[WoW] FPS drops under 10 in raids, what's my bottleneck?

[CKent]

I get 100-150 fps throughout Outland with all settings cranked to the max. I get probably 50+ in battlegrounds, though it can drop a bit in AV. The minute I'm in a raid it's 20, and during graphically intense encounters (Mother is a great example, 22 people all in the same spot, 20+ totems in that spot as well) it can drop to 7-8.

Rig's in sig. A buddy of mine says it's my CPU. I know dual core would be better, but I can't picture a fast, modern CPU holding me back this much.

I've read that 256mb vram is often not enough for 1680x1050 and larger resolutions. My card has 256mb vram, is this a possibility?

Video, chipset drivers are up to date. System is clean; no malware, no resource hogs like Norton or anything.

Lowering settings helps a little bit, but really not very much. Newegg has a black box 2.6ghz x2 dual core for $90, I'm considering jumping on it, but I'd hate to get it only to find out my weak link is elsewhere.

Only other thing I can think of is that one of my addons seems to have some kind of memory leak. I can't pinpoint it, but it may be Recount, as I know that addon was having some issues with the new combat log. After a 4 hour raid I'll sometimes get an error message and be unable to enter commands, meaning I have to restart WoW (can't reload ui).

 

[Soccerman06]

turn the game sound off before you do anything, then update drivers, because your system is more than enough to have decent settings.

 

[Anubis]

have you tried dropping your video details to low settings? if that makes a drastin improvement im gonna bet on the video card.

i did a test when i built my ne wcomp few months ago and the vid card gives you the largest improvement in terms of FPS over other comp compnents you can change out

 

[Xavier434]

It is very rare that FPS dropping in an instanced zone is hardware related. The vast majority of FPS problems are worse throughout Outlands than they are inside of instanced zones. I'm putting my money on this problem being addon or configuration file related.

 

[coloumb]

cpu and graphics card are your most likely bottlenecks.

lowering the resolution by A LOT will help - but not so much your enjoyment of the game. I encountered the same scenario while playing WoW on my laptop [business trip] - I had to actually point the view down to the ground and just watch the health bars in order to heal in a raid and keep the fps up to a playable state.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Originally posted by: coloumb
cpu and graphics card are your most likely bottlenecks.

lowering the resolution by A LOT will help - but not so much your enjoyment of the game. I encountered the same scenario while playing WoW on my laptop [business trip] - I had to actually point the view down to the ground and just watch the health bars in order to heal in a raid and keep the fps up to a playable state.

Look at his specs, they're not bottlenecks for WOW.

More than likely it's your addons. Try disabling them all and see if there is any change.

My old computer was pretty similar to yours yet I had stable FPS at 1920x1200 in raids.