World of Warcraft Performance

Should I be able to max out WoW with my rig's specs? I know the game is coded horribly so it's difficult to get 60+ FPS even on the best systems, but should I be able to turn up AA and AF and Draw Distance all the way and not face lag every time I spin my character around?

 

I've been more than able to max it out. Unfortunately even with the new DX11 and CFX support CrossFire still only works in fullscreen mode but that's usually just fine. Computer still blows the game away. It's not really all that rough on specs.

 

Having a rig that can run WoW well is like finding a needle in a hay stack. That ''spin lag'' I also get sometimes.

 

I wonder what my problem is then...We both have dual 5870s and I have an i7 940xm jaiav. What could it be? Is it possible that it's my CCC settings? My machine is not even a week old so I'm still fiddling with the thing.

 

Should the AAmode be all the way to the right on quality?

 

AAx2 is usually best from what I can tell.

 

At 1920x1200 I would leave AA off, but that's just me. The higher the resolution the less visible any jaggies are. To me it's just not worth it at that high rez.

 

The new water engine is quite taxing on resources, especially the highest quality with the reflections. I get a pretty large FPS boost when going from the highest setting to the second highest on this machine.

I don't think AA is particularly useful at 1920x1200 and it'll be a big drain on performance, especially at higher settings. Try turning that down to 1x or 2x and seeing what impact it has.

You should be able to max out the view distance and pretty much every other setting (save for AA and liquid detail) with those kind of specs. You can also make some settings higher by using the console instead of the UI to make changes too.

 

WoW now has Crossfire support?

 

I played WoW for three years. Who would have thought that cartoonish looking game would ever tax machines like these. Very poorly coded game. And Blizzard doesn't give a rat's butt because millions of people pay $15 a month to play it.

 

With the new drivers and profiles, yes. Experimental DX11 support too (has to be enabled in the .w.tf file). Seems to work pretty well. However, the second video card will only run while in fullscreen, not windowed. To me, in an MMO, this isn't really workable but if you never need to alt tab around quickly it's nice.

 

Turning shadows down one notch fixed virtually any problem I had in windowed mode.

 

This got me from low 40fps to over 100..

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-64.aspx

 

I'm sittin pretty at over 100 FPS average spiking up to 300 in dungeons and indoor situations, but for some reason as soon as I go to Thunderbluff or somewhere with large open areas, I drop down to about 30. Really troubling.

 

That is because you're indoor. Particularly if you're in an instance, the render area is significantly reduced. If you're in TB or Dalaran, your draw distance is massive as you're loading everything around you. Turn your shadows to simple shadows and you should get a boost from that.

 

Actually, something did change with one of the last few patches. I am usually around 100fps in Dalaran but when my view spins such that I am looking towards the Eventide bank, framerate immediately dives to under 20. All other parts of town are fine, and the number of people nearby has no bearing on it. I think it might be something to do with that sculpture in front of the bank.

 

The sculpture is part of the Algalon quest item turn-in as well as a spawn point for the Argent Tournament reps, so it's a possibility. Beyond that I'm not really sure - can't really see that being a big source of lag.

 

Overall it's just a poorly coded game. I'm not going to gauge my computers power on WoW.

 

All software is poorly coded. Trust me - I make a living from evaluating other's code quality and architecture and telling them how to make it better. WoW is not special in that regard. And if WoW is the most taxing software you run on your machine, then why not gauge its power based on how it handles that program? IMO the engine's longevity is a testament to good design and planning. It's not often that you encounter software that is still running strong (and pushing technology limits) *6 years* after initial launch. Most software become untenable after around 2 years, and discarded/rewritten at around 5 years.

@Luminair: Those things have been there for a very long time, but the framerate drop is very new... no more than a couple weeks old. It is also possible that in some way it might have been due to the holiday decorations in that area. The framerate drops haven't been so bad today, not like the past week,.. but Hallow's End is over now. So that might have had something to do with it.

 

Since patch 4.0.1 (or was it 4.0.3?) the framerate has dropped dramatically in most outdoor places. In any dungeon however the framerate is astoundingly high on my machine, but outdoors, it drops to about 45 average. Not the end of the world, but not very impressive. WoW is definitely not the most taxing program I can run on my machine. Performance in a game like Crysis:Warhead I find to be much more telling of the power of a computer than WoW.

As someone mentioned before, finding a computer that runs WoW well is like finding a needle in a haystack. They're just hard to come by in my experience.

 

Make sure Vsink is off in the in game video setting. Should help FPS.

 

I could easily be wrong but I was always under the impression that frames above the refresh rate are just useless frames.

 

Oles chiefs. Not really useless. The higher the frames FPS are the better in any game. However some games have a built in CAPPED FPS limit. For example MOH Tier 1 and PES 2011. Both are capped to 62FPS. That is just the gaming engines desire.

In terms of high FPS above 60fps in general. Vsync is never recommended unless you are experiencing bad tearing or flashing of the screen when gaming. If that happens then you have no choice but to try and use vsync to remedy the problem. However that is not a complete fix as you maybe need a game patch of driver update of bug fix. Tearing and the like can almost always be fixed wtihout using or the need for Vsync. It is helpful though in certain cases.

In general though the more fps frames the better. It really depends on the game though.

Cheers.

 

Most games I've played on the M17x tears hell bad without vsync (PES 2011, AC2, Fallout) so I just leave vsync on. But higher FPS than your refresh rate IS useless anyway, because refresh rate is exactly what it says. Eventhough you have 120 FPS, if your refresh rate is only 60hz, then you screen will only refresh 60 times per second, effectively limiting your fps to 60. This is also what causes screen tearing, because it's trying to display frames faster than what your screen is capable of. There's really no reason to disable vsync unless you're suffering from artifacts, input lag, or if your system is too slow to run whatever you're trying to run at 60 FPS anyway.

 

Oles chiefs. Thats not entirely true. The higher the FPS is the better. Refresh rate and FPS are different things. For our eyes we only see 30 FPS as being smooth motion. Although some do say we can see 60fps effectively. However we all know the higher the FPS gives a much responsive game play action and response. So the higher the better in most cases, not all.

Those games you listed are known for very bad tearing though. Especially PES games. They have always had the tearing each and every past year. As for other games it seems to vary from person to person with tearing. I personally hardly ever get any tearing in any of the games I have tried or played. The only one I have seen it is is PES games however that is normal for PES.

Enabling vsync to fix tearing is mostly the best and quickest way to fix things. However it is not the best. I would rather have much higher FPS with no tearing. Higher FPS is always better in most cases and you will notice an improvement on screen. If it gets to low then your eyes will be able to see oh oh what is this frame lagging and skipping.

We usually don't notice tearing because it is going so fast and the images/frames are being displayed to fast. However the odd occasions we will be able to see it and it can be very annoying. People who enjoyed Vsync would be wise to use it if their min FPS is well above 60 - 62fps constantly and never drops below. If there are drops below then you are effectively hindering yourself.

Which driver are you using chiefs and your system specs?

Cheers.

 

The notion of "refresh rate" is meaningless on digital displays (LCD/LED panels) like those in our laptops. The notion of "refresh rate" comes from older CRT technology where the display device needed to send a complete frame through an electron gun which sprayed onto the luminescent front surface of the display. The luminescence didn't last very long, so you had to "refresh" the whole thing very frequently - typically around 60 times per second (aka 60 Hertz or 60 Hz).

Digital displays work entirely different than that and instead have a "response time" which is somewhat similar, in a roundabout way. This "response time" measures the amount of time it takes for the display to change a pixel's color. Once changed, it will stay that color until changed again (no "refresh" needed) or until the display loses power.

That said, my Acer external monitor is pretty fast... 2ms response time. If the video card were to send a single, complete frame at a time then that means my display can handle 500Hz "refresh rate". However, thats not really how it works... the video adapter can tell the display to turn on or off a single pixel at a time... it doesn't need to send a full frame. For all intents and purposes, an LED/LCD screen has "no" refresh rate. Pixel updates are effectively instantaneous.

 

4.0.1 is what is on Live servers still. It will be a few more weeks most likely before they push 4.0.3 out (all they have said about it is "before launch"). If you are in beta then I guess you might be using 4.0.3... I am not in beta so no idea what is available there.

Anyhow... just checked back in to report that after updating to 10.10 (I was still on 10.7 due to hardware cursor in WoW not working properly in 10.8/10.9), my framerates have shot up significantly. The framerate drop I was seeing at the Eventide bank has gone away, and I get a steady 60-ish fps throughout Dalaran and pretty much any place I flew around in Northrend. This is with view distance and spell effects and almost everything else on maximum settings. I turned shadows down one notch and turned off multisampling as the only reductions.

I ran a couple of Wintergrasp battles, looking for the largest skirmishes to stress the system out... and still it never dropped under 50 fps. In a VoA 25 and 10 man it was fluctuating between about 70 fps and 150+ depending on what was going on at the time.

I even tried running FRAPS for a while, since if anything that will cripple framerates. I still had no trouble though, framerates dropped as low as 30 during very heavy combat but usually held in 40+ territory.

Wednesday (tonight) is our raid night, so I will get to stress it out on heroic LK and Halion later. Those two encounters (and I guess Sindragosa too) tend to be the most taxing in game currently due to the heavy levels of spell effects.

 

Cool Cool chiefs. Yeh thats very true with digital displays these days. Like for teles 24 frames can be sent to be updated with each screen refresh. So 24/1 and so forth.

I was just wondering do you know what ms our screens are for the M17R2? 8ms or 7ms or something like that?

Geee sorry for the off topic guys. Back to WOW.

Cheers.

 

According to the info on the AW website, 8ms.

Alienware M17x Laptop Details | Dell

Which is pretty damn good. Most panels are between 10 and 20ms I believe (lol I guess that's not exactly "slow"). My Acer is 2ms and my HP is 5ms. However they might be slightly faster than our internal RGBLED display, but the contrast and color spectrum of the internal display panel is phenomenal. My externals are 24" but the 17" internal is just way more "crisp and beautiful". That's about the best way to describe it.

 

Just following up on this. Performance in ICC / RS 25-man was outstanding with the 10.10 drivers. In fact it was so good that I forgot I was running fraps the whole night... and crashed the system by running out of disk space about 2 hours into the raid. Even with fraps recording everything, I was never below 25fps. Once I turned fraps off, it stayed over 100fps... even during the middle of those encounters that have a significant level of spell effects.

I kept everything set to maximum, although I did turn shadows down one notch because they annoy me and spell effects I turned down two notches so I could actually have some awareness of my surroundings.

I am quite pleased with the performance of this latest driver release in WoW and I doubt I will be trying any subsequent ones until/if I upgrade to xfire 5870s.

I did notice however that with fraps running while playing WoW, a couple of my cores actually managed to hit 100C briefly. I use RadeonPro to set the core affinity of Fraps (and balance the load just like the affinity mask setting in WoW), so I guess I am finally pushing the machine to the edge... though it seems to take a combination of WoW and Fraps to do it.

 

I'm also having problems. I basically started from all min settings and found which exact settings affected the FPS the most. It boils down to 2 settings for me. Liquid detail and sunshafts. Liquid above fair drops the FPS from 150 to high 20's, and sunshafts enabled does the same. Funny thing is it does not matter what they are set on, either one or any mixture of the two and at any setting good/ultra(liquid) and either low/high(sunshafts) gives the same results. Normally I would expect each incremental increase would drop the FPS more but it doesn't.

Shadows does not affect the framerate much for me so that didn't help.

I do not use AA so it is always at min. I'm running with vsync off. I'm using 10.10 drivers. Fresh install. I don't see any temp problems.

Also tried stealth mode both on and off. Here's another funny deal, on or off I still get upper 20's everything enabled. At max settings shouldn't stealth mode kill my FPS? The only difference is when I turn down those two items it only goes up to mid 30's vs 150 in normal mode. So that tells me that stealth mode must be working.

Any ideas?

 

I just realized that WoW does not support crossfire. A quick search of the forums confirmed it as others were saying this already.

With crossfire off I get about double the framerate as with it on. Tested in a few different areas and the difference is amazing (and very repeatable). I can tell the cards are being used since the temps and utilization of both cards goes up, vs single mode only one does. But yet single still way outperforms dual. Other games confirm xfire is working fine and almost double FPS in those games.

Meh, I have been trying to quit anyway so this looks like it may push me towards it. I did not pay for a dual GPU rig only to play it with one and have to turn down the settings.

 

That is odd... Sunshaft and Water effect settings have minimal impact for me using a single 4870. Perhaps those shaders just don't work properly on the 5870 architecture or crossfire in general.

 

I think it has to be crossfire, because on a single 5870 it runs so much better even with those two settings on. I understand crossfire won't work well on every game, but worst case I would expect little to no improvement, no half the framerate!

It wouldn't bother me so much except my old computer (asus g73jh) had a single 5870 so I was expecting an upgrade. I guess it is an upgrade for all my other games but I really wanted WoW to run better.