WoW FPS is weird.

Jschmuck2

Diamond Member
Jul 13, 2005
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Rig in Sig and I'm averaging about 50 FPS in major cities. Does that seem right to you?
 

Jschmuck2

Diamond Member
Jul 13, 2005
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Well yeah but just the same...for a single core, my CPU still holds up alright in most other cases.
 

JSK07

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Sep 12, 2007
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Originally posted by: BassBomb
Whats wrong with that?

WoW is typically a CPU heavy game.

I'd say that looks about right based on your system specs. I had similar performance with my old AMD X2 system. When I went to the Q6600 and 8800GT I had a huge increase in performance in those zones.

Your FPS is capped at whatever your display refresh rate is set at. So with your LCD it's probably 60mhz meaning that even if you have the most badass system in the world you'll never go above 60 FPS.
 

nitromullet

Diamond Member
Jan 7, 2004
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Originally posted by: Jschmuck2
Rig in Sig and I'm averaging about 50 FPS in major cities. Does that seem right to you?

I've noticed that AA is the biggest FPS killer for WoW. Try enabling anything above 4xAA and walking/flying around Terokkar Forest outside of Shattrah and see if you maintain 50 FPS. WoW is highly playable at 30 FPS, so I have no problems trading eye candy for FPS.

Originally posted by: JSK07
Your FPS is capped at whatever your display refresh rate is set at. So with your LCD it's probably 60mhz meaning that even if you have the most badass system in the world you'll never go above 60 FPS.

That is not correct. You probably have v-sync and triple buffering enabled. I don't get any noticeable tearing with my current setup, so I have v-sync and triple buffering disabled. My FPS often goes above 150 with a 60 Hz LCD.

Originally posted by: BassBomb
Whats wrong with that?

WoW is typically a CPU heavy game.

This may have been somewhat true at WoW's launch, but anything remotely modern can play WoW with no problems. I used to use an AIW X800XL as a backup card, and swapping that card between my current C2D rig and its normal Sempron 3000+ based home gave the exact same gaming experience on the 1680x1050 LCD I had at the time. I also have a friend what was playing WoW on an Athlon XP 2000+ until not too long ago, and it was quite playable.

You MUST have at lease 1GB of RAM to play WoW smoothly on a Windows XP machine though. Anything less, and your game will stutter constantly. I'm guessing that Vista would probably bump that requirement up to 2GB. I've never used a Vista machine with anything less than 2GB so I can't say for certain.
 

JSK07

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Sep 12, 2007
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Originally posted by: nitromullet


That is not correct. You probably have v-sync and triple buffering enabled. I don't get any noticeable tearing with my current setup, so I have v-sync and triple buffering disabled. My FPS often goes above 150 with a 60 Hz LCD.

Thank you for the correction. I was not aware that turning off v-sync and triple buffering would change this. I think many people are like myself in that we generally just change our game resolution but otherwise leave the other settings at whatever the game defaults.
 

livingsacrifice

Senior member
Jul 16, 2001
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Your right I have the same problem with my computer and my 2900xt. I run the game at 1920x1200 and while it plays alright most of the time 60fps or higher, in places like negrand or pretty much most of the places in outland it runs not as smooth, sometimes choppy. The game seems more GPU intensive to me though I don't really ever see the cpu percentage go up that much with WoW open.