What do I need to upgrade in order to play WoW (BC/WotLK) Maxed?

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I3eyond

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Jan 14, 2006
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When I played Burning Crusade before WotLK came out, I SWEAR I didn't have these problems. But, anytime I look up from the ground my framerates drop significantly.. usually down to around 30FPS (I have VSync on.) It almost looks like a game tearing would without VSync.

When I turn View Distance down, I don't have this issue. If I turn view distance all the way down, my FPS is locked at 60FPS.

I posted here because I'm guessing the answer will be graphics card. Perhaps memory, though? An application is telling me I'm only utilizing 80%, so I don't know. My goal is to play WoW completely maxed out without any issues whatsoever.

Sidenote: Why am I having this issue now? Did Blizzard change graphical capabilities in BC as well?
 
I3eyond said:
Sidenote: Why am I having this issue now? Did Blizzard change graphical capabilities in BC as well?
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Yup. Some of the latest WoW updates over the past month or two have boosted the graphics of WoW as well as system requirements.

What resolution are you playing at? As it stands now, I recommend more RAM and a new video card like the GTX260 or GTX280. Also, overclock your E6600 to 3.0Ghz as well to remove any potential CPU bottleneck.
 
I'm gonna add my 2 cents into this,

I'm running a EVGA 9600GT, 4GB RAM and a Q9300, onboard audio and a 22" Acer Monitor and run everything on max at a consistant 60fps with Vista 64 even in lich king


I'm thinking along with the other guys that your being limited by Ram and CPU more then anything.
 
I'm running a GTX 260 (check rig in sig), and I am consistently getting between 60 - 100fps anywhere I go - even in Dalaran/Org. This is with ALL settings maxxed. 1440x900, 4xAA. Everything else on High.

I agree w/ the previous posts - get some more RAM, and a GTX 260/4850 at the least. This should be more than enough to handle WoW imo. Patch 3.0 DID upgrade a lot of the Video settings as well. If you compare recommended specs between BC and WotLK, LK's specs are considerably higher.
 
I was playing this fine on my Dell lappy (Core Duo T5500 I think, 2 gigs, ATI 1400x with modded recent Catalyst drivers) on the weekend but likewise I had to turn off shadows and have the settings down except for spell effects (you can't see any of the ground based stuff until a certain level) and textures I left on high. Played the exact same as it was with BC. I think to a point you need so much for CPU/GPU but after that then it's something like a 260 or other higher end things to crank it all to max and even then you will *STILL* get lag in crowded areas because everything is dependant on the netcode. Need to add a KillerNIC to the list! ;)
 
Need to add a KillerNIC to the list!
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or, from what I've read about the KillerNIC, you could just flush some money down the toilet and save yourself a bit of time.
 
An E6600 at stock speed isn't going to cut it if you want the draw distance slider at max. 3.2GHz overclock on that CPU would put you a lot closer to your goal and should be easy to achieve. I'd at least try it before spending the money on a new CPU. I don't think the RAM is going to make much difference unless you run a ton of RAM hogging mods.
 
Starcrossed said:
or, from what I've read about the KillerNIC, you could just flush some money down the toilet and save yourself a bit of time.
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Only WoW had an improved gameplay speed because the way WoW is coded is that the netcode takes priority over graphics. So if it's lagy in Dalaran then all the SLI'ed GTX 280s won't help your framerate after a certain point.
 
To equal the graphics settings WoW had before the 3.x.x patches, turn your Landscape View Distance down to about 60%. Set Shadow Quality all the way to the left (blob shadows). When I do that with either my 8800 GTX or GTX 260 my FPS goes back to what it was before.

Basically, dynamic shadows are new and landscape draw distance was greatly increased. If you run on "max" settings now your CPU is really getting a work out (yup, CPU, not GPU - both those new items put the strain on your processor more than graphics card). Also, servers tend to be much more crowded now. When you put two to three times more player characters in an area your FPS will go down.
 
Starcrossed said:
or, from what I've read about the KillerNIC, you could just flush some money down the toilet and save yourself a bit of time.
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I can think of worse things to spend money on TBH.
I personally don't want a killer NIC, but it does indeed make a performance difference in many applications, its not much of an improvement though, and its really application specific on if it will or wont help.
 
So even if my CPU is never maxing out it comes down to the overall speed of my processor being too slow to immediately load the things in the distance without lagging while doing so?

Overall, it seems a CPU upgrade is what I need the most. When I turn view distance down, it's not a problem, and you guys are saying the E6600 just won't do max distance since they increased the draw distance dramatically. Am I correct in saying this?

Is the E8500 the best I can do for the money? I'm not a big overclocker, and probably never will.
 
My experiance with WOW leads me to belive it is very CPU bound even with a good vid card. It diesnt seem to multi-thread to well. Multiple cores still help to run windows explorer etc around it.

Do you have, are you using a second monitor? Even if not make sure your set to single display mode in the nvidia control panel. That can make a huge diferance.

Having 4 gigs of RAM (or more) also helps. I suspect due to caching both within WOW and at the OS level.

Right now the only place I get any kind of lag is Dalaran, and that isnt bad. Not like the early Shat days.

The improvements to the game engine are nice. View distance is a biggie for me in a game. Fancy partical effects are good too :)
 
I3eyond said:
So even if my CPU is never maxing out it comes down to the overall speed of my processor being too slow to immediately load the things in the distance without lagging while doing so?

Overall, it seems a CPU upgrade is what I need the most. When I turn view distance down, it's not a problem, and you guys are saying the E6600 just won't do max distance since they increased the draw distance dramatically. Am I correct in saying this?

Is the E8500 the best I can do for the money? I'm not a big overclocker, and probably never will.
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WoW wont' take advantage of the slower quad cores so your better off with the faster dual core as far as WoW is concerned. WoW is no longer the stepchild of PC gaming that Joey the Little Gamer can run on his grandparents 5 year old Dell.
 
OmegaAvenger said:
I personally don't want a killer NIC, but it does indeed make a performance difference in many applications, its not much of an improvement though, and its really application specific on if it will or wont help.
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KillerNIC does make a difference...

...if your CPU speed is 1Ghz or less.
 
Update:

It took 5 seconds in BC going from zone to zone when, say, Shattrath City would pop up as you were flying into the zone.

So, I decided wait a second, this isn't normal at all...

So, I got off my lazy ass (sort of) and reformatted my Raptor for the first time in what I realized after doing it was probably 2 years.

The result? 30ish FPS to a smooth as butter 60 with Vsync on. Granted, I don't have view distance turned all the way up (it's around 75%), but as good as WotLK looks regardless, it's hardly necessary. Still, WotLK will drop to around 45FPS when I'm in a zone where you can see a LONNNG ways, but that's to be expected on my system. Though I don't know if it's as GPU or CPU related now...

And I have shadows turned down to 50%. But I can barely notice a difference anyway...

The bottom line: Go reformat! LOL :D
 
add another 2GB of ram and call it good. Also wouldn't hurt to OC that CPU a lil bit
 
Ugh, you don't need to upgrade anything. Not for WoW. Your system is overkill for WoW: WotLK. 30FPS is nothing to worry about. Once you're hitting low teens or single digits, that's when to consider upgrading. WoW will be dead by then, so there's no need upgrade from your current rig, ever.

If you really want to do something, just OC.
 
My rig in the sig chokes on Northrend. 20fps in howling fjord, 45-50 in dragonblight. But then again, running max settings 1600x1200 8xAASS 16XAF Trees seems to kill it the most, or looking at the front of any Inn.

Have an e8400 in the mail right now which should help. This game is just too nice to drop the view distance down. I could easily drop the AA down too, but I only gain about 5fps taking MS down to 1x. Not enough of a speed increase to see all those jaggies. Pretty sure the processor is the bottleneck. I dropped my old 8800gtx into my wife's machine and it runs much better than mine does now. (she's got a p35 board running an overclocked e6300)
 
WoTLK adds a ton of new stuff, one major being dynamic shadows but the ammount of dynamic shadows in the game isn't enough to choke an 8800GTX, the game is still CPU bound since it tracks every interactable object with in your characters bubble (that includes characters).

The bad side to the object tracking is it floods your PC with packets, KillerNIC has been proven to help ping times (faster load times into dalaran) by either prioritizing the stack or going above the windows network stack completely.

2Gigs can be enough for WoW but with how cheap memory is these days you could see a decent benefit by going to 4gigs as well.

You have a perfect CPU for WoW, the E8500 is a really good CPU as well, you will see a benefit there but thats also depending on your ping times, if you arent getting the info to your PC you will lag and frames will hurt. I didn't see you post your average ping, they moved the "Lag Bar" to the PC icon on your tray, but if you are constantly above 400 (like i play at a constant 500) no matter how well your machine is you won't see much of any benefit.
 
Trimlock said:
WoTLK adds a ton of new stuff, one major being dynamic shadows but the ammount of dynamic shadows in the game isn't enough to choke an 8800GTX, the game is still CPU bound since it tracks every interactable object with in your characters bubble (that includes characters).

The bad side to the object tracking is it floods your PC with packets, KillerNIC has been proven to help ping times (faster load times into dalaran) by either prioritizing the stack or going above the windows network stack completely.

2Gigs can be enough for WoW but with how cheap memory is these days you could see a decent benefit by going to 4gigs as well.

You have a perfect CPU for WoW, the E8500 is a really good CPU as well, you will see a benefit there but thats also depending on your ping times, if you arent getting the info to your PC you will lag and frames will hurt. I didn't see you post your average ping, they moved the "Lag Bar" to the PC icon on your tray, but if you are constantly above 400 (like i play at a constant 500) no matter how well your machine is you won't see much of any benefit.
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My ping is usually around 120ms....
 
WoW doesn't take advantage of quad cores, it prefers higher clocked CPU's to run better. WOTLK also wants a beefy GPU in order to run shadows and view distance and max. Shadows are the big killer, some area's in Northrend even my GTX 260 drops down to the 20's. Unless your running Vista 64bit, more RAM aint gonna really do much for you.
 
Atech said:
Actually it makes a difference on my Q6600, perhaps you should do some reading up about eg. Network Stack...
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How's it feel to know you could have just adjusted Windows' ACK response time or added a couple iptables/socat rules to any *nix based router you game behind and gotten the same performance benefits without spending $250 on fecal matter?
 
zbox said:
How's it feel to know you could have just adjusted Windows' ACK response time or added a couple iptables/socat rules to any *nix based router you game behind and gotten the same performance benefits without spending $250 on fecal matter?
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Ouch. lol
 
I dont know why so many people have issues with running WoW...Im using a slower CPU and an older video card and I still can get constant 40-50 fps most everywhere I go in WoW...the only issues i have with fps is if im town like shatt or if I alt-tab alot it seems to screw up my fps, But i believe thats due to a memory leak

Running a AMD 4400x2 (stock clocks), 3gb of ram and an old 7950gx2 video card.

I run WoW at 1650x1080 with everything maxed besides draw distance (60%) and shadows (just blob shadows)
 
With draw distance down and shadows off, you're running the same settings that were pre-3.0 patch. The OP wanted to know what he needed to do to run at max settings. Turn shadows and draw distance up and you'll see why people are having issues.
 
RiPpLeeFFecT said:
With draw distance down and shadows off, you're running the same settings that were pre-3.0 patch. The OP wanted to know what he needed to do to run at max settings. Turn shadows and draw distance up and you'll see why people are having issues.
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People just find it easier to bash WoW rather then actually do something helpful for a game they won't even touch let alone give advice about. :rolleyes:
 
WoW isn't as CPU limited as you might think. I run a rather old Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (@ 2.3GHz) with 4GB ram and a Geforce 8800GTX (621/1620/1026).

I run WoW at 1920*1200 with all ingame settings at max and with 8x CSAA (transparency AA on multisampling). WotLK runs largely ok for me except dalaran which is slow (15FPS). I average about 25-30+FPS in normal WotLK game areas which is perfectly playable in a game like WoW.

During my own testing i've found WotLK to be limited by my GPU, not CPU, even though i have a much older hat CPU than most people here. Tracking WoWs CPU usage while i game it only peaks at around 75% CPU usage, averaging about 60-65% at most times, it never reachs 100% at any time. However, overclocking my graphics card from 576/1350/900 to 621/1620/1026 has yeilded decent performance increases, clearly showing that i'm being held back by the 8800GTX and not even my 3 year old CPU.

Maybe at low res the GPU plays less of a role, but if you game at higher res with AA then WoW is 100% GPU limited, even on a 8800GTX. To get fully smooth performace at 1920*1200 with AA on max details you'll be wanting a GTX260 or 280 IMO. The CPU certainly is not the limit and after moving from 2 to 4GB of ram myself only a month ago, this also has no impact of WoWs frame rate, it only improved alt-tabbing speed.
 
People who pull <30fps with systems nicer than mine need to reformat.
Before I formatted, I was getting about 30fps, post format a solid 60 with vsync on. All settings as high as they will go except for shadows.
 
And the shadows cause a massive drop in frame rate, which is the reason why people get low frame rates, it's not for any other reason and people do not need to reformat over it.

The guy asked what he needs to have to run at full details. Not full details with the most demand features turned off, which is all most replies in this thread have been so far.
 
lloose said:
People who pull <30fps with systems nicer than mine need to reformat.
Before I formatted, I was getting about 30fps, post format a solid 60 with vsync on. All settings as high as they will go except for shadows.
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This should show that the game is indeed very CPU intensive.

Assuming you have draw distance all the way up, you perform better than me with draw distance at around 60%.

With shadows at 50% and distance at 60%, I do get 60FPS, but in Northrend it'll usually drop below, anywhere from 40-50FPS. And it's just not as butter smooth when I look up and pan around when the viewing distance is very high.

So:

Draw distance: The faster your CPU, the better. lloose has an 8800GTS, I have the GTX. I have an E6600 @ 2.4. he's at 3.0. There ya go!

Though, it's hard to confirm this 100%, as he has 4GB and I'm only running 2GB.
 
Another vote for more ram and new video card. You can try the ram first(another 2gigs for total of 4gigs) and overclock your cpu. Then if you see no improvement then you can get a new video card like GTX 260 or 4850.
 
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