WoW and SLi - /facepalm

M

MartinX

One Hour Martinizing While You Wait
Joined
Jan 23, 2003
Messages
7,184
Yeah, so I play WoW.

It's by no means the only thing I play, but it probably takes up about half my gaming time.

Not that long a go I upgraded my PC, I had been running a gtx 260(192), and I stepped up to a gtx295.

I was happy with the gtx295 for most things, but I found it disappointing in WoW.

Basically the sli didn't work, I got exactly the same fps as I did with the 260 (half a 295 or thereabouts), some quick research showed that this problem was pretty well known, and because of the tiny minority of sli users playing WoW, no one was looking to fix it.

It didn't bother me much, after all, even a 260 is more than enough to get great performance out of WoW, but it was still a minor annoyance.

Until today, when I found that simply unchecking the "reduce input lag" checkbox fixed it, fps just went through the roof and pretty much stayed there.

I don't know what "reduce input lag" is supposed to do, I played for a while with it on and with it off and could perceive no difference in the relative lagginess of any inputs at all, so it appears that it's sole purpose is to screw with me.

So yeah, if your sli setup seems uncharacteristically sluggish in WoW, try turning off "Reduce input lag".

The new shadows still take a big, big chunk out of performance at the higher settings though....
 
MartinX said:
So yeah, if your sli setup seems uncharacteristically sluggish in WoW, try turning off "Reduce input lag".
Click to expand...
Pretty sure that WoW doesn't make use of SLI, your performance would be the same with a single card.
 
WoW relies more on the CPU and FSB than it does the GPU.

Unchecking "reduce input lag" made a HUGE difference on my system after I got an Nvidia card and i'm not running SLI.
 
By googling, I found this description of what Reduce Input Lag does:

As for the fps issue, disabling it does sometime improve your fps. I'm not sure exactly why, but I think if you keep it turned on, WoW client will "waste" CPU cycle waiting for your input 60 times (or whatever your screen refresh rate is) in one second. That way as soon as you press a key, it registers it right away, hence called "reduce input lag". If you keep it unchecked, it will only register your input after it finishes what it's doing, most of the time rendering an object in WoW. Therefore keeping it checked will "delay" objects from being rendered, thus lowering your fps.
Click to expand...

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/t...824E4504AD.app23_02?topicId=11296522590&sid=1
 
I cant remember where I read it, but I heard if you play in windowed mode SLI will not work as well.
 
DASHlT said:
I cant remember where I read it, but I heard if you play in windowed mode SLI will not work as well.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's definitely unstable in window mode.

Okay to satisfy myself further I maxed out the graphics options and found some dense scenery to stare at and conducted the following experiment:

Stared at scenery until HDD was at rest, sli on - 70 fps.

Shut down wow.

Turned off Sli,

Restarted WoW and stared at scenery until HDD was at rest - 52 fps

Shut down wow.

Turned on Sli,

Restarted WoW and stared at scenery until HDD was at rest - 70 fps

Shut down wow.

Turned off Sli,

Restarted WoW and stared at scenery until HDD was at rest - 52 fps.

This satisfies me that sli works.
 
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