5850 & WoW

[EarthwormJim]

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!

Are you at a low resolution or something and need that much AA? I'd rather have 4xAA and nice shadows myself.

 

[Collider]

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.

Other than that the system is perfectly stable. I haven't done a 24 hr burn in or anything but ran 3DMark and multiple games (crysis, modern warface, dragon age). The system is running at stock speeds for now. The only thing that I can think of is that I'm running 1600 ram at stock i7 speeds.

running @ 1920x1200. there isnt much noticeable difference between 4xAA and 8xAA but droping the shadow setting one notch gave a much more significant fps boost. going from 8x to 4x didnt make a dif for me.

 

[Axon]

Eh, if it's working don't mess with it too much.

 

[MagickMan]

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!

Yeah, it's a massive FPS boost and the quality difference is almost imperceptible. I always tell people with decent rigs to max everything but turn the shadows down one notch, you'll get the most enjoyment out of the game that way.

 

[octopus41092]

Turn down/off the shadows. It drops the performance by way more than it's worth. WoW has some serious issues with shadows. I can get 60FPS in Dalaran on my HD4850 @ 1680x1050, 4x AA, everything highest, but with shadows on low.

 

[thtadthtshldntbe]

The following info and suggestions are gathered from years of trying to tweak my WoW performance.

WoW is basically a combination of 5 year old or more graphics technology with something like 1990s gaming programing tech in terms of how the developers implement the system. The developers don't change this much because they want WoW to be able to run ok, even with settings turned way down, on computers from 10 years ago.

It uses two big threads and a couple of little ones.

It is much more highly CPU bound than GPU bound.

One of the biggest issues with WoW is the constant small file accesses it does (this is why a SSD is such a tremendous boost to WoW in contrast to other similar games), along with the constant small internet accesses (this latter issue, for example is why, WoW often used to have problems with Comcast until Blizzard and Comcast did something on the backend to deal with it, early 2009 I think). The short of this for the end user is that your io subsystem is doing a lot more work when it is running WoW then when it is not.

The general rules of thumb for tweaking WoW are

get as fast a processor as possible (much like back in the 1990s when processor speed was everything for gaming). The more Gigahertz that you have the better WoW will run.

Set the affinity mask, as mentioned above, to the appropriate amount for the number of cores that you have.

Get as much ram as you can (to minimize disk accesses).

Tweak your system in such a way to minimize use of the io subsystem.

If you like to listen to music with WoW and Vent, use a usb headset so that vent never uses the systems soundcard. Make sure that your music files are on a different hard drive than WoW.

Get a SSD, put WoW on it. Heck, if you can't afford a SSD, but have a spare hdd sitting around, give that to WoW.

Tweak the shadows setting (which consumes a lot of CPU computing time under WoW, especially when there are a lot of things on screen) and the spell effects/details settings.

If you have a video card made since the year 2000, you will get almost identical video performance in terms of what the video card does for WoW as you will with the latest and greatest. WoW just does not offload enough to the graphics card.

 

[Keelin]

Hi all,

I read with big interest the different posts in regards to people with ATI cards running wow, especially the ATI Radeon HD 5850. A few days ago I switched out my old GeForce 8800GTS 320MB which was running WoW smootly at medium settings, though not more than 1 or 2 x AA - with a ATI Radeon HD 5850 setup in crossfire even. Now from running smoothly it is almost unplayable.... Even running around in Tanaris killing low lvl pirates or bandits can be a pain. Framerates flick from as low as 20 or so to 70+.

I tried to change settings from ultra, down to pretty much medium and still have problems. This I find very strange as even one 5850 card should be able to run WoW on max without major issues. My gaming system is mentioned in my signature. It is in general a fast system, but the fact that the old GeForce could run WoW much better at even same settings is strange..... I have the newest ATI drivers installed.

I run Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit OS.

Soon specs will change quite a bit to a Core i7 system as seen below, but still as it is WoW should run great... I did not try the affinity tips yet though. Never modified the WoW config files before.


System soon changing to:
Core i7 980-X 6-Core @ 3.33GHz.
6GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000MHz.
GFX: Asus Radeon HD 5850 (in CrossFire)
Motherboard: Asus Rampage III Extreme
HDD : Corsair Vertex Limited Edition 200GB SSD

 

[Zap]

One of the biggest issues with WoW is the constant small file accesses it does (this is why a SSD is such a tremendous boost to WoW in contrast to other similar games)

This is absolutely true. I just re-built my wife's system and put WoW on an SSD and it plays great. Stuff just loads faster, less than half the time of my system with WoW running off a VelociRaptor side-by-side with hers, watching the loading bars go by. Also, as you run around the environment and things come within your view distance and have to load, you normally get these little hitches as they pop up on the screen. It no longer seems to do that with the SSD.

 

[Keelin]

Can someone take a look at my post above and perhaps give some feedback? Would be great Thanks!

 

[NoQuarter]

Can someone take a look at my post above and perhaps give some feedback? Would be great Thanks!

Try using a driver cleaner to remove the old nvidia drivers? Try in single 5850 mode instead of Crossfire.. put 2 Crossfire links between the 2 cards instead of just 1.. uhm.. reinstall Windows

Seriously should have no probs on that system, I can run WoW at max fine on a 5770.

Also how often does your fps bottom out and for how long?

 

[eappleto]

Sounds to me like you have a bad videocard. Put in one, see how it plays, put in the other, see how it plays, switch PCIE slots, see how it plays. Once ALL of those combos are complete, then try to Xfire and see how it plays.

 

[Seero]

Can someone take a look at my post above and perhaps give some feedback? Would be great Thanks!

First of all, WoW doesn't scale properly with crossfire and sli.

Your video card upgrade shouldn't decrease FPS like that. I had that problem very long ago when switching vendor and the driver was not uninstalled properly, which the performance dropped significantly.

Here is what you should do first before buying anything if you haven't reinstall your OS after switching card.

Download and install ccleaner.
Boot in safe mode and uninstall any video card drivers.
Reboot back in safe mode, manually delete any folders containing those drivers. Reboot again in safe mode and run ccleaner on the registry. It will remove any reference to non-existence files.
Reboot in normal and download and install the latest CCC 10.4.
Rerun ccleaner again on registry. You may want to clean up your HDD a bit with ccleaner too, just remember not to remove cookies or you will lose all stored passwords.
Defrag your HDD. Reboot and start WoW with all mods disabled. You can enable all mods afterwards.

If the above doesn't help, simply disable one of the card and try again.

So that you know, I have setup a PC with GTS 8800 640mb running WoW for a friend at max setting without any visual issue. Having 20 ish FPS is one thing, seeing shuttering effect is another. The game should still be very playable running consistently at 20-30 FPS unless it runs it runs at 60+ 50% of the time but 0 for the other half. I believe what you are experiencing is "shuttering effect", which has nothing to do with the video card setting. It happens when there is a driver/resource conflict. It will also happen when your system has a bottleneck, but in your case there shouldn't be one unless you are in 25 man raid, and of course Dalaran.

Crossfire or sli setup requires very fast memory as well as very fast HDD and a NIC with onboard NPU to play well on MMOs.

 

[Keelin]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I will definitely try it out. I actually got most parts for building a new computer, except the motherboard. One of the new parts is also an SSD harddrive, which I also heard would help a lot on wow load performance etc. Thinking of cloning the current hdd to the new ssd drive while I wait for the new motherboard which could take a few weeks...

But regarding the idea of a faulty graphics card then in such case I think it could be the main card, since I came to think of that I possibly had the problem with wow the few days I waited for the second card to arrive. However I never installed the ASUS drivers I think, but started from the 10.2 or 10.3 ati drivers. I will look at the driver clean out though also.

 

[Seero]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I will definitely try it out. I actually got most parts for building a new computer, except the motherboard. One of the new parts is also an SSD harddrive, which I also heard would help a lot on wow load performance etc. Thinking of cloning the current hdd to the new ssd drive while I wait for the new motherboard which could take a few weeks...

But regarding the idea of a faulty graphics card then in such case I think it could be the main card, since I came to think of that I possibly had the problem with wow the few days I waited for the second card to arrive. However I never installed the ASUS drivers I think, but started from the 10.2 or 10.3 ati drivers. I will look at the driver clean out though also.

Cloning from HDD to SSD is not a good idea.

 

[Keelin]

Fresh install only then?