Problems with WoW that I should not be having...

All,

I'm running Vista Business x64 on my Inspiron 1520. I have the 8600M GT card, 4GB of RAM and the T7300 2.0GHz Dual Core Processor. I'm getting TERRIBLE (15-20) FPS running WoW. I was wondering if anyone else was running a similar setup, and what drivers they were using for their 8600M GT as I'm assuming this is potentially the problem. If i set the settings as low as possible, the game runs fine. I should not have to have low settings however with the setup I have. I run every other game I play just fine at higher settings (namely Bioshock and FSX). Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance guys/gals!

Scott

 

In order to get any help you need to tell us what settings you're currently running....

 

Turn off Anti-aliasing and Anti-scopic filtering. These will eat it up performance.

 

AF is not too bad and also really helps visually. AA is the worst and usually 2x AA is all you need to take out any "jaggies" higher than that is really for enthusiast machines and the visual improvement is very little while the performance demand continues to grow considerably.

 

AA and AF don't exist in WoW... do they? I don't see any options for them but maybe I am missing something?

But ever since the patch, even on Single or SLi my PC can't display the shadows right and there's flickering and bad images caused by it that make it run slow and look bad- try turning the shadows slider all the way down.

 

I think it has something to do with those new dynamic shadows.

 

actually now that you mention that i remember hearing about peoples who's frame rates were cut in half because of the Shadows

 

I have read that as well but I have not played since they came out.

 

which drivers are you using (version)

shadows are cut frame rate in half because it has to render the model twice if i remember right.

 

Is your ground clutter radius set to far? Try setting it to near. It helped me a little.

 

Check your drivers from Dell, then turn off JUST shadows while leaving everything else as desired (though don't turn AA up past 2x imo), the new dynamic shadows introduced with WotLK killed my performance.

 

i use 169.17 drivers and they are the only ones ive gotten to work well with all my games for vista + 8600mGT

 

Turn off shadows, change your drivers, check that your card isn't overheating, update our addons (I had one that had a mempry leak and a later version actually prevented me from logging in while parked in dalaran) and yes AA does exist and still kills fps its called multisampling in wow.

 

what setting is your battery options in?

it should be set to high performance

 

All my laptop performance settings are maxed. I'm using driver 180.84 from laptopvideo2go.com with the modded INF. Regardless of the settings in the game, my point was that the hardware I'm running should be more than capable of running WoW at completely maxed settings as it can handle games like FSX and Bioshock which are much more graphically intensive. Is anyone else using Vista x64 with the 8600M GT? If so, what drivers have you found to be stable and perform well? WHQL certification is not a concern of mine. Thanks for all the replies!

Scott

 

Right, but were saying to you is that shadows ARE broken- no way around that. I know your card can max out other games, but WoW messed the graphics up bad with the Shadows addition. Just turn them off and everything else up.

 

As soon as I disabled shadows the game started performing right where it should.

I can wander around with 150 FPS now whereas with shadows I was lucky to be hitting 60.

 

These google results may help.

I'd say it has something to do with your drivers, but that's just a guess...

WoW causes tons of problems, all the time.

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