Upgraded Vcard and no performance increase in WoW.

M

mr. nails

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 14, 2003
Messages
287
so, i had an 8800gts g92 512mb vcard and i upgraded to a gtx285 1gb vcard. i have my res to 1920x1200 and all settings on high. this includes the shadows on high as well (now).

i was getting 30-60fps (before shadows) with my 8800gts and i'm still getting 30-60fps (after shadows) with this new card. now, the game does "flow" better if u will, but by the frames i'm getting it doesn't seem like the new card really helped a lot.

if i run vantage benchmark though it does in fact shine there. i was getting 7k sumthing and now i'm getting 14k sumthing. so, the card helps with gay benchmarks, but not really my game.

could my psu be the problem?
 
no way. do you have vsync enabled in the game or control panel? i think the 285 is not one of the cards that are simply renamed 88xx or 98xx cards so you should see an increase. do you have any other games you can compare with?
 
Sounds like V-Sync is on since you are topping out at 60fps.
 
vsync is on, but does that matter? i'm not complaining that i'm only getting 60fps. i'm complaining that i spent $350 on a card just to enable shadows. to see my game drop to 30fps is depressing.
 
It's WoW. It suffers from serious graphic engine flaws that Blizzard will not admit to. Back when I was playing it using a 4870, I had to have a fair number of settings turned down to keep it smooth. A great number of other people have the problem, and back when I was still perusing the forums, Blizzard was still nicely deleting threads about the issue.

In other words, take any performance you get in WoW as a gift, you simply have to accept what it decides to give you.
 
MisterSparkle said:
It's WoW. It suffers from serious graphic engine flaws that Blizzard will not admit to. Back when I was playing it using a 4870, I had to have a fair number of settings turned down to keep it smooth. A great number of other people have the problem, and back when I was still perusing the forums, Blizzard was still nicely deleting threads about the issue.

In other words, take any performance you get in WoW as a gift, you simply have to accept what it decides to give you.
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lol, i like that answer. thx. :p
 
mr. nails said:
vsync is on, but does that matter? i'm not complaining that i'm only getting 60fps. i'm complaining that i spent $350 on a card just to enable shadows. to see my game drop to 30fps is depressing.
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Of course it matters. V-Sync will sync your framerate with your monitor refresh rate to prevent screen tearing. Your monitor's max refresh rate is 60Hz. Therefore the maximum FPS you're going to get is 60.
 
TotalLamer said:
Of course it matters. V-Sync will sync your framerate with your monitor refresh rate to prevent screen tearing. Your monitor's max refresh rate is 60Hz. Therefore the maximum FPS you're going to get is 60.
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i understand that and yes it does do that, but that's not the problem. having 60fps was never the issue.

either way, it seems WoW isn't coded very well and no matter what current vcard u have u will have not so good performance.
 
TotalLamer said:
Of course it matters. V-Sync will sync your framerate with your monitor refresh rate to prevent screen tearing. Your monitor's max refresh rate is 60Hz. Therefore the maximum FPS you're going to get is 60.
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What he said and WoW is a CPU bound game to boot. I went from a 8800GTS 640MB to an GTX260 216 went up by 50%, not around the 100% mark which is what that upgrade should have been. Graphically, WoW is what it is(5 years old). My 9800XT ran it great back in the day. Northend is a little more taxing, and should be in this day. The Shadows setting is a joke. My game would have them on full settting and show 80fps. Problem was it was stuttering everywhere I went. Shadows are borked and wasn't needed. Upgraded background textures would have been nice, but no, had to throw shitty shadows in there. Cheap graphical upgrade.
 
I just upgraded my video card as well to a BFG OC+ which is the 675mhz version. I must say WoW runs a lot better now with the settings maxed (I dont have view distance maxed because I feel thats not needed for the performance hit it gives you) vs my 8600gt. If you turn the vsync off itle allow your fps to go higher which is what I like to see, just how high they will go. The game runs really smooth though on my e6600 @ 2.88ghz but some places still slow down like in dalaran when a lot of players are there to like 25-30fps which is just the way the game behaves. They are actually adding more shadows in the upcoming 3.1 patch and a few more graphical enhancements, I hope they continue that trend with future updates.
 
mr. nails said:
now, having said that. would u or any1 for that fact know if WoW benefits from quad core cpu's?
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It does, but not very well. You can try modifying your config.wtf file to include the code

SET processAffinityMask "15"

It may already be in there, if it isn't, just add it onto the end.
 
Wow is a CPU intensive game. You didn't know that? Most MMO's are. Guarantee you would of saw a performance boost with a CPU upgrade. Most MMO's you do.
mr. nails said:
now, having said that. would u or any1 for that fact know if WoW benefits from quad core cpu's?
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No but a fast 3 ghz core 2 would be great. Can buy one for around 150-180 or so. A quad you would need to spend 300-400 to get around 3 ghz without OCing.
 
Doesn't he have a 3 GHz E8400 already?
Run that up to 4 GHz'ish and see if you have an improvement. I have no idea about CPU performance in WoW, but it's worth a try based on what others have said.
 
Yes you got an improvement in speed. You didn't run with Shadows at High before and now you do but the performance stayed the same so that tells us you offset part of your performance increase with better graphics...

Now disable Vsync.
 
bigdogchris said:
Wow is a CPU intensive game. You didn't know that? Most MMO's are. Guarantee you would of saw a performance boost with a CPU upgrade. Most MMO's you do.No but a fast 3 ghz core 2 would be great. Can buy one for around 150-180 or so. A quad you would need to spend 300-400 to get around 3 ghz without OCing.
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Not in this case. Hes tapped out his hardware and the engine is just showing its flaws now. The biggest issue with wow is you have 2 things going against you. 1st you have actual the actual rendering on your side, which would be butter smooth at the highest settings if it weren't for #2. 2nd is the fact that Blizzard's hardware (even though im sure its top end) cannot keep up with your hardware. There are too many people on their servers and your system takes a hit for it because its not sending the info fast enough to your computer to work with. A great example of this is Dalaran. There is NO reason why you should take a FPS hit like you do in that place. If you log in during off hours like early morning, you can pull well over 60fps easy on weaksauce hardware. Remember how Shat used to be? Go back and be amazed at your silky smooth capped solid 60 fps.
 
Thats because you have a lower number character polygons to draw... Not because of network lag.

If what you said were true then moving the camera around would be very smooth but you'd just see people warping around when they move. But the camera movement would be smooth.
 
WoW is more CPU bound - the textures are not demanding at all. Things like draw distance (which they increased) and shadow quality (which they added) are CPU driven much more than GPU. So are crowds of player characters in a city or raid situation. Hence you're seeing very little improvement with your upgrade. Play a new, graphically intense game and you'll see what you spent your money for. ;)
 
I have a 4870X2 and [email protected].

WoW is kinda a poorly coded game. With my system, I still have trouble in Dalaran. When I'm not moving, everything is great at 60FPS, but as I move around the city and as more stuff loads in and out, I'll see my FPS drop a bit then recover. It's mostly server side and I think it's based on the number of clients loading in/out and moving around you.

Kinda like when you're questing in the world, and you'll notice a split second of lag. I think that's the server syncing you and someone that's moving close by you. Well, I'm pretty damn sure because whenever it happens I go on guard (because I'm on a PVP server) and sure enough someone come trotting along (good guy or bad).

Besides Dalaran, most of the time you should be rock solid 60FPS...until something loads in (and something drops out). In the open world this happens much less often.

In instances, you should be at 60FPS all the time.

So when you're instancing or running around in the world, you should notice that your frames are much more stable. In Dalaran and possibly other big cities (I don't have any problems in Org or UC) things are still a mess.

Bottom line: It's a game architecture problem.
 
Basically there are a few things that limit a game like WoW

number 1 even more then videocard is!!! Hard Drive IOPS :p these games load a fair bit of small textures and suffer from the seek times of HDs

number 2 poor shadow implementation, with shadows on in lineage 2, even with a GTX 285, it kills my fps with more then 10-15people on screen

number 3 Vsync! if you're at 60fps, and your fps drops to say 58, vsync will drop your fps to 30(#s that divide into 60) unless you use tripple buffering :p(I think this is still true)

I picked up a cheap SuperTalent Master Drive OX 32GB SSD, and lineage 2, now loads(porting from town to town) and runs 100x smoother, it feels like it's on a different system.
 
WoW wasn't always this bad. I am running it on my current system and it wasn't until the patch leading up to WotLK that my system started to show it's age with it (well, except for Shatt). I can't wait for my new build but I'm also afraid that it still won't be enough for northrend.
 
I was about to say no one has mentioned hard drives yet until Digital Viper did. I have my game installed on a couple 500g drives in raid 0 at the fastest part of the drives and it really loads everything fast. Thats one of they key things to wow being smooth and not pausing a lot is having it on fast drives. Some people may mistake hard drive loading for fps or something and think its the gpu when it could be both. I also make sure the files get defraged regularly.

A SSD drive would be the optimal thing to have a game on but if you go and read Anandtech's new article on them, http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531 you will see its best to wait before buying them unless you have a cool 350 or so to spend on the intel one or the OCZ model they mention.
 
Not sure if anyone has said this but sometimes putting WoW in window mode - max, will help. I got a 4850x2 and it stutters all the time (my gtx 260 was better) so I'm the one who should be feeling bad and I get 20-40 fps most of the time with everything turned to max.

BTW coming off from a 8800GTS to a gtx 285, WoW wont really show you the "holy crap its amazing" feeling you expected. Try another game like crysis. But if you really want something that will shock you, go for a bigger monitor, not a new graphic card.

A new monitor will show you the difference, while a newer graphic card will run the game better/smoother.
 
darkvenge said:
I was about to say no one has mentioned hard drives yet until Digital Viper did. I have my game installed on a couple 500g drives in raid 0 at the fastest part of the drives and it really loads everything fast. Thats one of they key things to wow being smooth and not pausing a lot is having it on fast drives. Some people may mistake hard drive loading for fps or something and think its the gpu when it could be both. I also make sure the files get defraged regularly.

A SSD drive would be the optimal thing to have a game on but if you go and read Anandtech's new article on them, http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531 you will see its best to wait before buying them unless you have a cool 350 or so to spend on the intel one or the OCZ model they mention.
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I read anands article, but it really doesn't apply to a game drive, since there will be little to no writing done, you install the game and play, update once in a while and you're done =) I wouldn't care if it writes at 10mb/s :D as long as it reads fast

Funny thing is, even a fast CF card will run games like lineage 2 better then a regular hard drive
 
Same thing everyone else said, WOW is cpu bound, Supposedly core i7 is a much bigger upgrade for it than a graphics card. Can't say for sure though, just ordered one and a new mobo ram and 2 260;s to cover all the bases but supposedly even with this setup you will still max out at 60 fps in dalaran.
 
Stupid question but do you play in Fullscreen? Fullscreen = +FPS in most games. I mean real fullscreen, not the window is the same size as the screen.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Basically there are a few things that limit a game like WoW

number 1 even more then videocard is!!! Hard Drive IOPS :p these games load a fair bit of small textures and suffer from the seek times of HDs

number 2 poor shadow implementation, with shadows on in lineage 2, even with a GTX 285, it kills my fps with more then 10-15people on screen

number 3 Vsync! if you're at 60fps, and your fps drops to say 58, vsync will drop your fps to 30(#s that divide into 60) unless you use tripple buffering :p(I think this is still true)

I picked up a cheap SuperTalent Master Drive OX 32GB SSD, and lineage 2, now loads(porting from town to town) and runs 100x smoother, it feels like it's on a different system.
Click to expand...

So, for those of us with beast systems, would you guys suggest turning off VSync for higher framerates? I mean with VSync on obviously there wouldn't be any screen tearing, but with it off the FPS would go up. So which is bette?

And is RAID 0 worth it for WoW? I mean obviously it won't increase FPS, but there is a lot of load time in that game, so I'd imagine it would make a big difference. But I just want some opinions first.
 
Jon55 said:
So, for those of us with beast systems, would you guys suggest turning off VSync for higher framerates? I mean with VSync on obviously there wouldn't be any screen tearing, but with it off the FPS would go up. So which is bette?

And is RAID 0 worth it for WoW? I mean obviously it won't increase FPS, but there is a lot of load time in that game, so I'd imagine it would make a big difference. But I just want some opinions first.
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Well instead of raid 0, get at cheap SSD (not the first gen cheap)
like supertalent MasterDrive OX they're $85 USD and have a 150mb/s read(actual is about 145) this obliterates my RAID 0 with 2 7200.11 500GB drives that put out an average read of 190mb/s

The big issue isn't throughput I'm guessing that wow is similar to lineage 2 in that it has many small textures as the world is big and has many objects in it with many people using different armor and weapons, so the bottleneck is seek time and IOPS

with my current SSD, I can turn my screen fast without any fps lag, I can run into big crowds with much less fps lag, and I can walk through towns without much fps lag :) these things were not possible with my RAID 0 HD setup.

as for Vsync, you should just enable Triple buffering which would fix that issue.
 
SSD or a faster HDD would really help with seek times there as previous people have mentioned.

By the way, they are 3 new video options are coming in the next patch. Player textures, projected textures and a new notch for shadows. Tri-core support is added as well.

Highest shadow notch murders my fps on a gtx 260 core 216. I would keep it down at least 2 notches to keep it all smooth.

But yeah, you shouldn't expect too much coming from a 8800. Came from a 6800Ultra AGP and it is almost a different game with max settings and smooth fps while raiding.
 
WoW graphically lags up if there's lots of network lag because it processes the network data first and then draws the updates on screen. That's why it lags in Dalaran if there's people, not because it can't actually draw and keep up graphically.
 
Numan said:
WoW graphically lags up if there's lots of network lag because it processes the network data first and then draws the updates on screen. That's why it lags in Dalaran if there's people, not because it can't actually draw and keep up graphically.
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I don't think it's network data :) you're talking about a highly optimized net based game.

it's 99% a hard drive limitation

also for Lineage 2 shadows rape my 285 when in populated areas, I think it's the fact that there are so many things to draw and calculate shadows for.
 
Throw that CPU up near the 3.4-3.6ghz range and you'll see a 2-5fps gain on the low end.

The SSD won't make much of a difference.
 
bigdogchris said:
Stupid question but do you play in Fullscreen? Fullscreen = +FPS in most games. I mean real fullscreen, not the window is the same size as the screen.
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yes, i play in fs.

for the other questions.. yeah, i run triple buffering as well.

my raid 0 was just for the hell of it and not for WoW.

i haven't paid too much attention to ssd to know wtf, but aren't they too expensive for the space provided? i may be wrong. idk.

lol, and as for u ppl that states upgrading my vcard for WoW wasn't the smartest thing to do... well, i use my pc for tv, video, music, and "other" games as well. CoD4 is great, but i miss my SoF2 action. give me an updated ver of that and i'll be happy. have no idea on CoD:WAW.
 
$85 for a decent 32GB :) I'm happy with mine

Lineage 2 is an older game, based on UT 2k4/2k5 engine with mods to it(hdr and such) graphically, a 7900GTX is more then enough for it, I haven't seen any gain going from my 1950xtx to my GTX285 and even 295. The biggest gain I got was from the SSD
 
And there I was thinking that an online game relies on 1. a fairly good CPU, and 2. a half decent broadband connection?

Now if WoW was running entirely on your system say like Crysis, Doom, or some other game that doesn't rely on it's graphical content being fed from a server, then yeah a new GPU will make a difference, but seeing as a good portion of the WoW players probably haven't updated their system in the last four or five years, Blizzard would like to keep it accessible to them as well (or they would lose subscribers).

So basically I think your frame rate for WoW has hit the limitations of the game engine, not your hardware.
 
Outamyhead said:
And there I was thinking that an online game relies on 1. a fairly good CPU, and 2. a half decent broadband connection?

Now if WoW was running entirely on your system say like Crysis, Doom, or some other game that doesn't rely on it's graphical content being fed from a server, then yeah a new GPU will make a difference, but seeing as a good portion of the WoW players probably haven't updated their system in the last four or five years, Blizzard would like to keep it accessible to them as well (or they would lose subscribers).

So basically I think your frame rate for WoW has hit the limitations of the game engine, not your hardware.
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I doubt the game engine has a limitation of fps that are considered choppy 0.0
MMO games like any other games have all of the required files on your pc, the only thing that they receive from the servers are player locations / items / actions etc, nothing graphical, everything is stored on your machine and is loaded when when a player shows up on your screen.
 
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