5850 unable to max out... WoW???

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[L]imey

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 9, 2009
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I'm running at 1680x1050 and i'm getting frame dips into the 30's with a 5850 and a 2.8 clocked Phenom 1 and 4 gigs of 800mhz ram.

Dragon age is pegged at 60 with vsync... this makes NO sense.

Any thoughts?
 
I believe that's exactly what vSync does...it holds you to the Hz/fps of the monitor. Is your monitor 60 Hz?

.
 
after reading into this issue a lot, with people running i7 920's, 2 5870s, and 6+ gigs of ram getting the same results, find out that wow is a lot more cpu based than people thought. it only runs 2 total cores no matter how many you have. people have been talking a lot about using processaffinitymask and getting better results as well, might be something to look into.
 
dekruyter said:
I believe that's exactly what vSync does...it holds you to the Hz/fps of the monitor. Is your monitor 60 Hz?

.
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x2

as for WOW, thats not the first time I've heard a complaint about the performance from the new ATi cards. I'd wait for new drivers :) hopefully it will get fixed (either that or it's blizzards issue they need to get figured out)
 
No, i'm aware of what vsync does. What I'm saying is... when I have vsync on in dragon age, I get 60 FPS 100% of the time...

Wow goes from 60 to 25 back and forth which makes absolutely no sense....

What is this process affinity mask you speak of... I'll google it but any other details I should know?
 
[L]imey;1034889043 said:
No, i'm aware of what vsync does. What I'm saying is... when I have vsync on in dragon age, I get 60 FPS 100% of the time...

Wow goes from 60 to 25 back and forth which makes absolutely no sense....
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it's because the system doesn't have the power to keep the FPS locked @ 60 :) (well, it does... or should). What CPU are you running?
 
Extreme view distance and AA settings (like 8xSSAA) could cause this. More likely however is the game's demanding cpu requirements. Paging from the hard drive can also cause stutters and hitching unexpectedly. Why that still happens in modern games with the huge amounts of ram some gaming PC's have I don't know.
 
Phenom 1 @ 2.8ghz

That's really sad that it's already a bottleneck for something like WoW...
 
If I'm not mistaken, while WoW is "multithreaded" it doesn't scale properly across multiple cores. IE: it doesn't use more than "100%" of a single core's performance, so on a quad you only get 25% utilization per core or whatever windows load balances it out to.
 
It's sad that people are still complaining about performance in WoW after each new tech comes out.

That aside, the Phenom isn't a great processor gaming wise. I run one, I believe it holds my 4850 back sometimes, 5800 series even more so I'd be inclined to believe.
 
[L]imey;1034888919 said:
I'm running at 1680x1050 and i'm getting frame dips into the 30's with a 5850 and a 2.8 clocked Phenom 1 and 4 gigs of 800mhz ram.

Dragon age is pegged at 60 with vsync... this makes NO sense.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

My thoughts are that your CPU really isn't that fast and WoW is a game that is ALL about the CPU. At that res you are barely putting a strain on the GPU. Even my Q9650 @ 4.4Ghz slows down here and there in WoW. It is a CPU intensive enough game that I actually did notice an improvement when I upgraded from my Q6600 @ 3.6Ghz to my current processor.

Yoda4561 said:
If I'm not mistaken, while WoW is "multithreaded" it doesn't scale properly across multiple cores. IE: it doesn't use more than "100%" of a single core's performance, so on a quad you only get 25% utilization per core or whatever windows load balances it out to.
Click to expand...

It uses up to two cores. On my quad I'll typically see the CPU usage of WoW between 35-40%.

Samson4EiT said:
It's sad that people are still complaining about performance in WoW after each new tech comes out.
Click to expand...

It's not like the game hasn't changed at all since it came out 5 years ago. We're on our 2nd expansion pack, and they constantly update the game to increase view distance, add shadows, stuff like HDR was added also.
 
GotNoRice said:
..snip

It's not like the game hasn't changed at all since it came out 5 years ago. We're on our 2nd expansion pack, and they constantly update the game to increase view distance, add shadows, stuff like HDR was added also.
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I know that. However, whatever little graphical improvements they do make from time to time does not need much more power to run. With the exception of when max shadows was unplayable on everything, that was blizzards fault though.
 
any thoughts on which graphical options are burdening my processor the most? I'm fine with turning down anything except view distance to make it smoother.

Thanks for the replies guys, looks like I'm going to need a platform upgrade sooner than I thought.
 
Sage Osaka said:
after reading into this issue a lot, with people running i7 920's, 2 5870s, and 6+ gigs of ram getting the same results, find out that wow is a lot more cpu based than people thought. it only runs 2 total cores no matter how many you have. people have been talking a lot about using processaffinitymask and getting better results as well, might be something to look into.
Click to expand...

This is completely correct.


There is not much heavy going on graphically in wow. But in a place like Dalaran where HUNDREDS of different players are being drawn in real time on your screen, you will see that the cpu is a much bigger player with more people than the graphics in wow, at least above a certain base level.
 
Triple buffering on?
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Triple buffering shouldn't drop fps to half what it normally is. Probably some kind of lag, maybe textures aren't loading properly from the hard drive or something like that that's causing a bottleneck.

And in my experience, a slow internet connection doesn't actually degrade performance (as in frames per second). All it does is miss out certain people and objects. For example, when I had dial-up, it was a common occurrence to walk around Ironforge "empty", only to have people appear gradually as my internet connection caught up.
 
Try the WoW addon tweakwow. I use it with my i7-860 to enable all the cores. Restart of WoW required afterwards. Before it, I saw 100% usage on core 1. Now i see slightly lower usage but on 4 cores. (its set to 8 in the tool so seems to halve the number you set it too, weird).

It certainly helps.
 
starfury6 said:
Try the WoW addon tweakwow. I use it with my i7-860 to enable all the cores. Restart of WoW required afterwards. Before it, I saw 100% usage on core 1. Now i see slightly lower usage but on 4 cores. (its set to 8 in the tool so seems to halve the number you set it too, weird).

It certainly helps.
Click to expand...

its not really enabling all the cores.. its just forcing the load balance across all 4 cores and probably doesnt support hyperthreading..
 
Imo, some overlcocking on the processor would help.

And in busy places like dalaran, it's damn near impossible NOT to dip low. There's so many people, so much going on, so much to render...and then the network.

I can steady around 60fps during peak hours in dal... One big key in the process is setting the affinity mask to 255 (or 15 if you have a standard quad core) in the config.wtf folder.

Unlocking wow to use an additional 1.5 cores of your quad core will be the biggest boost in fps your wow will ever ever see.

More people need to know about this.
 
Shadowssong said:
Upgrade your CPU and harddrive (to ssd). It also relies on your internets speed.
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First off, SSD doesn't improve FPS (unless you already knew this) it will only decrease the stuttering effect you might feel while having view distance maxed and entering new areas since WoW is a dynamically loading game like any GTA / Diablo 2 is.

Second off your latency in WoW has nothing to do with the amount of FPS you can get (typically only games like Original UT have I seen a FPS cap depending on the setting Netspeed is on).

To the OP: My suggestion is to #1 turn off the fancy Shadows, #2 check and make sure that Edge Detect AA is not enabled in the CCC, #3 would be to turn off things like Adaptive AA off or to performance and try that. Other than those options your best bet (unless you have some sort of system issue) is to OC/Upgrade your CPU because WoW is all about the CPU for FPS and Ram/Hard Drive performance for transitioning between areas.

The biggest boost of performance that doesn't have to cost anything is OCing the CPU and using a good Defragger like Ultimate Defrag and placing WoW on the outermost area of your HDs for the best loading speeds possible.
 
actually, an SSD will increase your average fps, and raise your minimum FPS. Games like wow which load many small textures are often hard drive limited due to seek times. by removing the stuttering effect, which will make vsync drop the sync/fps to 30 or below for a second, the fps should stay above 60. also take off shadows, way too many shadows to calculate and shadows are not cheap still =p (ray tracing?!)
 
turn down your shadows, check your v-sync is off, and disable adaptive aa
 
I turned shadows down to minimum, adaptive AA was already off, vsync is off... i messed with one or 2 other settings and Now I bounce between 95 fps and about 40... It's clearly related to how far out it has to draw textures that is murdering my FPS. If i take draw distance down to minimum, I quadruple my frame rates. Perhaps I'll have to find a better balance.
 
Get a newer TriCore PII(wow likes 2 cores all to itself), OC it to 3.8~, or get a SSD. This should give you enough performance to max out WoW. Option two is do both and pickup a 19x12 monitor, enjoy.
 
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