Microstutter in WoW.

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soccerballtux

Lifer
Dec 30, 2004
12,553
2
76
Running an Nvidia card (for those that said nvidia did better with this).
I've found decreasing draw distance helps some, but honestly, with an OC'd 9800GT I figured I could turn everything up.

Do you guys have any other recommendations? I've turned off Vsync+tripple buffering, and nothing else seems to help.
 
Leyawiin

Leyawiin

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2008
3,204
52
91
With patch 3.0.2 in October (Echoes of Doom) the WoW graphics engine got a complete revamping. Landscape draw distance was almost doubled (at maximum) and dynamic shadow quality was introduced. Did you have these issues prior to that? Basically, to recreate what was "max quality" prior to the patch you have to have the Shadow Quality slider all the way to the left (back to "blob" shadows) and have Landscape View Distance set to about 60%. These changes have little to do with your graphics card, they are primarily CPU intensive and everyone is complaining about them.

I have a GTX 260 OC'd to 666 Mhz. It used to run WoW before the patch at almost a constant vertical sync limited 60 FPS with all options at max. Now when I have all options maxed I notice a 10-15 FPS drop in many areas and a fair bit of stuttering if I pan the camera too fast (like when flying somewhere or running along on my mount). If I place those two sliders I told you about back to their pre-patch values everything returns to "normal". You might also want to reset some of your WoW folders by deleting Cache, WTF and Interface. Allowing these to rebuild helped my performance on "patch day" quite a lot.
 
Mem

Mem

Lifer
Apr 23, 2000
21,476
13
81
Originally posted by: RallyMaster
If you're using Vista...have you disabled SuperFetch and indexing?
Click to expand...

Bad advice on disabling Superfetch,one of the best features of Vista.

Anyway he has XP so I would look at otherthings like what anti-virus are you using,disable Windows Defender,run a full anti-virus scan to rule out any viruses,install latest drivers for your hardware,don't forget DX9.0c has been updated too (Nov 2008).


I notice you have a 9800GT OC,does it microstutter if you underclock it ie default 9800gt speeds.

One thing I disable or put to low in all my games where applicable is shadows ,this can kill frame rates in any game.

Running an Nvidia card (for those that said nvidia did better with this).
Click to expand...

No offence but thats crap,you see a lot of die hard Nvidia fans say that here and some have been here long enough to know better,any game on any hardware can give user issues,personally I have used both ATI and Nvidia over the years and find them about the same in my gaming experience,I never had any issues in WoW when I used to play that game however.
 
myocardia

myocardia

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2003
9,291
30
91
Originally posted by: Mem
No offence but thats crap,you see a lot of die hard Nvidia fans say that here and some have been here long enough to know better,any game on any hardware can give user issues,personally I have used both ATI and Nvidia over the years and find them about the same in my gaming experience,I never had any issues in WoW when I used to play that game however.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that he was talking about performance differences, not reliability/driver issues. With some games, you really want an nVidia card, assuming you want the best performance for the least money. For others, you really want an ATI, for the same reason.
 
apoppin

apoppin

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
34,890
1
0
alienbabeltech.com
Originally posted by: Leyawiin
With patch 3.0.2 in October (Echoes of Doom) the WoW graphics engine got a complete revamping. Landscape draw distance was almost doubled (at maximum) and dynamic shadow quality was introduced. Did you have these issues prior to that? Basically, to recreate what was "max quality" prior to the patch you have to have the Shadow Quality slider all the way to the left (back to "blob" shadows) and have Landscape View Distance set to about 60%. These changes have little to do with your graphics card, they are primarily CPU intensive and everyone is complaining about them.

I have a GTX 260 OC'd to 666 Mhz. It used to run WoW before the patch at almost a constant vertical sync limited 60 FPS with all options at max. Now when I have all options maxed I notice a 10-15 FPS drop in many areas and a fair bit of stuttering if I pan the camera too fast (like when flying somewhere or running along on my mount). If I place those two sliders I told you about back to their pre-patch values everything returns to "normal". You might also want to reset some of your WoW folders by deleting Cache, WTF and Interface. Allowing these to rebuild helped my performance on "patch day" quite a lot.
Click to expand...

Perhaps it is your CPU ,, it had a very limited cache and is pretty slow paired with a 260+

i am running WoW [14 day trial, coincidentally] with every option fully maxed out - including maxed AA/AF - with a single 4870/1GB and i do not get any stutter issues [unrelated to playing it on 56K dialup :p]
- but then i have e8600@4.0Ghz; i also tried it with 4870x2 but have not played with my 280GTX and WoW.

You could try turning some options down to see which one - or which combination - is causing the slowdowns - or upgrade your CPU {just 'anyway'}

rose.gif


.. or it could be your Overclock
{666?}
:Q
 
Leyawiin

Leyawiin

Diamond Member
Nov 11, 2008
3,204
52
91
Not to hijack the O.P.'s thread, my CPU is a bit weaker than yours - AMD X2 6400+ @ the stock 3.2 Ghz. The video card is factory OC'd - EVGA GTX 260 "FTW" Edition (yeah, interesting OC number they settled on!). Things are getting a bit better each maintenance day since the patch. I think they are tweaking and optimizing what changed with the new graphics engine. Since the release of Wrath of the Lich King I turned Shadow Quality back up to full and Landscape View Distance up to full as well, much smoother than a few weeks ago. Then again, almost everone is in a different zone now (Northrend), so that might have something to do with it. And again, prior to the big October patch it ran very well - even in places like Shatt.

Back to the O.P.'s issue though, in the WoW tech support forum these complaints have been very common for weeks since the new patch. And the mods have said the same thing - turn those two options down, thats what really changed in graphics for the game. They also said those changes impact the CPU more than the graphics card.
 
C

Concillian

Diamond Member
May 26, 2004
3,751
8
81
A guild-mate of mine was experiencing stutter on rotating his view.

He said it was fine looking straight in one direction, but if he rotated his view with the mouse, he saw lagging that didn't show on FPS graphs (recount will track FPS and graph it realtime).

He updated me later to tell me it was one of his mods, but he hadn't narrowed it down yet. So just FYI, not all performance issues are necessarily hardware / driver issues. BTW he has two machines, one with an 8800GT and one with a 9800 GTX, I don't know which he was on at the time.

He never got back to me to let me know which mod was doing it.
 
C

crimson117

Platinum Member
Aug 25, 2001
2,094
0
76
Good call - make sure you disable all UI mods before worrying about your performance. It's best to even relocate the entire interface folder to a temporary spot to make sure nothing hangs around.

Although WoW's API is fairly generous to UI modders, sometimes it's insufficient, so modders have to brute-force solutions which can really kill your performance.
 
F

FuryofFive

Golden Member
Sep 7, 2005
1,544
9
71
Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Running an Nvidia card (for those that said nvidia did better with this).
I've found decreasing draw distance helps some, but honestly, with an OC'd 9800GT I figured I could turn everything up.

Do you guys have any other recommendations? I've turned off Vsync+tripple buffering, and nothing else seems to help.
Click to expand...

cant help but notice teh date on this. have u installed the new nvidia drivers... my 8800GTS ran choppy in games it shouldnt have. i updated to the new drivers and all the games run fine.
try that, sorry if someone mentioned that alread
 
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