WoW, Bad fps, good hardware, weird

Hi guys,
My buddy's computer is getting some pretty bad FPS and I can't figure out why. He gets about 26-29 fps in Dal and 15-20 fps during 25 man raids.
His specs are:

Q6600 OC'd to 2.7ghz
4gb ddr2 800
320gb 7200.10 16mb
geforce GTX 260
Windows 7 64 bit

In the game, his affects bar is set to "good" When he puts it to Low, he gets about 30-33 fps in Dalaran.

I had him update all his drivers and update windows, but no change. Only thing he has running in background is AVG, and when he turns that off it does nothing.


I'm stumped. Any suggestions? Surely that hardware should yield a little better fps than that...

Thanks!!

I have heard pretty much any setup won't fair to well in Dal. Sometimes I just wonder if the Engine running WoW just doesn't take effect of todays hardware I mean the game is almost six years old.

From what i've heard, FPS in Dalaran is correlated to network issues such as ping.

As for the Raid FPS, set the shadows slider to LOW or if you dont like that, set it one setting below highest.

To top it off, look up on google for something like "wow affinity config" and set it to utilize the extra core(only 3 cores i'm told it will go up to no matter how high you set it, i set it to use everything on my i7, and it works great! [affinity 255])

sounds about the same for me
e8500
4870 1gb
4gb ddr2 800
vista 64

only gets that bad in dalaran though.

In addition to what Suprfire said, try unparking your cores. Bascially, Win 7 will power down cores that it feels are not needed. From this thread, I found this fix. It's a simple value adjustment in the registry, and Win 7 will take advantage of all your cores all the time. I am running an i7 920, and it was noticeably perkier once I made this change. Granted, you have fewer cores but it is still worth a shot. (You can see if Win 7 is parking your cores by looking at core usage in the task manager).

Try 185.85 driver release. Seems to be the only one for me on 7 64 that allows normal FPS, everything else (including the latest) cuts it in half (at best).

Ain't got no gas in it.

Might be his connection or the server can't handle the load.

Its their side, not your friends. The rig in my sig does about the same.

Three things:

1 - turn off your mods. Better yet delete the directory of them all. I know from before that Questhelper would literally eat half your FPS at times (although dunno how many people use it after the in game stuff) but some mods eat CPU cycles like candy.

2 - CPU > GPU for WoW. Doesn't take much for maxing out the eye candy, then it's just how much AA do you want? Speaking of which, the spell effects can slow you down if there's a lot of them at once, like 25 man raids and esp. with AA cranked. I have a simular system as the OPs buddy (Q6600 OC'ed to 3.2Ghz, GTX 280) and my graphic options are set to maxxed out and 2xAA...because of the crazy spell effects. I guess I could just leave the AA a lot higher and down it for raids but lately on my realm with the insanely long log in queues it literally could end your night to log out for a graphic change and get stuck in a 1-2 hour queue. Shadows also kills FPS for some reason, although fine on my desktop, my laptop (Core2 2Ghz 9600M GT 4gigs Ram) simply dies and rolls over. I'd try downing the AA to see how it behaives.

3 - Lag > All. WoW's code is all based on waiting for the net info to bounce back and forth before it lets anything else happen. Your (and everybody's) FPS drops so much in Dal not because you can't push that many polys of people running around but because it's not updating your end before it does everybody and there's a lot more bodies to update. Back to my systems again, Lagaron runs worse on my beefier desktop at my apartment then my laptop does at my parents place because my parents don't have the same shit ass bandwidth I do.

This is what happens when you're bored at work. The blunt version is to turn off mods, try turning down/off AA and other then that you're screwed in Dal unless you wake up at odd hours.

set shadows one notch below max. That makes a massive difference. I have everything else maxed.

I haven't had any issues with mods reducing my FPS and I run a bunch of them.

I got a Core i7 recently and my FPS in Dalaran never drops below 30fps. Usually hangs between 40-60fps.

Mad Cat said:

In addition to what Suprfire said, try unparking your cores. Bascially, Win 7 will power down cores that it feels are not needed. From this thread, I found this fix. It's a simple value adjustment in the registry, and Win 7 will take advantage of all your cores all the time. I am running an i7 920, and it was noticeably perkier once I made this change. Granted, you have fewer cores but it is still worth a shot. (You can see if Win 7 is parking your cores by looking at core usage in the task manager).

Click to expand...

I never had to do that. Win 7 uses all my cores without having to do that.

For WoW I did this;
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820516737&postId=198185845842&sid=1#1

And that fixed it's issues.

Turn shadows as low as they go. If the hard drive is chunking away while Dalaran is loading and while he's walking around, he needs a better gaming drive. Old-ass 320GB .10 drive is slooooow. Also try Archer75's fix above (15 for a quad core)

Also playing in windowed mode can bone your framerates.

Numan said:

Three things:

1 - turn off your mods. Better yet delete the directory of them all. I know from before that Questhelper would literally eat half your FPS at times (although dunno how many people use it after the in game stuff) but some mods eat CPU cycles like candy.

Click to expand...

This is huge and so few people do it. They just assume that pile of mods is not taking up any resources, meanwhile its hacking their frame rate by 50%... This and lowering shadow quality have definitely had the biggest performance impart for most people in my guild.

Too bad the game does not include a usable benchmark tool.... It would be great for people to see results like "This is your game at default settings VS this is your game with you 75 mods enabled and graphic settings maxed out"

Archer75 said:

set shadows one notch below max. That makes a massive difference. I have everything else maxed.

Click to expand...

I second this. A notch below maxed will give you good shadows on buildings as well as your toon, but there will be a short radius where other toons and objects get shadows. Maxed out shadows will put shadows on almost everything in your vision.

EDIT: However, I think the FPS drop mainly comes from the lack of CPU power or network latency. Dalaran is the current prime example of this.