support as soon as I found out it was a monthly charge as well.

 

Arrghh! Read me sig, Matey -> Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
And nay, me hearties! Tuh only fe'er me be sufferin' fer tuh years to come - be tuh 'Cap'n Fe'er'!
Fair Winds!

 

For the moment i have no 100% working solution on FFXIV, with 10.8 i have bad gpu scaling so the cards are not under full load, and currently on 10.9a they get into full scaling load, but after like 5 minutes the performance drops into half, very weird.

Well in 3 days, i think i won't participate in the intial release, too busy next week. Might be a good time to just sit around and wait what other people experience with the full product. All the info should be out there, and if it applies to the full version aswell, i hope people will report how it works

 

Plus there will be that massive glut of people downloading the (huge I'm sure) patches to the official release on the opening day and the days following. Knowing Squeenix's past history and server issues on huge patch days (former FFXI player) it will be a few days before things are up and running at release anyway I'm predicting.

 

Yeah and all the crowded fields, login issues, other issues. I don't want to even imagine that and start with a bad experience with it, i wanna take my time and enjoy this when things have calmed down a little bit and we know this runs well on our systems, messed around enough with this system for the moment Gotta order a 940xm on ebay later this week, and maybe upgrading to a SSD... So until then hope everything is ready and stable with the game, cheers

 

I too am more than ready to wait and let others move on out of the starting areas and figure out the quests and update game info online before I being my experience as well tho.

And I still have yet to get my laptop delivered. >.< The last tracking update states it left Edison, NJ twice...once on September 17th and once on September 18th. I didnt order anything other than the laptop so should be only one box. If FedEx lost it somehow......

 

I've seen someone arguieing about that once aswell... Don't you guys in the US have something called Tracking Numbers? Well i got my packet with UPS anyway delievered to Europe and i was able to see each and every destination point it passed, with many checks to see where the packet currently is... Does FedEx offer that aswell, online of course?

 

Yup, that's what I'm talking about. The tracking number shows this info from their online tracker:

Sep 18, 2010 9:04 PM Departed FedEx location NEWARK, NJ
Sep 17, 2010 10:59 PM Departed FedEx location NEWARK, NJ
Sep 17, 2010 6:30 PM Left FedEx origin facility EDISON, NJ
Sep 17, 2010 4:05 PM Picked up EDISON, NJ
Sep 17, 2010 1:12 PM Shipment information sent to FedEx

Oops, got Edison and Newark mixed up in my previous post. But still how could one package leave the same facility twice? I'll probably be calling FedEx in the morning if no updates show up before then. Its supposed to deliver tomorrow before 3pm.

 

Well as they are still updating it, the packet is somewhere roaming and it looks like they tried to deliever it? Not sure, but i'm sure they should deliever it for real tomorrow or the other day, if you live near that Newark NJ. Make sure somebody is at home... Don't they leave a note if you are not at home for example, so you can make a fixed day and time to get it? No phone number?

 

I'll be home all day tomorrow (took a vacation day from work just so I could accept the delivery). But they do leave a notice for you if you miss the delivery and try again the next day. I really hope it gets here tomorrow because I wont be around to sign for it otherwise. If its in New Jersy, it still needs to make it over here to Pennsylvania. Newark is oh, about 2.5 hours from here so its close, but not quite here.

 

zzz it's also pirate day in WoW... Arrghh!

did you by any chance change your CCC settings to max performance? try shifting the slider back to balanced if you have. i find the textures become washy if i use performance/high performance settings... no issues in wow myself.

i've recently swapped to modded 10.9 drivers however i did not experience any issues under 10.8

 

@grim and sef, thanks for hijacking my thread. Jerks lol.

And I have everything in CCC set to max AA and AF as well as AI and mipmap. I'll give that a shot though when I get but it most definitely looks washed to me and looks better on my 6 year old desktop, something's gotta be wrong here though. Anymore suggestions or feedback is still appreciated. Thanks guys.

 

I gave it a shot and it didn't seem to make a difference. No matter what I do if I uncheck windowed mode + maximized everything just looks really washed over and the textures don't smoothen out. This really sucks, it'd be cool to know if I wasn't the only one having this problem.

 

Are you playing in the native resolution of your display (whether that is the internal LED panel or an external display)?

Also, why not just use full-screen windowed mode in WoW? I see no real performance difference between that and non-windowed on my machine. In fact, I generally get framerates far above anyone else in my guild - nearly all of whom have desktop systems. I am often pushing nearly 200 fps while they struggle to reach 20.

 

Yeah I'm using my native resolution. I know that I could just run it in full-screen windowed mode but I don't think I should have to considering this game isn't very demanding on our systems. It's just disappointing to me that the game looks better on my old school desktop rather than on this expensive beast of a laptop. But you're right though I have noticed a big performance increase from running in full-screen windowed mode, I just wish the washed up textures would leave me alone :|

 

Just a quick thought about washed up textures, the only thing that comes to my mind is when you have mipmap set to performance in CCC instead of set to Quality the texture would be BLURRY, that's what i noticed in SC2 when i had it on High Performance, since it's also a Blizzard game it might be releated. So try to set it to the right, on Quality.

 

Thanks for the help Grim but I tried it and it still didn't do anything that was at least noticeable to the human eye. I tried fooling around with all the CCC settings and never once did I notice any noticeable changes in-game. Although I did notice that when turning off the "Full Screen Glowing Effect" it fixed the washed look for the most part even when full-screen windowed mode was turned off. So far i'd say that it fixed the problem but there is still some noticeable washed textures here and there but nothing is ever perfect I guess.

 

Awww, that's too bad Did you try the WHQL Dell/ATI Display Driver yet? Wonder if that fixes it, it's not exactly the same as the beta driver, some games have been improved, it's a bit newer and it has an updated CCC. If nothing helps, i guess we have to atleast wait for 10.10 CAT and see how those perform. I'm also on the line for the moment, sitting out the release of FFXIV and see how things work out, until i buy the game and waste time on playing it on not 100% working drivers... o_o' (Though i still like to test anything and mess around the system, i guess i'm thinking economic sometimes )

 

So you are saying the 8.763 official release is a tad bit different? Here I go jacking the thread again. Sorry...
Lolinternets - did you try RadeonPro? It's a bit daunting the level of control you get within, but worth it when having to tweak a game.
Oh well, it would seem I am going to have one very busy week, A09, reinstall video drivers, and lots of 3DS Max work.

 

Yeah that's what i interprete as i read the release notes and the CCC Driver Information and compare it to the earlier beta, that's all, not less nor more (some numbers changed hrhr)

 

Haha it's all good man! But yeah I've tried RadeonPro but I don't think WoW can be used with it because the .exe is only the launcher and the launcher then executes the game from there. Usually RadeonPro will make a sound when a profile is activated and when a profile is deactivated and I here both those sounds when I start up WoW whereas when I use it for BFBC2 I only here the startup sound and then goes straight into the game.

@Grim,

If you're speaking of the official drivers that were just released yesterday/today then yeah I decided to uninstall the beta drivers and reinstall with the new official release ones although I'm still running the beta vbios as I'm unsure as to how I would go about flashing them again with the official vbios. The program starts and just says that this program is only intended for "ATI 5870 video cards", which I assume is the default message when it already detects the current vbios version.

 

Beta VBIOS and the recently released VBIOS is absolutely the same once flashed, just the process in doing so is now DOS, run from a removable device (MS or CD). You don't have to update or reflash it, if you already got the Beta VBIOS.

Yeah well, that much different it won't be then and we can assume it is indeed the 10.8 driver causing this in general or you might have a specific problem on your own, influence unknown (A clean windows install could help track the issue down maybe)... But i think we just wait for the 10.10 CATs, and prey ATI is seriously working on Alienware Setups to optimize drivers (i can't imagine why they SHOULD NOT do this anyway already *sigh*)

 

This is most definitely a CrossfireX issue, as Warcraft runs off only one GPU while in windowed mode.

You can tell from the heat ejected from the back of the system.

Since the game runs at 30-60 FPS in Windowed mode + maximized, I don't even know why you'd ever want to run it in full screen to begin with. Part of the reason why this is a great game is that you can actually go on with your normal life whilst playing rather than being consumed in a full screen application.

Also, I don't have the latest drivers + vbios, but in full screen it runs perfectly fine with no noticeable texture degradation or white film.

Are you running it on an external monitor by any chance?