World of Warcraft Framerates and Latency

Ok, I am about 3 weeks away from being able to purchase a new laptop to play World of Warcraft on. This is the only game I play so I want to cater my system to this game. I say this because I have heard conflicting information on whether the GPU or the CPU is actually the most important component when playing WoW. I will have $1500 to spend and I want a 15 inch laptop. I want to maximize my framerate both questing and raiding. I know the latency depends on my wireless card and internet connection and the connection between the 2 and the WoW server itself.

What I am looking for is some advice on which rig to purchase and some of the components needed to maximize my play with my budget. So far I am leaning toward a Sager 8130 from Xotic PC which I specd out at about $1400.

Any advice would be welcomed.

 

sager np8130 or lotus p151hm1 -- best bang for your buck

 

These are both the same laptop right? It would be a matter of the best deal?

 

They are built from the same Chassis.

For WoW the GPU is the most important thing. This is the case with all games. WoW actaully will benefit from a stronger CPU as well but you still want to get the best GPU you can. The NP8130 is a good option to go with but also consider the NP8150. With the sales going on you can get the 6990M which will do much better then the 560M. The 560M will still handle WoW great but when you're raiding, you got everything set to Ultra and there's lots of AoE going on the FPS could take a hit. The 6990M will handle it much better.

The 6990M i7 2670QM, would be a good combo and still be under your budget. The Bigfoot 1103 shows to get the lowest latency so go for that one.

 

Thank you for the reply, I have looked at both the 8130 and 8150 on the Xoticpc website and you are right, I was right at $1500 with the 6990M on the 8150 with the other options I wanted. I think in the long run it might be worth the extra $150 or so to go with the 8150.

 

for Wow, you'd need more than just an 1103.
also check out services like lowerping.com (if you live outside the u.s., or have in game latency of >200).

another thing to consider is a gamepad like a Nostromo N52TE where you could make spam macros for each button.

without a macro, wow would trigger the spell cast after the "key up" event, meaning the moment your button starts to to go up after pressing is when wow will start to cast that spell (there was an addon that fixed this before and i think one patch back in wotlk added this feature).

having a spam macro that automatically does this for you will shed a few milliseconds off aside from you just need to press a button instead of repeatedly pressing a button to cast a spell.

another advantage of this is you control your character with your thumb instead of 3 fingers for WASD keys, leaving 4 fingers to use for casting spells/skills. much easier to do DPS/Tank/Healing rotations with this.

 

Ok, I am not trying to be smart here, I just truly don't know the answers to my questions. Someone mentioned to me that I should look at the HP laptop also and I did, here are the specs I came up with:

•steel gray
•Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
•2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz
•2GB AMD Radeon(TM) HD 7690M GDDR5 Discrete Graphics(TM) [HDMI, VGA]
•FREE UPGRADE to 8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
•750GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive with HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
•No Additional Office Software
•No additional security software
•30% OFF 9 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
•15.6" High Definition HP LED Brightview (1366x768)
•FREE UPGRADE to Blu-ray player & SuperMulti DVD burner
•HP TrueVision HD Webcam with Integrated Digital Microphone and HP SimplePass Fingerprint Reader
•802.11b/g/n WLAN
•Standard Keyboard with numeric keypad
•$30 OFF Adobe(R) PhotoShop(R) Elements 9
•HP Home & Home Office Store in-box envelope

This came out to under $1200 with a 2 year warranty that includes shipping. It comes with an upgrade to a Blu-Ray player. The main thing I didn't like was the lack of a wireless card upgrade.

My question is what would make a $1200 Sager with say a 570M better than this HP for World of Warcraft? Again, I am not trying to be disrespectful, just trying to understand. Thanks!

 

The biggest difference there is the GPU. The ATI 7690M is very but a part of ATI mid level graphics cards. It wont do as good as the 570M. According to notebookcheck.com the 7690M scores 5558 in 3D mark vantage vs the 570M scores 9902 so its much more powerful. That is most likely the reason for such a price difference. You could go with the NP8130 for the same price and still get better performance with the 560M compared to the HP.

 

Thank you for clearing that up for me. At first glance if you don't know the details like me it appears that the 2 gig ATI card on that HP for that price would be the way to go but that is a huge difference in 3D scores.

 

No problem. RAM does help when needed but its not as important as the card itself. Consider it just like the CPU/RAM combo. Lets say hypothetically you had a 2.0Ghz CPU and 16GB RAM compared to a 3.6Ghz CPU and 8GB RAM. While the 2.0Ghz combo has more ram in it the 3.6Ghz will be faster.
As long as you have enough RAM on the video card to handle the game you're fine. A 1.5GB video card is plenty for games.

 

Video RAM is one of those things where bigger/more != better. It's equal parts marketing and performance. The reason is that video RAM is also called the frame buffer. The job of the frame buffer is to act as temporary storage for textures and jobs being processed by the GPU. Higher resolutions need more frame buffer because they have more stuff to store. Realistically, you don't need more than 1-1.5GB in most cases if you're running at or below 1080p. Only very large resolutions or multiple monitors (like in Nvidia Surround) will you end up a ton of frame buffer.

I say it's related to marketing because it's easy for a company to beef up a low end card with extra video memory to make it seem like a better deal. For example, an Nvidia 540m is a low range discrete card. Throwing a theoretical 4GB of frame buffer at it would still not make it faster than a 560m with the stock 1.5GB. Clock speeds and the number of cores/shaders makes the biggest difference in performance, which is why you can't compare cards directly on memory size.

 

Thanks again for the replies, very informative. Decisions to make. I know the 560M would probably play WoW fine right now, my only concern is if they change the engine or someting in one of the next expansions and I will be wishing I had something bigger than the 560M. My only 2 possible options are the 570M and the 6990. The 580M is out of my price range right now.

 

What exactly does this mean? Why would this be? And while we are at it, what would be the best card for wireless gaming, BlueTooth not needed.

 

Well I have the stock wireless card in my rig, I just ran a test and I am pulling 37M out of the 50M on my connection with a 45ms ping or better at times. That is too a server 350 miles away. I am also not the only person on the net at this time either. That is way more than enough to play WOW or any other game for that matter. I do not see what all the hype is about to be honest.

 

Would that be a speedtest.net test?

 

yes it would I just added the test results to my post for you..

 

The BF 1103 is one of the best wireless cards available, the only thing better would be a ethernet cord.

 

I guess I would agree.. But unless you are running over a 100M connection I do not see were it will be of any use. You have to realize that you are going to bottle neck somewhere. The question is where, my stock card is connected a 65M atm, the other night I pulled 47M off the stock card. I have no use for anything more and most people do not run connections fast enough to use a BF 1103. I got other laptops here connected at 150M+ and they cannot use it because we are limited to a 50M connection. They also pull no faster speeds than my sager with stock card.

 

it means your wireless card's performance is limited to your network.
it may be a bit faster than intel 6230 or 6300 or stock but there are more factors involved in getting performance.

ex. your internet connection will greatly determine what your latency will be, it doesn't matter if you have a 1mbps, 5mbps, 50mbps connection if your ping time to your server is 600-800ms. no wireless card on earth will help you on this one.

performance of your mouse, keyboard/Nostromo like I said in my previous post. that .5-1 second difference in triggering that spell or your trinket is that important in high ranking arena matches.

of course if all you do is pve and a few battlegrounds here and there then it really won't matter much.

 

Agree with your comments about the .5 to 1 second making a difference. I play a rogue in 2's and 3's and everything counts. I have Comcast cable internet, the fastest home speed they sell. I usually play wirelessly though but I am not sure what my max connection speed is, if its 50mbps or what? If anyone knows how I can test this I will run the test. After learning the Lotus 151 allows a user upgrade of the GPU that might be a great option. I can pick up that laptop with the 560M for around 1100 and then when the price of the 580M comes down a little or I save up more money I can replace the 560M and have an awesome card that I am sure will last me a while.

 

www.speedtest.net will let you test your current connection speed

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1697463938.png

here is my results, that was from a wireless connection on a business type laptop.

 

the best measurement in checking your latency is from your laptop do some ping tests on your world server (used to get the server ip address before from wowwiki).

this way you can check which servers has the best latency for you, however with the release of arenas back in burning crusade and the start of "instanced" servers, I'm not so sure anymore if blizzard already released the server IP address where arenas are hosted.

(this was also a factor in searching for the best server for you before so you'd have the lowest latency possible. while playing lol.)

and if I'm still not happy with the results then that's the time to check for services like lowerping.com which does help a lot on some cases.
there was also a registry fix called Leatrix latency fix before that's supposed to lower your latency (sorry been quite a while since i last played)

but the best upgrades i've ever done wasn't in the gpu or faster internet but rather the nostromo n52

 

On my laptop running a BF 1102 I am currently geting around 40 ms home, and 45 ms to world ping on World of Warcraft.

That is running over a 5GHz network with my laptop being the only client on the 5GHz side. The router is a DGND 3700.

On my old laptop running a netgear PCMCIA card I was getting 154ms home, 90ms world, and about the same on my wireless desktop upstairs. Both on 2.4Ghz wireless.

Hope that helps.

If you don't already know you can get realtime response times in WOW by highlighting the little green computer icon as part of the UI at the bottom of the screen where Guild info, Quest Info are located.. If it's yellow things are starting to go wrong, and red is drastically wrong.

 

go for the 8150 and order with 6990m card. There are 100+ people who will tell you the same. This is the best for your budget and with the power it has you can record with fraps and still run the game perfectly on max.

 

Hi, thanks again to everyone for all the good input. I usually get between 80 to 120 ms ping when playing on my laptop wirelessly at home on the server Moonguard. It is a west coast server I believe located in the Spokane data center. The nearest data center is in Chicago (Im in central Illinois). I have an old belkin router, not sure if the router matters when it comes to these numbers and I have a basic wireless card in my Dell im playing on now. I might have to rearrange my desk area so I can actually plug my laptop into an ethernet port for raiding and arena's if that will cut down on my ping. Questing and dailies and the such would be fine to play wirelessly.

 

Ping is important to consider, to be sure. However, there's only so much you can do on your end. If you're wiring in to your router- there's even less you can do. To put it in perspective, your router is just one hop on the internet. If you've ever done a "tracert" before, you can see just how many other routers stand between you and the site you're trying to get to. (and this won't even touch the number of switches that you might pass through, since they're transparent).

By means of comparison, VoIP (Voice over IP) is considered "good quality" if the latency stays below 150ms. This means you can be on a phone call and not notice any issues in quality of ping stays below this value. The point of this is that it's great to lower your latency, but beyond a point you begin to have diminishing returns.