What's holding back my WoW performance?

CKent

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2005
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I have 2 WoW accounts. I have a dual monitor setup, a 22" widescreen and a 19" 4:3. I have 2 installs of WoW, it makes managing the UI and other settings for each window much easier. I play one install on each monitor. When I open up the second window my fps drops noticeably as you might expect. I'm wondering what the bottleneck is. I don't think it's ram; one instance uses 450mb, the other 250. Is it my single-core cpu? Or my video card? And if video card, is it the gpu or the low amount of vram (256mb)?

PS - turning down settings in-game doesn't help performance very much at all.
 

vesuvius333

Member
Apr 13, 2005
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What other programs are running in the background? Do the obligatory spyware sweep, antivirus sweep, and it wouldn't hurt to do a defrag of the hard drive. Maybe post this on a popular Wow forum?
 

CKent

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2005
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Not much running in the background, and my system is clean. I've read that pushing high resolutions is demanding on vram. Since this is essentially ~2900x1050, could it just be the fact I have a 256mb card rather than 512?

Asking on the WoW forums would get "Mai HP runz it gud" "u nubz my aleenwair iz betur" "ur mom iz betur", so it isn't really an option :\ Yes, it's that bad.

Edit: I should amend that it's not really a "problem" per se - I know I'm asking a lot of my rig and I do get ~15-20 fps in max settings with a second window open, which is fairly respectable (performance with just 1 WoW running is great, 50-100 fps). I'm just curious where the bottleneck is in case I upgrade.
 

vesuvius333

Member
Apr 13, 2005
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Man those Wow forums sound horrid lol. Have you tried lowering the resolution and or textures when running the 1st instance of Wow, then replicating the settings for the 2nd one? I know when I run modern games on my rig if I want to increase the fps I decrease the shadows or turn them off all together. Maybe take a gander at tweakguides.com and see if their is an article about Wow? Hope this helps.
 

Glayde

Senior member
Sep 30, 2004
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One thing that i noticed with WoW, even without it taking a large memory footprint it uses a lot of processing power.

When I have wow running, any other application takes forever to open or to do anything really. One thing that helped was enabling hyperthreading. A dual core i imagine would help even more.

I wouldn't want to run two instances of wow without 2gb of ram either.

One thing would be to also check running one or both instances without some addons.

I use cool beans system info that lets me track cpu usage and whenever wow is open it spikes and stays up above 70%.
 

livingsacrifice

Senior member
Jul 16, 2001
442
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Mine runs pretty well at 1920x1200 4x aa and I've got a pretty new computer. But in the past I have noticed that it somewhat has to do with the server and what map you are on. I noticed last night it runs like crap in Un'Goro Crater but say in StormWind I have no problem, even with a bunch of people running around. I'd probably go dual core cpu if I were you should help the game performance quite a bit.
 

KMFJD

Lifer
Aug 11, 2005
31,038
47,820
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From Dual-Boxing.com

Unfortunately, the thing with XP is the Direct X part of it. When you have 2 monitors hooked up and on ?Dual View? there is a glitch, and it cuts your FPS down in half. Making it unplayable.

The solution to this is Horizontal Span. Go to your video card settings and change the display to Horizontal Span ( one whole desktop ) This will move your resolution up to 2560 x 1024.



I run 2 accounts on 1 system no problem, system is an AMD64 3000 with 2gb ram and a Nvidia 7600gs 1 monitor.....30fps easily achieved. On my dual core system with 2gbs ram and a 8800gt 320mb i run 3 instances no problem, this is running on Vista 32.
 

Beev

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2006
7,775
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Open windows media player in the background. I don't think the version matters, but I use 9.

Yes, this is a serious post. I don't know what it does (there was a huge topic about it on the WoW forums) but it can drastically improve your performance. I know that I personally load into the game from character select in less than half the time than if I don't do it. And NPC's load faster as well. Try it out.
 

CKent

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2005
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Interesting info KMFJD, I'm not sure I wnat to do that though because of the different resolutions, 1680x1050 and 1280x1024. They're LCDs so I won't change the resolution on either.

As for WMP, I've read about that, but trying it only gave me graphical glitches. My horse's tail was all orange speckled, for example, among other things. Perhaps it works by lowering the number of colors available to WoW or something... at any rate it's not an ideal situation.

Anyway, while turning down settings doesn't help much, it does help some. For now that's what I'll continue doing.
 

Anubis

No Lifer
Aug 31, 2001
78,712
427
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tbqhwy.com
Originally posted by: Beev
Open windows media player in the background. I don't think the version matters, but I use 9.

Yes, this is a serious post. I don't know what it does (there was a huge topic about it on the WoW forums) but it can drastically improve your performance. I know that I personally load into the game from character select in less than half the time than if I don't do it. And NPC's load faster as well. Try it out.

it does nothing for me, i tested this for about an hour last week

FPS never went up, nor did load times

for my friend it doubles his FPS :/

im running a Opty 160 i think dual core at 1.8 GHz, 2 gigs of ram and a 7600 GTm 22in WS mon 1680*1050 and i basicially never get above 40 FPS, max settings

which i find odd as i used to get 60+ running 1600x1200 on a 6800Gt and a 3200+ same ram

:/


and my wow uses well over 512 megs of ram running a single instance of it
 

KMFJD

Lifer
Aug 11, 2005
31,038
47,820
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Originally posted by: CKent
Interesting info KMFJD, I'm not sure I wnat to do that though because of the different resolutions, 1680x1050 and 1280x1024. They're LCDs so I won't change the resolution on either.

As for WMP, I've read about that, but trying it only gave me graphical glitches. My horse's tail was all orange speckled, for example, among other things. Perhaps it works by lowering the number of colors available to WoW or something... at any rate it's not an ideal situation.

Anyway, while turning down settings doesn't help much, it does help some. For now that's what I'll continue doing.
The info i gave pertains to XP only, in Vista it is fixed and should work fine, many people have had the same issue and the horizantel spanning seems to work, check out www.dual-boxing.com they are a great source of information for dual/multi boxing.
 

imported_Shivetya

Platinum Member
Jul 7, 2005
2,978
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I run multiple copies of WOW on the following iMac... 2.16C2D 7600GT (256mb) 3Gb ram.

What I had found on that machine was that WOW performance was more linked to base RAM. I went from 2gb to 3gb and I could run 3 copies of WOW easily...

Now on my PC (2.0 AMD dual core) has 2gb of memory... but I run two sessions at one time I found that with only 1gb of memory the system was chugging as it was swapping to disk to often.

WOW is anything but CPU intensive. However memory is another issue and the more the merrier. Mainly what your trying to do is over come the OS's need to swap to disk. Don't go by just what each copy of WOW is using... look at the whole picture.

 

mrCide

Diamond Member
Nov 27, 1999
6,187
0
76
can you run multiple instances of WoW by just running the executable twice? or is there a trick to it. and do you run both in windowed+noborder or what?
 

Anubis

No Lifer
Aug 31, 2001
78,712
427
126
tbqhwy.com
Originally posted by: mrCide
can you run multiple instances of WoW by just running the executable twice? or is there a trick to it. and do you run both in windowed+noborder or what?

just run the exe a 2nd time
 

KMFJD

Lifer
Aug 11, 2005
31,038
47,820
136
Originally posted by: Anubis
Originally posted by: mrCide
can you run multiple instances of WoW by just running the executable twice? or is there a trick to it. and do you run both in windowed+noborder or what?

just run the exe a 2nd time

While that will work, it is much better to have a copy of the wow folder and run from 2 different exe's .
 
Dec 30, 2004
12,553
2
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Originally posted by: KMFJD
From Dual-Boxing.com

Unfortunately, the thing with XP is the Direct X part of it. When you have 2 monitors hooked up and on ?Dual View? there is a glitch, and it cuts your FPS down in half. Making it unplayable.

The solution to this is Horizontal Span. Go to your video card settings and change the display to Horizontal Span ( one whole desktop ) This will move your resolution up to 2560 x 1024.



I run 2 accounts on 1 system no problem, system is an AMD64 3000 with 2gb ram and a Nvidia 7600gs 1 monitor.....30fps easily achieved. On my dual core system with 2gbs ram and a 8800gt 320mb i run 3 instances no problem, this is running on Vista 32.

It's not a glitch, its more of a hardware limitation-- graphics cards can't render to two display ports at the same time. You get the same effect with dualview vista-- severly decreases Aero performance.