Not Enough for WoW ?

Hi im currently running an Asus G50V a1 laptop that has a duo T9400 procesor, 4gb DDR2 (800h mhz) of ram, Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT 512 MB, 2 250 harddrives (not 1 got fried so it was replaced with a hitachi 250GB instead of the original WD, they didnt have on stock and i wanted my laptop back asap ) ... now i think these should be enough for WoW to run full graphics but the reallity is i run the game on "fair" setting and even so in some intense boss fights i got 5-10 fps wich is really frustrating .

I tried reinstalling windows (running vista 64bit), reinstalling the game, but nothing worked ... if anybody can give me some advice id really apreciated it.
Is there any way i can distribute say 1 GM of my ram to the videocard ?

thx in advance

 

Did you try updating drivers?

My old laptop that had a 8400m GS could run it much better that, so it's not that your GPU is bad.

 

This is not a limitation of the card.

Are your GPU and CPU upclocking properly when the game is running? (they switch clocks to lower values when idle to conserve power and heat) Check that with CPU-Z (for the CPU) and GPU-Z (for the GPU). You are not running the game on battery, right?

And also, try getting recent drivers, as suggested above.

Check for malware on your system, or for processes gone berserk and eating a lot of CPU/RAM.

 

didnt understand a thing there, sorry .

scanned for malware and got none, about updating drivers.. the laptop has a program called asus live wich says everything is up 2 date, used windows update yesterday also.

Im not running on battery, im running on high performance, so thats why i got this huge dilema..

 

The problem is that WoW had a massive, massive graphics update when WOTLK hit. They increased polygon counts on a lot of new stuff, and unfortunately, its probably the worst decision they've made with the game. The graphics and lag from them definitely off a lot of people now, because they essentially increased the system requirements 4 years into the game.

The first thing you need to do is turn those "dynamic" shadows off. There's really no reason to be using them.

 

Turning shadows to low can make a BIG difference, also updating to the latest nVidia drivers available on their Web site will make sure you're getting good performance. Don't run the game on battery, make sure you've customized your performance settings to maximum, and run it in native resolution (whatever rez your screen displays natively) so the video card doesn't have to deal with interpolation.

 

What I meant is that because of bad drivers, your CPU or GPU might be stuck in a low-power profile. But this appears to be a game requirements issue, rather than a computer performance issue like I originally suspected.

 

You mean WoW is now DX10 enabled?

But yeah shadows are killers for 128bits cards. They are very hard on the memory.

 

Is there any way i can distribute say 1 GB of my ram to the videocard ?

and if so.. how ?

 

Unfortunately there isn't much you can do to increase your video card's performance. Overclocking it might help a little, but you're only looking at a 10-15% improvement there.

Your video card RAM is certainly not a limiting factor in any event. The slowest piece of the 9700M GT is the memory bus width (128 bit). Your card probably can't even utilize 512mb VRAM.

If WoW has a DX10 and a DX9 setting,or anywhere you can see to turn off a DX10 feature, try that. Thus far in most games DX10 provides a small graphical improvement with a large performance hit.

Having up-to-date drivers is important. Here is that latest NVIDIA driver I am aware of: http://www.nvidia.com/content/Drive...otebook_winvista_64bit_international_whql.exe

You might also check if your chipset driver is properly installed. If this isn't working, then neither is your videocard driver most likely. As always the latest drivers can be found at http://support.asus.com/download

Good luck!

 

thx alot 4 ure posts, i installed the latest chipset and the driver u linked above, now i will have to test in in an actual raid .

on a small sidenote, so i dont create a new thread, when i start up the pc i get that gamer's republic logo and the blast sound .. twice... any way i can disable that ?

thx again for all your help.

 

You can completely disable the startup sound through the bios:

When the Republic of Gamers logo shows up hit F2 to edit bios settings, go to the advanced tab and you can choose to disable the post sound, or just change its volume. (You may have to redo this whenever or if ever you update the bios.)
There's actually a thread here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=388503&page=2 which talks about replacing the sound and screen that you see on startup. You might have some fun with that if you're really ambitious.

Hope that helps.

 

Could it also be a cooling issue? Maybe try a laptop cooler. Took apart my laptop and thoroughly cleaned the fans inside, the dirt (tho I say dirt once heard that like 75%+ of "dirt" in a house is actually dead skin cells) build up inside was just crazy. Also started using an NC2000 laptop cooler. On my old beater Dell 7900GS GO I gained 15-20FPS easy. Went from 5-6FPS in Uld 25 @ 1400x1050 with low graphic settings back up 1900x1200 with med graphics setting and 20-30 FPS.

I can not believe how hot the Dell used to get but now the bottom hardly gets warm.

I used the wife's X1 while I waited for my laptop cooler to arrive and noticed it would heat up a fair bit. Once I got the NC2000 I tried it on the X1 and as on the Dell the temp difference was very noticeable.

 

its not a cooler isue, the laptop does not overheat ... i cant open and clean it as i have a 2 year global warrenty on it and i dont wanna loose it .

 

As long as you are just opening the cover to the Hard drive Bays and to the processor/GPU then you will not have to worry about voiding your Global Warranty. Just be careful in your cleaning not to break the little yellow sticker on top of the screw holding your CPU in place. Unless you are applying new coolant to the CPU then that shouldn't even be a possibility.

I would do what the others are suggesting. Purchase a can of air from your nearest Home computer superstore, clean all of the dust bunnies out. I am always surprised by how many I find inside of my laptop. Make sure you have a good notebook cooler. And then try again.

Can you tell me what type of FPS you get in:
a: dalaran
b: 10 man raids
c:25 man raids
d: all by yourself in old world non city environment
e: all by yourself in BC non city environment
f: all by yourself in WOTLK non city environment

If you don't raid then you can disregard those. But if you give me that information then I will be able to tell you with a little more certainty if it is something you need to be worried about or if it is something that you can expect to be normal after the graphical improvements Blizzard made with the new expansion.


Thanks

Joe

 

Its definately not a requirements issue, i run WoW on my G50V (9700m GT) with latest Nvidia Driver and never drop below 25fps with everything maxed out and running Ventrilo in the background..

How does it preform on other games?

Have you many add-ons running on WoW?
If so delete your '' folder in wow and your "interface" folder and see if there is a difference, some of the add-ons caused huge Fps drops after Wotlk expansion released..

 

there's no reason your setup shouldn't be able to run everything maxed out (besides shadow...nvidia cards seem to violently choke on those...) i had a 8600m gt 512 ddr2 and i was running wow at 1680x1050 at 2x antialliaising with a steady 30fps...

 

well i recently got win 7, overall performance seems better but wow still sucks, im running the game on poor/ fair visual settings to get better fps in the raids.

a. dalaran i get around 30fps at peek hours
b. around 40-60 fps for 10men raids
c.5-20 fps for 25men raids (this is what hurts the most, during BL im stuck around 5-10 and i loose lots of DPS)
d+e+f around 80-120 fps

as for addon they are :
atlasloot enhanced
auctioneer
bigwigs bossmods --DISABLED
cartographer 3.0
crap away
deadly boss modes
drainsoultimer
fortexorcist
gearscore- DISABLED DURING RAIDS
lylock
mailget
notesuneed
Omen threat meter
Ora2
Power Auras Classic
Questhelper - DISABLED
Raidtracker - DISABLED
Raidbuffstatus - DISABLED
Recount
TBartisan
Timerbuttons
Xperl unit frames

i cleaned the fan as best as i could ... also i installed GPU-Z and im not going over 85C so overheating doesnt seem to be an isue ... as for drivers i got all the latest drivers i could find .
Also if i set to turbo extreme from direct console i get a BSOD after 10min, so im setting it only to turbo.

 

WoW is just like that. It runs on everything, but doesn't run awesome on anything really. It's a 5 year old engine that was optimized to run on everything 5 years ago and since hasn't been optimized to run on the latest hardware.

Don't sweat it, I was in a hardcore guild raiding Sunwell and half the members were running machines 1/3 the hardware you are running.

I know someone who plays WoW on a 13" Lenovo laptop. So don't sweat it.

Turn off mods you don't need. Atlas loot don't need it, WoW Armory and just about any MMO site will have the info, if you don't know, likely a guild member will. XPerl get rid of it, use PitBull or whatever the successor is. Get rid of Cartographer and use Mapster, few others that much lighter. Deadly Boss Mods is good, but BigWigs is less resource intensive and IMO better. Do you really need TBartisan, timer buttons? Mailget? Lylock? If you need cooldown button timer use OmniCC, Fortexorcist should cover any dot timer you would need. SimpleMiniMap for the minimap. The default Wow UI atually takes up more resource than PitBull etc. For Casting, I like AzCastbar because it's light weight.

Do you need Recount? That actually uses the most resource probably. And just about everyone else or any of the raid/guild leaders will have it. During a boss fight just focus on doing well, can read the boss fight logs after later.

 

^^^
| | | Really good advice.

 

I'd recommend grabbing the latest video drivers from nVidia's website. Your video card should have no problems running WoW. If you run 3dmark 2006 you should see a score of over 7500 if your video card is running correctly.

Make sure you're not in some low power state as well. I don't remember how to change power settings in vista but make sure you're using the high performance setting.

 

ill try with the recomended addons, see if i can get something, i also i set the video setting is good, will test it in tonights raid.

 

What resolution you runing it?

 

1680 x 1050 is the native resolution, i tried changing it to get more fps but i didnt find any improvements, got any suggestions?

 

what I suggest doing it turning your shaders down, and change your color multi sampling down to 1... you will notice a huge improvement in FPS and no noticeable difference in looks.

 

<--- nab, shaders down = shadow quality?

 

sorry, meant to say shadows... not shaders.