Gaming Powerhouse? Won't run WoW at full settings...

Hey there. I have had my G73JH from Best Buy for about 3 months now.
The game I play the most is WoW. Surprisingly this i7 6GB, dedicated memory graphics "beast" can't even handle WoW at full settings.
I put everything on Ultra and to my surprise I get only about 12 FPS.
I have to downgrade many things to medium and a few on High to get a decent frame rate, above 30 FPS. It really doesn't make any sense to me. What does everyone else get in WoW?
I asked Best Buy about this and a geek squad member simply told me its WoW...not the computer. He said that it is a mistake to think that the platform WoW was made on will run well, even on the best of systems.
I don't get it.
What do you guys think?

 

I believe the screen resolution is higher on my non-Best Buy model and I get good frame rates on Ultra settings. There must be something wrong with you config or you are using a lowered power profile which reduces clocks. You should be getting very good frame rates. There is a WoW thread around here somewhere. People were posting in it last week so it should only be a few pages back if you care to browse through it. It's not very long.

 

It has nothing to do with the G73, WoW is just a badly coded game. In most cases though, it's on the user's side.

 

Make sure you're plugged into an outlet, and see if the framerates you get are better.

 

Yeah this is what the geek squad agent was saying.

And I did a search for anything pertaining to the g73 and WoW and nothing came up. I will look manually I guess.
Anyone else have advice or any kind of links on how to get WoW to run well on the best buy version?
My profile setting is on High Performance under the windows power management, I uninstalled Power4Gear due to some weird glitches it caused.
WoW doesn't seem like too much of a graphic intensive game. I am surprised it wont run on Ultra on the factory defaults on a machine this beastly.

 

In high traffic areas the FPS is known to drop to 15-20 FPS, otherwise you should be getting 30+. Are you playing cataclysm?

 

Yes I am playing Cata.
And I do get about 30 fps, but I have had to sacrifice some settings in order to do so.
I was expecting a steady 60 FPS, as I get on my desktop (which only has 2 cores).
After doing some research, it appears that WoW does not take advantage of any more than 2 cores, and is a CPU stresser rather than GPU.
I wonder what I should do.

 

World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide : Welcome To The World...Of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Try enabling DX11 to see if it gives you a boost..

 

Is that a setting in WoW's video settings?
How would I turn that on?
Strange. On the link you sent me, the G73's card barely dips below 40FPS on Ultra Settings...
something strange going on here.

But thanks for the link and info! I'll see what I can come up with.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/asu...-g73-series-driver-application-reference.html

See this trhead.
Make sure you have updated your system...

I play WOW every day with no issues on Frame rates...
I never worry about the Frame rate, as long as my spells hit and my melee works, I am good.

I did run Ultra setting, with no issues...

but if you are in a place with 1000 other player in the same location, you will run into Fram rate issues ...

THe only way around that is to have a Fiber line, with a $12,000 gaming system... and have a direct feed into the server..

 

Even top spec gaming desktops running SLI/Crossfire lag on WOW if they have shadow on ultra, so please tell me you don't have shadow on ultra....

 

No, I don't have shadow on Ultra. But its good to know that. Thanks.
I read on the WoW and G73 thread a few weeks back that unenabling the death effect will increase frame rates, but it doesnt seem that I can do that anymore.
And I cant find anywhere how to enable DX11 for WoW.
Can anyone help me please?

 

Two ways to enable dx11 are described here:

World of Warcraft - Cataclysm: Experimental DirectX 11 support - - PC Games Hardware

I updated the file and it did add some fps.

 

First of all you've got a laptop.(in other words a laptop can't be as powerful as an equivalent Desktop PC)
Second of all the Asus g73jh is 1 year old (technology progresses)
Third a game is not necessarily well optimized also a game is made to be future proof, just because it has an ultra settings does not mean that you must necessarily run it.
Fourth there will always be games on no matter what PC that won't run in "ultra" settings with acceptable FPS.

 

Try either option as described in pcgameshardware.com. Then, confirm that it's working with the macro at mmo-champion.com.

Read both links to make sure you've set it up right. If you want to edit the Config file, open it in Notepad and make sure that it saves as the correct file type when you're done. It looks like the consensus is that the d's in "d3d11" should be lower case, but I forgot how I did it.

That being said, DX11 shouldn't be the silver bullet. Do you run many add-ons? If so, try turning them off and then on one at a time to see if you find a culprit. If problems persist then I might recommend posting screenshots of your video settings and we can look for any anomalies (doubtful, though.. the only thing that comes to mind is the limit foreground FPS option, which you shouldn't need enabled).

EDIT:
Here are my video settings which, IIRC, provide me ~50 FPS.
Display Mode: Windowed (Fullscreen)
Resolution: 1920x1080
Multisampling: 4x
Vertical Sync: Enabled
Texture Res: High
Texture Filtering: 4x Anisotropic
Projected Textures: Enabled
View Distance: Ultra
Env Detail: High
Ground Clutter: High
Shadow Quality: Good
Liquid Detail: Good
Sunshafts: Low
Particle Density: High
Triple Buffering: Disabled
Reduce Input Lag: Disabled
Hardware Cursor: Enabled
Max Foreground FPS: Disabled
Max Background FPS: Enabled, approx. 30 FPS

FWIW, these are the addons that I run:
ATSW, Atlasloot, Auctioneer, Bagnon, Bartender4, Clique, DBM, Fishing Buddy, Gatherer, Gearscore/Playerscore, Handynotes, Mapster, Postal, Prat 3.0, Skada Damage Meter, Tidy Plates, TomTom, WoW Pro Tour Guide

I have a G53JW-XA1. I installed an SSD (which is where WoW is installed) and did a clean wipe of the system.

I also run the Leatrix Latency "Fix" script to reduce lag. (mine at home is about 40ms)

EDIT 2: After ensuring that I have the "d3d11" setting with lower case d's, I double checked my framerates with my settings. I get a fairly consistent 60fps running around Orgrimmar. Flying in Org would cause dips to 40-50fps. Flying out into Durotar and surrounding zones would cause a drop to 30fps on initial zone load, but it would shoot back up to 50-60fps.

 

I feel blessed that I never got into that game

 

That's a shame.. you look like a Protection Paladin, and the game could always use a few more tanks.

But the Leatrix script should help any game that's TCP based, not just WoW. The nice thing about WoW is that it has an in-game latency monitor, so you can actually verify that the script helps.

 

Another thing to check, aside from shadows, is sun shafts. I was getting great FPS and then decided to turn sun shafts to max. The game looked a bit better at the cost of higher temps and lower fps. Turned them off, and my stuff is fine.

 

Thanks for all the help guys! Its running smoother.

 

I am very surprised where this generation of games is going.
FPS extremely popular, 15$ for 4 multiplayer maps on Halo and Call of Duty? it's freaking joke!
Activision and Microsoft milking franchises for every penny, since when it's acceptable to pay 1/4 the price of a full game for some multiplayer maps?
and Valve still supports Team Fortress 2 with regular updates, and the community can get involved with mods.

 

You wait until Steam has the DLC/maps for 75% off

 

Frustrated with how DX11 and games with millions of polygons give low framerates? Now imagine the frustration running Minecraft at <60fps...

 

I am not going to even try the demo of "modern" Call of Duty games.

 

You're supposed to play with:
- Vsync Off
- Full Screen (Windowed)

Voila, 110 FPS in BG's and 70 FPS in raids. I've never lagged anywhere thanks to those 2 setting adjustments.

 

Isn't the purpose of Vsync to prevent screen-tearing (which I find terribly distracting)? Considering the screen only updates at 60 Hertz, I don't see how >60fps yields any gains. I'd rather have 1 frame every 1 refresh. I find it somewhat comforting to see a rock solid 60fps on the in-game meter. I'll gladly sacrifice unneeded "headroom" for butter smooth video.

I see that Wikipedia states a 'possible' tradeoff to Vsync is input lag, but I've never noticed it. WoW certainly isn't a twitch shooter - just button mashing.

 

It does however lower the framerate by quiet a bit as it takes processing power to force it to stay 60Hz.

 

What nobody wrote here, each and every addon also eats cpu performance.
So try to run the game with all addons disabled and check if it runs smooth. If it does, enable one addon by one and check which one is performing bad.

 

@pato: I listed my addons & settings in post #15.

WoW looks and plays great. IMO, the settings that I lowered suffer diminishing returns at higher levels - they cost more in performance than you gain in graphics.

If Vsync is causing any drop in performance, I am totally cool with it. My lowest FPS drops have been to about ~30-40fps when loading new content, otherwise I'm cruising at 50+... usually 60fps. I'm sure I'd still take a FPS hit if I was flying to a new zone with Vsync disabled, so I'd much rather enable it rather than have constant tearing.