T400 owners - how is wow performance?

I finally got my T400, and I am so far, extremely pleased. It performs beautifully and boots as fast as my desktop (both running Vista ult).

The only problem I have so far is fairly poor performance in wow. I get a lot of stuttering. Displaying the FPS will show me that it does indeed run at about 60FPS, but it dips down low sometimes with stuttering here and there. I figured this would be bad drivers of some sort, but wanted to see if anyone has similar issues.

 

it has to be a drivers issue, the 4500HD should have no problem running at high? HD3470 should be able to max it right out.

 

That was my thought as well :/

Unfortunately, the only driver I am able to find is the one that came stock with the laptop.

I suppose I'll simply have to wait it out for the newer driver =(

 

WoW is evillll!!! (this is coming from a guy who cleared TBC lol )

 

Mohdoo do you have the ATI or only the Intel video card?

 

If you've got switchable graphics, you might want to try setting it to ATi only in the bios.

 

I have the ATI card. I have set it to only allow the ATI card in the BIOS.

 

*Bump*
Anyone else having this problem?

 

I have slow FPS while on desktop, especially with any OpenGL screensaver, but when I threw Need for Speed Carbon at it, on highest settings with x2 anti-aliasing, the game ran great, smooth gameplay. I have the 2.53GHz, Win XP, SSD, 3470 dedicated, since I'm running XP. Funny thing, I believe I'm getting battery life in the 8-9 hours with 9 cell despite discrete use only.... I'm in class all day without dipping below 33% battery life. My BIOS is set for dedicated discrete as I had the unit preloaded with XP from Lenovo..

 

Ah ha! So perhaps the issue is the 3450 running OpenGL? Can anyone else confirm issues with such?

 

Does wow use OpenGL or DirectX on Windows Vista?

 

DirectX. But you can force it into OpenGL mode by starting wow.exe with an -opengl option.

 

How about XP? Automatically DX? Or OpenGL? Is there a way to alter which is used?

 

Mohdoo are you experiencing this problem in XP or Vista?

 

As far as I know (and I haven't played in some time), WoW automatically chooses to run in DirectX mode on Windows systems unless it's explicitly told otherwise with the command-line switch of -opengl.

I believe the main reason for this is that ATI and nVidia put more time and effort into optimizing and testing their DirectX drivers since that's what the vast majority of Windows games use.

 

This issue was mainly on Vista. As of right now, I have format reloaded on to XP. Aside from a couple drivers not working, it is fine. The video driver is just fine. I used Mobility modder to get the 3400 desktop drivers to work on my Mobility 3450. I just now tried using direct wired internet on wow, and it is running at about 40 fps on very low settings, which is odd. I hear people saying they are getting around 100+ FPS in CS:S. Is CS:S really less intensive?

Here is a link to a screen shot I took displaying my video settings and FPS: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v486/TS28/WowSS.jpg

I may try adding -opengl and seeing what happens.

Err...How do I add the -opengl setting..?

(Running Windows XP SP3)

EDIT again: Would me using a 5400RPM drive possibly relate to a poor frame rate in WoW?

 

I think the video card is just that slow. I played the WotLK beta on a FW139E/H which has the same video card and experienced the same.

 

Interesting and noted. I suppose I over-estimated the power needed to run CS:S at 100FPS

 

It can be your laptop hard drive. I had the same problem on a Dell 9300 w/ 256mb 7800GTX. I had to find the manuf. boot disk and disable power saving and make sure it was set to "performance" mode, worked wonders for game shuttering.

 

Create a shortcut to wow.exe, then edit the shortcut properties and add -opengl to the end of the command line. More info here: http://vgstrategies.about.com/od/faq/a/CommandLineP.htm

It could potentially lead to occasional stuttering, especially if you have 2GB or less of RAM. But the stuttering should only occur when crossing into a new territory (and additional graphic assets have to be read from disk) or when in a very crowded area. If you notice stuttering in a normal area where you aren't loading much new content then it's probably not a HD issue. Do you notice the HD light going crazy when the stuttering occurs?

 

I would also try the vsync thing..if its off turn it on, on then off (do that in control panel too). Always try the simplest things first .

 

Umm, im considering a T400, this thread is about to answer whether the T400 can play wow decently, through tweaking direct X and openGL and such, will wow play decently or not ? this is kind of worrying.