Awful WoW performance

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Sparrow_69

Gawd
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Jan 20, 2004
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My buddy's bro's pc recently died, so we did a bit of a cheap upgrade for him. He didn't have much money, so the upgrade was very budget oriented. He's a big WoW player, so that was the main game we were looking at. He started out with an athlon xp 1800+, 768meg ram, gf3. We found a few really cheap parts and upped him to an athlon xp 3000+, 1.25gig ram, ati x850xt. The problem is, performance still pretty much sucks.

All new drivers are installed and components recognized correctly. When he's just flying around with not many ppl around, performance is in the high 30s. He's obviously being cpu limited because changing the graphics options to low, or switching to 1600x1200 from 1024 makes no difference in framerate. However, he usually games in 1024 with everything on. However, when he gets to a crowded area (the bank? lots of ppl, bunch of christmas trees around, I don't play WoW so I don't really know) performance drops to 7-8fps. Does this sound normal?

There are no excess processes or programs running in the background, so I don't know what the problem is. Another friend has a 7600gt (similar perf to x850) 2gig ram and e6300 and says performance in the same area is in the 40s. Obviously the conroe is a lot faster, but 7-8fps sounds really low.. I wanted to ask this in the official WoW forums, but I'm not a player, so this will have to do. Tks for any help
 
run some network tests, go to www.speedtest.net and see what kinda speeds you are pulling also check for latency, also is the computer behind a router or connected directly to the ISP modem?
 
He's directly connected to the net via cable modem. His speeds are pretty fast 9mbit dl/1upload but I did notice his latency was about 200ms or so.. Is that any good?
 
Sparrow_69 said:
He's directly connected to the net via cable modem. His speeds are pretty fast 9mbit dl/1upload but I did notice his latency was about 200ms or so.. Is that any good?
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Depends to where you are testing to. Anything in 100 mile radius should give you 20-40 latency.

Hmm, you should be getting higher FPS. On my old rig, Athlon 64 3500+ 2gb DDR400 x850xtpe I averaged 60 fps 99% of the time @ 1680x1050 maxed out. I do not think Athlon 3200+ is that much worse. Look into drivers, maybe run 3dmark06, run GPU-Z.
 
The problems you're listing sound like what I used to experience back when I played wow on a system with 512mb of ram. Seems strange through since you say he has 1.25G in there now. Is his hard drive chugging whenever he gets the low frame rate?
 
Odd I have been having problems with wow lately too. Nothing to this extreme but I chugg down when I get into a populated area more than normal. ALso, I have noticed that my video drivers crash when I alt-tab out of the game, subsequently having to reboot the computer because it am viewing at 800x600 with no graphics. Odd?
 
Mexicorn said:
The problems you're listing sound like what I used to experience back when I played wow on a system with 512mb of ram. Seems strange through since you say he has 1.25G in there now. Is his hard drive chugging whenever he gets the low frame rate?
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His HD does chug a bit, but it doesn't seem related to the low framerates in populated areas. Its just slow when there's a bunch of ppl on screen. I'm pretty sure he's being cpu bottlenecked, but 7-8fps seems really low. What do you guys think he should be getting when there's a fair bit of ppl on screen? Does 37-38fps seem about right when there is no one on screen?
 
Could possibly be a problem with the latest WoW patch. With my 8800 GT and 4gb of ram, I dip down into the 30s in a large city like orgrammer. Everywhere else its 60+.

Do a benchmark with 3dmark03 and compare your results with other computers with similar specs just to make sure something is not seriously limiting you.
 
Does the athlon xp have some sort of a clockspeed throttling measure if it gets too hot? I remember his cpu being around 50oC idle and 60oC load. Could that be affecting performance?

I don't know what his performance was like in open areas before the upgrade, but his performance in populated areas is pretty much the same as it used to be. I was expecting more out of it.

How much of a limiting factor should his cpu be? The WoW performance review over at anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2381&p=5 shows that the athlon xp is no speed demon, but his performance sounds very low.
 
Actually is sounds about right. On my rig (see sig) I get about 13fps in Stormwind with lots of people going around. Normally I get 30-45fps in the open.

FYI, CPU Throttling would be found in the BIOS.
 
Sparrow_69 said:
Does the athlon xp have some sort of a clockspeed throttling measure if it gets too hot? I remember his cpu being around 50oC idle and 60oC load. Could that be affecting performance?

I don't know what his performance was like in open areas before the upgrade, but his performance in populated areas is pretty much the same as it used to be. I was expecting more out of it.

How much of a limiting factor should his cpu be? The WoW performance review over at anandtech http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2381&p=5 shows that the athlon xp is no speed demon, but his performance sounds very low.
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Actually I used to run WoW on my old machine (XP2100, 1gb ram, ATI9500pro) with something like 20fps in populated areas and 40s everywhere else at 1280x1024.

I have an odd feeling the last patch screwed some things up.
 
The latest patch definitely did something wrong because my FPS has gone done by quite a bit. In Mt. Hyjal yesterday, my FPS dipped into the teens.

I'm running at 1680x1050 max detail, except 1/2 for terrain distance. Level detail is checked. Vsyc is checked. Triple buffering checked.

AMD 3800+ X2
4gb Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800
BGT 8800gt (675/1750)
 
Is everyone having these slowdown issues? A friend that lives nearby (e6300, 7600gt, 2gb) was getting in the 40s in the same area. I guess its possible they weren't looking at the exact same thing at the same time..
 
I've noticed my FPS dipping lately too, especially in areas like Ashenvale or the Eversong Woods. I was wondering what was going on.
 
Gabe3 said:
Could possibly be a problem with the latest WoW patch. With my 8800 GT and 4gb of ram, I dip down into the 30s in a large city like orgrammer. Everywhere else its 60+.

Do a benchmark with 3dmark03 and compare your results with other computers with similar specs just to make sure something is not seriously limiting you.
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I am having the same problem in Org. as well. With my system in sig I used to get 60 all the time. Now I go into a populated city and I get framerate dips.
 
braamer said:
I've noticed my FPS dipping lately too, especially in areas like Ashenvale or the Eversong Woods. I was wondering what was going on.
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heavily wooded areas yes, there will be some frame rate, turn down your LOD or whatever it is so it doesnt draw objects that are far away, alo i noticed on my system when im near a water fall i take a big hit, or when i was killing fel orcs and their ghost were around(floaty stuff in the air) i take frame hit too.
 
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