G73 with world of warcraft

I play a lot of games CODMW2, World of warcraft ect. This notebook plays MW2 extremely well. World of Warcraft is a mixed bag for me. Plays well in 5 man and even 10 man but its a lag fest in 25 man with 5 fps. I was wondering if someone has figured out a good combo of settings for this game to run well. I notice that the CPU never gets over 1.6 and maybe that the problem but how you get it to use the full power of the CPU?

 

1) [obvious first] make sure you're in high performance mode as opposed to battery saving.

2) turn down shadows incrementally until you find bearable FPS. They're a HUGE burden on the GPU.

3) Turn AA down. Just going from 8x to 4x can net you a decent FPS bost as well.

 

Well - other than the typical settings in the video settings, there is a tweak that really can help "the Laggy" in dal and raids where there are a lot of players on the screen.

By default WoW only takes advantage of 2 of your 8 logical processors.

Although this came from the actual WoW forums, I and a number of people in my guild who have i7 processors have used this trick to great advantage. Its certainly made an inprovement for me, and it may help you out as well.

See here:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311&sid=1&pageNo=1

Well, I've tried it on an i7 using (using a value of 255) to allow wow use to all 8 cores. I see moderate activity on 4 cores now, and my micro stuttering has decreased in dal, and game play seems a little more smooth.

Edit For clarification:
Well, none of the posts really spell it out, but you simply add the numbers in accordance with the logical processor in the first chart to tell wow which processors it can use.

so with a two core processor your max value could be 3 to use both cores. If you wanted to dual box, you could set one client to 1 and the other to 2 for maximum performance.

With a quad core or dual core with HT you could use a value of 15 to use all four cores, 3 for the first two cores, 12 for the last two cores, 9 for the bookend cores (first and last), etc

with an i7 (quad core with HT) 255 is the value for all 8, or add up the numbers in the chart with the corresponding cores you want to assign as illustrated above.


I hope this can help everyone, and i think it might have special application to our multiboxers.

Odd, you learn something new every day!

 

I was under the impression that 3.2.2 removed the 2 core limit?

 

it did, maybe make sure u got shader detail down, doesnt matter what pc u got (friends 4ghz dual 4870's still laggs) with shader detail on high

 

I'm actually interested in knowing what FPS you see in 25mans...this is the game I expect to play the most. I do want the flexiblity of playing the newer stuff as it comes out. I remember my XPS Gen2 would rock 40mans at 30FPS at 1920X1200. I find it interesting that this is having issues. If someone would give me an idea of what they are seeing in the most recent content it would be great.

 

with 2core CPU+GTX280M 1680x1050 everything (and I mean everything) set to max, the game didn't have any problems in 25man raid...usually 35+FPS, minimum FPS was 20.

 

No 25 man runs until next week, but I *DID* find an interesting bit of informaton that a guildie was able to reproduce on his machine as well on his 5830m equipped machine:

Turning off death effect netted 10-15 more FPS. Even while not dead. I cannot pretend to understand that one

[My machine being the G73*]

 

WoW (no pun intended) that is odd, and quite a large boost in frames.

I do not play this game anymore but I remember when it was considered to be super easy to play on almost any semi modern computer. They added just a bit of visual effects to this game and now it crushes even top end systems. I do not think the trade out was worth it.

I have my eyes peeled for the new Final Fantasy MMO maybe it will get me interested.

 

I would suggest staying away from any MMORPG if you want a any form of real life.......

WoW wasted 2 yrs of my life ><

 

I will upload screen shots tonight after my 10 man run but last night after running in High proformance mode I was getting 15 - 22 fps in boss fights
and 45 to 50 runnning around in ICC 10 I hate to see what it will be in 25 man. I will also include a screen shot of my video settings

 

If the gear system is the same as XI I'll pass. NMs monopolized by gold farmers, 10 mil for a Hauby. . . .

And I just can't take the name "lalafel" seriousl. . . . I keep thinking of a certain greek pastry

 

Im really intersted in your results, im playing with the idea of upgrading to g53jh, but the main game i play is WOW, even my desktop still goes down with i7+gtx285 at 1920x1200 in certain encounters, but i expected the G53jh with the new gpu and i7 to have a better result, not sure if its enough to play at 1920x1080 one of the reasons i want a 1600x900 screen, but could be drivers also, there is a lot of good comments about the 10.3 catalyst coming.

 

Wow took away 4 years....or was it 5 years of my life. I cant remember and thats bad. I played it since beta though. Then recently I just stopped logging in and my account eventually lapsed and I never looked back. Its like a switch turned off. I'm now a reformed Wowaholic.

Like Vicious, I am really interested in the Final Fantasy 14 MMO. I never played Final Fantasy 9 but wanted to.

 

This is actually kind of funny. Wow's graphics are on the low end of the spectrum. I can play the new battlefield which is 100x more graphic intensive than wow at 52 fps on max on 32 player maps. Wow is either coded like Sh!# or there is something wrong with your G73.

 

after playing wow for 2 years myself, i have found this, and have heard it many times from multiple sources, and im surprised it hasnt been mentioned here yet.

WoW is an extremely processor heavy game, coming from an age where processors were a big deal and gpu's were second fiddle. simply leaving hardware monitor open while you play will let you know. My temps while playing mass effect 2, which gets better frames maxed out for my on my g71 compared to wow in dal, with shadows off show these facts

Wow stresses your processor, and hardly touches your gpu. my gpu temps if i can recall from when i last played might have broken 70c

but on the mass effect 2 side of the spectrum broke 88c when i didnt have a cooler,

my cpu temps were pushed higher by wow than any other modern game ive played as well. and in terms of cpu's it took forever for wow to get dual core support, where most poeple for the longest time were only using half of their processors power to run it, and im sure its just spotty on the i7 quad support, let alone with the hyperthreading.

 

WoW is just 5 years old with little optimization since then to take advantage of the latest hardware. But it is still very scalable as there are a lot of raiders playing on very old hardware. It runs ok on low spec machines and runs ok on high end. Very weird.'

Also WoW like many MMORPG is more CPU intensive than GPU.

 

Shadows kill. My G73 replaced a macbook [non pro] 2.4 Ghz with the 9400m gfx. would run 30fps 1x AA, medium settings [particles, textures maxed, using a 23" external display].

Try to turn on shadows. . forget it. Not with the external display, not with the built in LCD. Even on the G73 I average low 30s with shadows maxed, with death effect and shadows turned down 1 notch from max, steady 60 fps (vsync + triple buffering). Of course on the G73 I have everything maxed and on except those two, and my only complaint NOW is that, having seen how good the game looks with shadows maxed or near-maxed, I don't think I could go back.

Not that I could. Now that my wife has finally gotten her hands on "her precious" [my former macbook] she won't even let me touch it

 

Well I only say this from my experience with the game 2 years ago. I could max it (everything) at 1920x1080 on my C2d E8500 wolfdale and an Ati radeon 4870.

The only thing that makes sense is what someone said about it being CPU intensive. My 8500 is overclocked to 4.0 ghz. The 720 in our G73 is considerably lower if we're just talking clocks. I still blame Blizzard for not properly optimizing it to take advantage of the latest gpu's.

 

They added a lot of gfx revamping with Lich King. As mentioned above, it's still VERY scalable for older equipment.



This is what I'm seeing in Dal with shadows one down from max and death effect off, everything else maxed. It's not 25 man content, but at least it shows a baseline.

Ugh, resize ftl >< CPU-Z reporting between 2.1 and 2.3Ghz.

 

I understand. My only point is (and you would have to have played the new Battlefield Bad company 2 beta to get why I am saying this) that BC2 is almost photo-realistic in some ways. Even with enhancements, there is no way WoW looks anything close to that game and I'm getting 52fps.

Blizzard is not utilizing GPu's properly. They are being lazy and leaving the old code that just optimizes for cpu.

 

Same code, just extra features when Lich King came out. That makes sense.

It is also true I haven't really played anything outside of mmo's since before Vista was launched. . . . maybe it's time to see how the world has changed. . .

 

It's not really a problem with the laptop so much as that World of Warcraft is what, 6 years old now? It has a hard time dealing with having a large amount of players and objects on screen at once. Hopefully some of that gets nicely optimized for whenever Cataclysm comes out.

 

Well, I dug up a new issue. I'm running the 10.3 beta catalyst drivers.

Was doing heroic farming runs with guild tonight, and my wifi connection "slipped" it says limited connectivity, I have to close out and restart WoW. Afterwards my 60fps is down to 20fps and the RH fan is spinning fast enough to be much louder than usual. Air isn't particularly HOT, it sounds like the fan may be on full tho. Have to restart the machine to get back to normal FPS.

Gonna try rolling back the drivers, just thought I'd note it for posterity

Update: uninstalled CCC, left the 10.3 driver installed, had no issues for the next hour. shut down WoW, was browsing the forums here when the screen flashed black. tried logging back into WoW, and max 30 FPS. At least now I know it's not specifically a WoW issue

Update 2:

Installed original drivers from the driver CD. 13 FPS in a starting area. Installed the driver from the asus website. 13 FPS in starting area. installed the 10.3 beta drivers, 60 fps. Never once changed a video setting.

Guess I'll see if it continues to intermittently fail.

 

Well I get 60 fps in all areas but when I'm in a boss fight 5-18 (25 man)frames per sec, If Im right in front of a boss before we engaged my frame rate is 55-60 Have lowered lowered everything. I put it in window mode and see the CPU @ 2.0 GHz

 

I run mine with view distance, particle density maxed, windowed mode/maximized, triple buffering on, shadows one notch down from max. I'm not sure what's up with it at this point. After reuninstalling-re-reinstalling. I still have a once-in -a-while connection drop, but my frame rates aren't dropping with them like before. Gotta <3 windows ghosts in the machine ; )

Changed my wireless channel, maybe I'm getting interference from something.

 

Are you doing any 10 or 25 man with it? I can do 5 man @ 45-60 fps but when I hit 25 man i done for

 

I don't think this is from being lazy. I mean we are talking about the same guys that update with major new content every few months and add considerable amount of content with every expansions. They also pretty much patch games until literally no one plays them. Starcraft, Diablo 2. Seriously?

I think Blizzard would love to push new tech and rework old codes. But you have to remember a good chunk of that WoW userbase is running their game on a cruddy pentium machine with a geforce go.

Blizzard hates alienating their fans. Which is their biggest strength. But ironically also one of their biggest weakness.

 

those of you that are experiencing the drop in fps, are you doing the trick to enable all 8 cores?

i had a nvidia 8800 gtx and a x9000 2.8 processor that ran 25 man's with everything on full (minus shadows) at 30-40 fps. considering this is one of the few games i play i may cancel my order and go with a out dated high speed dual core that can handle this game better than the I7.

 

I think its more drivers, but idk if other are experiencing it, some encounters might take it down (like twins or anub) at 1920x1080, but shoudlnt be the behavior in most 25man encounters. Or maybe its the windows mode, a while back, with my old desktop, i had issues with windows mode and with normal when minimizing, after reentering the game, the fps drop severely to the point it wasn't playable, had to restart.

 

i had that issue where if i was playing in full screen and tabbed out and back in several times i would drop to 5-8 fps a simple exiting out of WoW and relaunching would solve that.

i usually never play in windowed mode since to me it does seem to hurt performance quite a bit.

i would love to see some tests of a 25 man, at 1920x1080, with everything but shadows maxed. honestly im a bit disapointed in the I7 if it cant hold a high fps on fights like blood council/sindragosa.

 

You hit the nail on the head. It happened again, capped @ 30 in OK. Simply turning off windowed mode uncapped it, back to 60 FPS.

 

Well with new drivers it's better in 10 mans but 25 still sucks I just dont think wow works well with the I7 unless it running 2.6 and higher

 

highly doubt its the system... probably your internet connection...

 

i would expect people on this forum to know the difference between frame rates and connection latency, as the two are drastically different....

 

yea i am seriously considering cancelling my g73 order because of this (not the only site mentioning this problem with WoW on an I7) and going with one of the older alienware core 2's

 

You must doing something horribly wrong. How do you only get 5 FPS in WoW running a 25 man raid? I know people using Nvidia 6800 and getting 20-25 FPS during a 25 man raid. I used a Go7700 and never had frame issues.

As for the i7, the latest patch made it so WoW is not limited to 2 cores. So if you have issues with i7 also, then again, you are doing something horribly wrong.

Despite how old WoW engine is and how pathetic it is for a MMO engine, it's really really bad, you must have done something. WoW barely runs with 25 players in comparison EverQuest raids used to consist of 80 players. And the bosses are open world a lot of times so you would have had multiple 80 raid groups and it ran fine. As great of a game WoW is, the engine horrible, craptastic garbage. When I quit, I never experience Wintergrasp where I wasn't getting 1 frame every damn 30 seconds. Blizzard has made so much money and invested none of it. Where are they hoarding all the money? Whatever.

My best suggestion, quit. Seriously quit. The game is time sinkhole anyways, especially the raiding.

 

Maybe it's because using all 4 cores causes the i7 CPU to run at it's lowest setting. (e.g. 1.6 Ghz for the i7-720m) Using just 1 core allows the system to run at max turbo which is 2.8 Ghz for the i7-720m. Of course, it won't constantly stay at max because there are still background OS processes running, but the switching from max to non max clock should be almost negligible if the other processes isn't running constantly. Have you tried changing the affinity to 1 core or maybe only 2 cores to see if it helps?

I think it will be interesting going forward to see how games will react to quad and hex core processors when they become more multi-threaded. As more threads spawn, the processor clock goes down. However, that should be offset with more total cores running at lower clock rates. Overall, you have more clock cycles but it's spread across more cores.

 

I seem to be able to get the CPU to go over 2.14 and In Dal I get around 25 -35 frames but it hicups here and there. Its really wierd. I did 10 man ulduar with 25-35 frames per sec. I have a Destop that crushes this game. I just got the laptop for while I'm on the road. It's wierd I can put Every setting to low and it won't change the FPS in 25 mans

 

I have an ASUS G51J and am experiencing exactly the same problems in 25 mans. Setting everything to low makes no difference. My performance in Dalaran and 5 and 10 mans is very similar to Warninglabel's. I have tried deleting all add-ons and the performance in Dalaran is almost exactly the same (within a couple of fps). I must say that I am very disappointed with the performance of this machine for WoW. The only other issue that I think may be causing the low fps in 25 mans is the graphics card overheating. I have bought a cooling mat to see if that helps the problem. If there is an improvement I will post the results. I would love it if anyone else has any further ideas?

 

I cant fault the G73, I fault Warcraft. We had the same complaint with the W90 and it had Dual 4870's in it!

There is nothing wrong with these laptops, the W90 had the two strongest gpu's on market and a good cpu. Now the G73 has a single strongest card on market and also a good cpu. This game is simply got issues now with the new content.

 

I was considering moving to G73jh, if this is the trend for all G73jh users, then i might just consider staying like this, and wait for i5 version, idk why is this happening though, the G73jh has such good benchmark score should be performing better in games, given that wow is poorly coded for new hardware, its a very popular game still, might discorage some buyers, at least its doing it to me, might just wait for sandybridge + gtx4xx, the G51VX runs fine in 25man raids at its low res.

 

Guys,

Anybody know whats causing the 1-2 lag delay in WOW on my G73JH? My fps is 60 which is fine!

The latency sometimes goes from 70ish - 100 200 + ( is this because of the asus bloatware)

What are your ingame settings?

 

Lag with that game is more often caused by latency with the online servers.

 

Hmm I feel like I need to install more recent drivers?

Anybody can put some links up?
Or there WOW settings

 

I have an Asus G73 as well, the G73JH model with the QM720, ATI HD5870, 8 Gigs of ram and 2x 500 Gigs Hard Drives.

I was able to play World of Warcraft while having FPS in the ranges or 60 to 200 in open areas.
At least 60 FPS in Dalaran on busy nights.
Up to 180 FPS in 5 man, up to 120 fps in 10 man and up to 60 fps in 25 man.

I play at 1920x1080 with ultra settings.

I must say I'm very happy with my new laptop!

 

You can test this easily. Go to Task Manager and Right Click on WOW. Set the affinity to the first 3 processors. This is the best performance and if you set it to the 1st 2, your frames will drop. WOW runs strongest on the first 3 cores as of now. Do some testing and you will see.

WOW is very CPU limited and when all 4 cores are being used you get the slowest clock speed which can hurt.

 

How did you get wow to run at such good FPS and what type of FPS do you get in dalaran?

 

Hard to believe, my GTX285 cant sustain 60fps on dalaran on at peak times 1920x1200, does go sometimes to 60 and over, but not its not maintaining it, my guess is a real desktop 480 or 5870 can sustain 60fps in dalaran 1920x1080, but a laptop.... idk. Even my current laptop cant sustain 60fps in dalaran at 1366x768 at peak times, and while the 5870m is much better card, i doubt it can sustain 60fps on a busy server.

 

What the hell, i tried that but its not doing any difference to mine.

I am running the G73jw.