Turbo Boost issue in WOW

I just started playing WOW again the other night and i noticed periodically that my fps would drop considerably and realized it was in relation to the CPU and Turbo mode.

Is there anyway to force the cpu in Turbo mode when i game or is something to do with WOW itself?

 

I believe trottlestop is your answer chiefs.
Uncle webb will be able to help you out more with it chiefs oles.

Others here should be able to help out too.

I would say if you used trottlestop that should help you out.

Cheers.

 

I hope so, was a major pain suddenly dropping down to 20fps or below for no reason and having to turn crap down then suddenly turn setting back up again.

 

You didn't state which CPU you have... which would make it a little easier to say if ThrottleStop will really help you out.

One thing that will probably help a lot though is to help WoW decide which cores to run on. You do this by setting the processAffinityMask. It is much easier to do than it sounds. In your "WT F" folder there will be a file named "config.wt f". Edit this file in notepad or some other text editor, and add a line at the end 'SET processAffinityMask "85"'.

For a full explanation of this, see the following WoW Wiki article:

CVar processAffinityMask - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

Optimal settings are listed at the very bottom of that page. I actually use a value of "84" since I often have other software running, but "85" is optimal for most people.

Also, be aware that every time a new patch comes out, this file is very likely to be overwritten by the patcher. So you will want to check on it from time to time to make sure your setting is still there.

 

Don't forget to mention that WoW's engine is so horribly old and now they have added Dx11 features, they'll have to upgrade the engine. Hardware can't stay bad forever

 

Sorry about that lack of info. I have the 720 and a single 5870, 6gb of ram.

Thanks for the tips, im going to give them a shot tonight.

 

Very weird, but I never had any issues with WoW... then again I haven't played with the new DX11 supported patch... I am sure Blizz will have a fix out in the next few weeks..

 

The engine has hardly been modified from the original core developed between 1999 and 2001, so don't count on it. The only thing you'll see is higher polycount items and bosses (the idea was, if users can handle the boss/environment textures in Ulduar, it can be applied to the whole of Cataclysm.), shadows and water. The base architecture will never change - Blizzard's ideology has always been to cater to the lowest common denominator, which in the case of WoW is a casual end user with lower-tiered computer configurations.

 

Core parking possibly?

I was under the impression that since patch 3.3+ you no longer needed the Processaffinity tweak.

I play on a i5 520 and it runs at 60fps on high settings everywhere but Dalaran which sits around 35-45. If i turn off vertical sync it hovers around 114 most area's except evil Dalaran.

Dual 4870's with 10.10's

 

I was just reading the site and it did state that after the patch you dont have to do that?

 

That is the "official" statement from Blizzard. But blues have also acknowledged that the setting still helps many players (a "blue" refers to a Blizzard employee making a post on their public forums - their posts are always displayed in blue text instead of the normal white text).

Core parking could be contributing - but I leave parking enabled these days and do not experience the reported problem.

I do however use the power management tweaks recommended by JJB. Those tweaks essentially make the processor more "aggressive" when it comes to ramping up the core speeds on demand.

Also, the engine has been updated. Moreso in 4.0 than in previous updates since they had a chance to revamp vanilla environments this time around. They have tried very carefully to not raise the minimum bar by much, as they certainly don't want to lose customers, but there have definitely been some improvements made particularly around texture handling and particle effects. Both are being offloaded to the GPU far more effectively now.

 

I made the change to the config file, but i cant seem to locate those power management tweaks you are referring to?

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-intel-series-4-5-965-chipsets-jjb-tweak.html

 

Thanks for your help!

 

In 3.3 I believe Blizzard changed it so WoW would use more cores by default, instead of having to manually set the processaffinitymask in the config file or the console.


Wowwiki claims that optimum performance will be gained on i7s with a single thread per physical core, but since the game is so badly coded and more CPU dependant, wouldn't it be better to run a single thread so that the 940XM can overclock more with turbo boost?

WoW also doesn't really benefit from multiple threads either in my experience.

 

ThrottleStop did a great job for me and Wow.

I didn't change anything, but I have 8 threads really well turbo boosted (22 - 24X). And indeed Wow is a CPU wh*re, so... 940 XM - 920 XM are really doing a great job.

So my advice is that you shouldn't aim for 1 thread turbo boosted, but 8 turbo boosted ! You will need TrottleStop to do that.

 

Unfortunately I have a 720qm so I dont believe that throttlestop will help me.

I did do the Power Mgmt tweaks as suggested and will be playing tonight. So hopefully everything will work as planned

 

Sorry Tritonman1,

I was responding to the previous post.

Yeah, indeed TS won't help you at all.

With your 720qm, can you try running Wow with DX11 ?

You have to add -d3d11 at the end of the target field in a shortcut to wow.exe

Maybe you will see a better balance between your GPU and CPU usage and so a gain in FPS.

Keep us posted.

 

Ohhh, i wasnt aware of that little DX11 tweak. I will definitely give it a shot tonight then and see if that makes a difference. Nice tip.

 

They changed it so that it is now threaded, which means that yes it will use multiple cores now, but it does not prefer any. The result is that WoW threads typically get scheduled for core 0, which also happens to be where almost all of your operating system threads get scheduled. This can be particularly problematic for i5 and i7 processors that continuously vary individual core clocks in an effort to boost performance because the game threads keep getting tossed on to cores that are underutilized - which means they are also underclocked. Throttlestop helps with this part by keeping cores from being underclocked, and the affinity mask setting helps by telling WoW to try and balance over specific cores. By the way, the value "85" has it skipping every other core... because the i5/i7 is hyperthreaded and those aren't "real" cores.

The affinity mask setting is still useful and valid. It prevents unnecessary thread context switches and provides improved balance of core utilization across the CPU die.

Let us imagine a CPU with a single physical core and a second hyperthreaded core (dual core via hyperthreading). This shouldn't be too hard to imagine actually, because it wasn't that long ago when this was state of the art. The two cores really share hardware, and only one can be executing at any given moment (only one thread can be active per hardware core). All hyperthreading does is give a second set of registers (tiny data storage bins that the core uses when running code), and potentially other data like instruction pipeline etc. All that data is known as the "thread context". When a hardware core switches threads (happens MANY times per second) it must also swap in the new thread context. Without hyperthreading this would mean going out to L1/L2 cache. With hyperthreading, if the swapped thread is still loaded into the "hyperthread" registers, then it is much faster.

But still, only one of those threads can be running at any given time.

So, take a chunk of work. It could be math calculations, it could be data processing, it could be game AI, or it could be 3D world model animation. It doesn't really matter, but let us assume that the work can be split into two equal parts for multithreading purposes. If you disable the hyperthread core and run it on this hypothetical system, you will find that it takes a certain amount of time to run. Let's say it takes 1 second. Then you enable the hyperthread core and run the same work again... it will now take slightly longer than 1 second. This is because *only one* thread can be running at a time per physical core. The work may have been split into two (half-sized) parts, but they cannot run concurrently. So 0.5 + 0.5 seconds is still 1 second... plus now you also have the overhead of splitting the work and resynchronizing the results.

On the i7 Extreme processors, a single core clocked up to maximum is NOT four times the clock rate of the four individual cores using a dispersed load. I forget the exact clock rates but at best it might be double. So if you put all work on a single core of an i7 you will *at best* be using 50% of the horsepower of the CPU.

So the ideal CPU loading with an i7 or i5 (Extreme or not) is to allow the game to run on each primary physical core, and ignore the virtual hyperthread cores. Additionally, you can further optimize things if you prevent the game from running on Core 0/1 at all. The reason for this is that the great majority of operating system processes and services are run on Core 0. If a high-CPU process (like a game) is allowed to run on Core 0 then it will be competing with the operating system regularly. The operating system will always win.

With that in mind, a setting of "84" is the most optimal for these machines, as it instructs the game to run on cores 2, 4, and 6, and avoids cores 0, 1, 3, 5, and 7. A setting of "85" is pretty good too, but like I said it will cause some competition with the operating system.

This is a direct conflict with your first statement above: "I believe Blizzard changed it so WoW would use more cores by default". The only way to use more cores from a single program is to use multiple threads.

Plus, it is wrong. If you set the affinity mask to "84" or "85", start up Performance Monitor with counters set to capture the %utilization of each of the eight cores to a log file, and then play WoW for a while (turn vsync OFF), you will see that those 3 or 4 cores are in fact being utilized fully. This directly implies that *at least* 3 or 4 threads are in heavy use while playing.

 

Nope, there's no conflict at all, you merely misunderstood my statement. Previously WoW used setting that were less than optimal. For instance, on my 9300, it had a processaffinitymask of 3, only running on 2 cores even though it could see there were more available (4 in my case). I'm using threads as a synonym for cores there because as you correctly point out, to use multiple cores you need multiple threads, and because on this machine there's no hyperthreading.

Just because WoW can use more threads, it doesn't automatically mean there will be massive performance increases because that depends on how well the application is optimised for parallelisation. Maybe those extra threads do take up 100% of another core, but it seems the useful work gained out of that is very limited, at least in my experience. That shouldn't be much of a surprise, because the engine is so wasteful, requiring extremely powerful hardware to run the fairly simple graphics on max settings when such a PC can readily handle very demanding and visually impressive games.

Not to mention, the engine itself is quite old now, and was originally designed when most PCs had single cores. I've also seen several reports that WoW benefits more from a single fast core than many slightly slower cores, which was the reason I asked my question above in the first place, on whether it would be better to run it on a single turbo boosted core (though being new to the i7s, I didn't know I could have it run on several cores and have those turbo boosted to a high value on my 940 when it comes).

 

Update -

I made all the changes per this thread..

Set affinity - 85..i also tried 84
Made the power management tweaks
Did the Dx11 option as well

Just got done playing...i was able to play for about an hour or so before i hear the cooling fans drop and then watch my FPS drastically drop. Which i assume is in relation to the Turbo mode not working and the cpu dropping in ghz.

I logged off of WOW and then logged back on and everything worked fine again..until about an hour or so again and the fans dropped and watched my fps die again.

 

After an hour? And the fans spin down? That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with turbo mode. Sounds more like your system is dropping into Stealth mode or a low power settings.

Do you have customized power profile settings or a custom screensaver or anything like that?

Is anything being logged into your Windows event viewer log (either Application or System)?

 

Another update...

I ended up re-imaging the laptop from the factory image. Reinstalling WOW..updated all the drivers to the newest..

Same issue. I seem to get about 15 minutes of normal game play before my fps drop to the point of unplayable.

If i exit the game and log back in to the game i am able to play again until the cycle repeats itself. It seems to relate to the cpu, its almost like the cpu doesnt realize its needed afeter awhile and just shuts down?

 

Do you happen to have a second monitor you can run ThrottleStop on while playing? Just run it in monitoring mode and see if you notice anything unusual when it spins down... core temps or clock rate downranking, basically anything that looks different when things are running "OK".