M11x - WoW Performance, Issues, General Discussion

I get around 25-35 fps in the busy SW bank area on highest settings except for low shadows, low water and 2x AA. I think that is fairly good but I am not experiencing frame rate drops after some time like you are. You could try running some app to monitor GPU temp to make sure its not throttling?

 

Not sure if this will help but my Throttlestop settings are
TDP/TDC = 200/200
Force TDP/TDC = 7

Also given those fps scores, are you sure the GPU is enabled for WoW? It will run on the Intel grafix but low fps. (Nvidia control panel, view -select view GPU activity icon, this shows you what the GPU is working on).

 

Well, I tried to continue playing with Wow even though FPS were around 10-11 just outside Bank in Stormwind. I find that my FPS increased outside the city to around 25-30 FPS but never really went above that.

Yes, the Nvidia taskbar indicator shows that Wow is indeed activating it....

I will try to increase my throttlestop settings to match yours and see if that shows any added benefit.

 

Hello I recently got a Alienware m11x and My world of warcraft performance is not very great to say the least. I can play fine on the lowest graphics setting possible except in big cities where its around 40 to 50 fps, or when theres a a lot of npcs around.

playing on low graphics really doesnt bother me I guess. but it should be perfect fps if I am playing on lowest setting possible, Right? so if anyone knows how i can solve this problem please help. or maybe it cant handle wow, which I doubt, So if anyone knows whats going on id appreciate it, and ive been looking on the forums about other wow issues and ive see some posts about optimus issues whatever that means. now here are some of my specs.

GeForce GT 335m graphics card
RAM 4 GB
Genuine intel(R) CPU 1.30 Ghz

So Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/494459-terrible-wow-performance-m11x-r2.html

 

Yea I looked at that thread before but Theres not Really A Definite answer. so if someone can maybe give me some sort of tutorial that would be great

 

Also If Someone can tell me how to see if the 335 graphics is switched on ive been seeing that a lot.

 

Real bad fps is probably due to the GPU not enabling. Though 40fps is good in city (I used to get ~30 in a crowded Dalaran).

Get newish drivers (see threads for how to install).
Then in nvidia control panel, under View - select to show GPU activity icon.

Make sure the GPU is enabling for WoW.

WoW is mostly held back by the CPU, though they may have done something about that for Cata. When you have it doing ok fps take a look at Throttlestop.

 

Try setting the graphics to "Fair" settings.

If you put it on Ultra or Good, your framerates will get massacred.

 

thanks ill see if the GPU is working right, and then look at the drivers. and what is throttlestop? and when I go to the nvidia control panel and look for updates it says im up to date dont know if that matters, thanks

 

Here's a link to an earlier post I made with my settings, which are mostly ultra. I get 60+ fps outside in the old kingdoms/outland (100+ outside Stormwind), and 40-60 (though sometimes gets to 80) in northrend. In the cities it varies, lately been getting 20-30 in both Orgrimmar and Stormwind, but they're very very busy.

If you're getting 10fps in this game, then something is terribly wrong.

 

Have you installed ThrottleStop to see what the CPU is throttling down to?

 

What driver are you using?

 

Official 260.99 drivers.

 

Now that Blizzard have rolled out 4.0.6, an update is warranted in this thread. Setting water detail beyond "fair" now works!! I suspect sunshafts work as well, but I haven't tested them. Blizzard promised, Blizzard delivered.

 

Can someone link me to the optimizations in this thread or somewhere else? I looked through here but things I'm looking for are...

- What settings should I put it on?
- Any config edits?
- Any other random optimizations?

 

No optimizations needed. I run everything on max except shadows which is one tick lower than max.

 

Hey guys, just wanted to say hi. I just got my m11x this past Saturday.

Even though I have a R1, I thought I'd mention my battle with WoW. At first I had the red line preventing me from going beyond fair settings. I went into the bios and set the graphics to discrete (Not worried about extra battery life) and installed the latest Nvidia driver:266.58 WHQL. I couldn't be happier. I can run in ultra and still sustain 45 fps in Stormwind. I even have the water effects set to Ultra and took a ride on the Stormwind love boat today and held steady at 45. So far the driver is stable on both WoW and Mass Effect 2.

 

I am running WoW on my m11x -R2 with 260.99 Drivers.

My water disappears completely when it goes above anything other than good.

When I say disappears, the boats in Stomwind Harbour are floating!
They look like giant airships!

Any suggestions / ideas? Apart from that i'm getting good FPS and it runs well.

 

Upgrade the drivers to latest. I can set the water to ultra now (though it's still buggy - I spoke too soon earlier).

 

How does raid vs. raid PvP combat work on your system? Ie. Tol Barad.

 

This is a known issue. Having Water set to Ultra, and Anti-Aliasing set above 2, will cause water to disappear. You can work around this by either lowering the Water detail level (recommended), or disabling Anti-Aliasing.

Some people have also reported that upgrading drivers will help too. You might want to try that. I'd try it myself, but I un-installed WoW because that game is the devil.

 

I don't generally do a lot of raiding. I'll try to do a Tol Barad battle soon and let you know.

Edit for spelling.

 

I've upgraded to 266.58 and still missing it on certain levels, but I wasn't aware of the AA problem so I'll have a look at that when I get home tonight.

And yea, the game has sucked me in well and truly for the fourth time in 5 years, lol

 

Ultra? On an R1? Ok I'll have to try this. I can only sustain 45fps in good settings on my R1.

(edit) tried this. My 3dmark06 performance dropped (nothing overclocked tho) by about 1k points. WoW was once again able to change the settings normally (no red line) but the performance didn't change much. I sure couldn't run on ultra. Dalaran was 15fps.

 

Looks like you've gotten' the R2 Optimus issue...

 

As an experiment try this (because for some reason it works for me, and I'd be interested to know if all R2's behave the same way). Set the water to "fair" and reload. Now reset to ultra and apply. For some reason this works for me everytime. The problem is, the second I go into a new zone/instance (or relog/reload) while the setting is set to ultra, the water disappears. Resetting it back to fair and then back again does nothing. Only a reload (while set to fair, followed by a reset to ultra) seems to work.

Very strange behaviour and extremely annoying. But it's the first time I've been able to see water on ultra.

 

Sorry it took me so long to respond, I work very long shifts.

Ok, I went into Tol Barad in "good settings." Multisampling set to 8x and texture filtering 4x. I saw my fps drop to 34 but they mostly stayed around 42-46ish. I was right in the middle of battle as well, not hiding or anything hehe. Hope this helps.

 

I'm thinking of buying a M11x r2 for world of warcraft, I mean that is not worth the laptop to play wow? thanks so much better than the M11x r1 r2? r2 those problems are solved with drivers?

 

I still play WoW with my old Core2Duo T7500 @ 2.2GHz with absolutely no problems even in massive multi-raid vs raid PvP (Tol Barad, Wintergrasp, capital city raids). Just turn shadow detail down and you'll be g2g. On an M11x you can even run multiple instances of WoW with hardly any frame rate drop.

 

Damn, that's pretty good actually. I'm seeing around 15-20fps when a lot of stuff starts happening on screen in Tol Barad. That's even with ThrottleStop pegging my CPU @ 2.2GHz.

 

wow that works best with r1 or r2? which gives more fps? I want more than anything not to raid pvp. I hope tips thanks

 

only want it for pvp! I do not want to do raids of 25

 

Well you probally want to get the R1 if you want a cheaper price since WoW is not a CPU intensive game (except for big man raids where tons of things are on your screen)
Though even at tol barad it lags sometimes (at bases where people are defending flags)
Though its a very cheap (good way) computer for what you get.
Basically its an 11inch powerhouse. Most mobile gaming laptop to date (I think)

Get the R2 if you want faster rendering times for making videos.

(also the money that you would have spent to get the R2 [if you get an R1] upgrade it with an SSD and 4gigs of ram [won't need anymore ram than 4 IMO])

 

Well, just got my R2 and when playing WoW for about 5hours suddenly it freezes and I am forced to close it through the Task manager. After I kill the process it remains open in the process list even though the window is closed and I am unable to re-open the application. The only way to start the game up again is to restart. But it doesn't stop there! When I shutdown/restart the screen turns off like normal but the keys are still lit and it seems like the computer it still on. So... I have to force power it off. I start up the computer and reopen WoW. This has happened three times since I received my R2 on thursday. It never happened on my R1.


Edit: Weirdest bug I've ever seen on a computer.

 

Anyone else been getting lag spikes? I go from 50-60+ FPS down to 1 then quickly back up. It might be because I'm on wireless but still... I'll try playing on ethernet cable next time.

 

Yup did you overclock your GPU? This means that your GPU crashed and optimus switched to integrated.

 

It was not OC'd. But I read on another thread that the GPU may need to be Underclocked by a few Mhz. It seems to have worked. Been testing for the past 2 days and now crashes.

 

if you are going to underclock then just underclock the shaders and leave everything else alone. My only problem with WoW so far is that I get lag spike from 50-60+ FPS to 1 in a split second and goes right back up again. Might be my wireless but I can test it out with Ethernet cable later

 

Yeah I've had it underclocked for the past 2-3days at 450/980/775 and its been stable and without crashes.

 

hmm...having issues with wow myself. It seems even on low settings i can only get about 30FPS in stormwind with maybe 15 people on my screen at once.

WTH is going on? this machine should scream with wow, but its only just getting by....

 

is your multisampling enabled? Are you whitelisting it? Those are the two things that get me. Right now I am running at max settings with 2x multisampling @ 55-60fps

 

it shows that its using the nvida gpu to run WoW

i pushed everything to LOW, so it was bi-linear multi sampling.

 

Even if it says Use Global Setting for preferred GPU change it to "High-Performance NVIDIA processor"

 

did that, got a few FPS more, but still in the low 30s..using latest drivers also, 266.58 i believe.

no gpu overclock.....cpu @ 166

 

Are you using throttlestop? Was doing some testing last week, and with my CPU @ 166 and throttlestop disabled, I was getting around 25-30fps in Howling Fjord (with lots of jitter), and when I turned throttlestop back on I was getting 50-70 (and no jitter).

 

ive been reading about throttle, however, cant find any solid info on settings....everyone seems to just be testing.

What settings are used for i5-520UM?

wow, going through throttlestop right now, i dunno if i got it setup right....lots of confusing settings.

The guide does tell you what they do, but it does not help with settings.

How come in options it doesnt let you save different settings for different profiles?

How do you set it so that its maxed only when plugged in and normally throttle operation when its on battery?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

The only problem I seem to be having with WoW is'nt my FPS . I can get 60+ np. But for some reason bodies of water arent being displayed. It's weird but no lakes ,oceans or rivers , watrerfalls asnd fountains do show up though.

 

The most common settings are 100/100 for TDP/TDC power limits, and 8 for the Force TDP/TDC value. That's all you need to know to get started, leave everything else at default. You should also continue discussions in the throttlestop thread.

The bottom line is, if you are overclocking, then the reason you are getting bad FPS (and probably worse than if you weren't overclocking), is because the OC results in power being drawn beyond the limits set by Dell in the BIOS, which results in the erroneous throttling of your CPU.

By OCing and not using throttlestop, you're effectively gimping the CPU. Better not to OC at all than to OC and not use TS.

 

It's a bug. You need to set the water to fair. For me, occasionally doing a /reload works on ultra settings, but it's hit and miss.