5850 & WoW

[Collider]

I'm concerned about my 5850 performance in World of Warcraft. In certain areas I get below 25 fps, esp Dalaran or 25m raids.

Out of all the games I figured that would be one game that the card would totally destroy considering how dated the game's video engine is.

Any WoW players having similar slow downs? Hows the performance with other cards in raids and in Dalaran?

 

[Dark4ng3l]

WOW is more CPU limited really. Though 25 FPS sounds low to me i'm not sure you can really expect the game to run at over 100 fps constantly.

 

[Moonzi]

I run WoW with a HSI 5770, usually get 35FPS in Dal, and 45 in 25 ICC

Just out in the world I'm constantly at 60FPS

I run at default settings though so it's not on ultra

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

WOW is more CPU limited really. Though 25 FPS sounds low to me i'm not sure you can really expect the game to run at over 100 fps constantly.

A i7 920 should still crush wow though. I've heard WoW doesn't do well on ATI cards, but I find it hard to believe even with that a 5850 wouldn't crush it. Maybe it's your harddrive. When I added some virtual memory to my 74 gig raptor my performance in dalaran plumeted; still need to remember to move that to my ssd.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Back when I still played WoW, I sometimes saw FPS dips into the low 20s even using a GTX 285.

It's not the graphics card, it's the bad programming (according to many). You're going to get FPS dips in highly populated areas no matter how awesome your system is.

 

[Axon]

As CurseTheSky said, if you're in a highly populated area, you will see an FPS drop.

I have two 4890s these days and I still pull 35 FPS in Dalaran during prime time. At 7 in the morning, I can easily get 60 FPS in Dalaran. Its infuriating, but that's the nature of WoW.

Otherwise, you can make these edits to your affinity mask settings to better maximize your cores:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311 (long)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16903570298&sid=1 (short)

There is some debate as to what precise setting is the best on affinity mask, so I recommend you experiment a bit. I use 85, personally. It's an easy change, so don't worry about blowing up WoW.

 

[Udgnim]

you're being network limited by WoW

 

[MagickMan]

Almost everywhere else in the game I'm pegged at 60fps w/ vsync, but in Dalaran I always drop to 30-45fps. It's network congestion on their end, not your system.

Here's a tip, turn all settings to Ultra but drop the shadow quality down ONE notch. You won't see much of a difference, if any, but your FPS will spike upwards in Dala.

 

[Collider]

Forgot to mention I have all the settings maxed out and I am mostly on during prime time when there's hundreds of players in Dalaran.

Thanks for the tip on shadow qlty and affinity mask, I'll try that out.

Axon, what does the affinity mask tweak supposed to do?

 

[Axon]

Forgot to mention I have all the settings maxed out and I am mostly on during prime time when there's hundreds of players in Dalaran.

Thanks for the tip on shadow qlty and affinity mask, I'll try that out.

Axon, what does the affinity mask tweak supposed to do?

Utilize all four cores (in theory & practice), improve FPS/load time (in practice). I would say it stabilized my frame rate and all but eliminated the "hiccups" I would see in WoW, especially while flying from zone to zone. Messing with the affinity mask does activate some silent cores, but I don't always consider a four core setting superior...which is why you should try some of the recommended values and experiment.

 

[thescreensavers]

With a ATI 3650 and a C2D T9300, in my laptop, I got 50fps in cities, and raids it went down to around 25/30 very playable.

I had to run the game with shadows off and Anti..what ever its called at x2. The rest was set on high.

 

[Soccerman06]

I play at 2560x1600 and almost everything maxed and have 2 260s and on Illidan (most heavily populated server), and get roughly 25fps in Dalaran and raids. I use a i7 at 3800 and I stopped being cpu limited quite a long time ago.

 

[Collider]

Utilize all four cores (in theory & practice), improve FPS/load time (in practice). I would say it stabilized my frame rate and all but eliminated the "hiccups" I would see in WoW, especially while flying from zone to zone. Messing with the affinity mask does activate some silent cores, but I don't always consider a four core setting superior...which is why you should try some of the recommended values and experiment.

Yeah I noticed that only a single thread is active in task mgr unlike running Dragon Age for instance all 8 threads were utilized. Thanks for that I will def try it out.

 

[Xed]

Set your process affinity to 255 in the config file if you're using i7.

 

[dguy6789]

I've heard WoW doesn't do well on ATI cards

WoW runs better on ATI cards than anything else actually. His problem lies elsewhere.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=20

 

[lopri]

I haven't played WOW but wouldn't your performance be affected by other users' systems as well? Considering it's an MMORPG.

 

[thescreensavers]

^ no

 

[lopri]

K thnx.

 

[Binky]

Forgot to mention I have all the settings maxed out and I am mostly on during prime time when there's hundreds of players in Dalaran.

There's your problem. Addons can also consume a lot of CPU power. Have you tried looking at the framerate with some or all of them disabled? Questhelper and auctioneer are huge addons that consume a lot of resources.

Try an addon called dynperf.

 

[nitromullet]

What level and type of AA are you running?

WoW runs awesome on ATI hardware, but I have found that higher levels of transparency AA (NV) and adaptive AA (ATI) can make frames tank in a big way on both NV and ATI hardware. 8x AAA was unplayable on the 4870 X2, unless I picked the wide/narrow tent which causes the image to be blurry, but 4x AAA was fine. NVIDIA cards suffer similar slowdowns when certain types of 8x transparency AA is used as well.

It's been a while since I mucked around with WoW AA so I'm not sure what the current state of things are, but it might be worthwhile to mess around with.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

WoW runs better on ATI cards than anything else actually. His problem lies elsewhere.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=20

Yea, I guess things have changed. The benches I saw only went up to like 260/4850 and ati was doing considerably worse. It was an x-bit labs article.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/mainstream-cards-mmorpg_14.html#sect0

 

[soccerballtux]

My biggest problems were also solved with the affinity mask settings. You can probably go ahead and set to 255 and not worry about it-- Windows can handle the performance balancing.

 

[Collider]

There's your problem. Addons can also consume a lot of CPU power. Have you tried looking at the framerate with some or all of them disabled? Questhelper and auctioneer are huge addons that consume a lot of resources.

Try an addon called dynperf.

I use the usual addons QuestHelper, XPerl, etc. but the problem only arises when in Dalaran when running around the world the fps is steady at 60 w/ vsync.

nitromullet, I'm running 8xAA with all other settings maxed out.

 

[Collider]

Update...

Just tried multiple affinity mask settings. 85 crashed my wow in the first 30 seconds. setting to 15 gave me a 10 fps boost in Dal. With 255 I was up to a very playable 39fps.

Dropping the shadow setting just 1 notch gave me a very enjoyable 55 fps with all other settings maxed out & 8xAA in front of a bank in Dal.

Thanks guys!

 

[Piano Man]

If setting affinity to 85 on your i7 causes a crash, you need to either reinstall WoW, or start stress testing your computer as there is some major instability going on.

I have both your CPU and Vid Card. Setting the Affinity to 85 and OCing my 920 to 4.2GHz made a huge difference.