Poor FPS?? Problem

[Voyto]

Hi there, ive been experencing this problem for a while now and my friend has just started to get it on his machine so i thought id post on here to see if its a common thing and there may be a fix?
I play 1280x1024, pretty much all setting maxed out, vsync off (have tryed it on, still get the problem) and i get about 100 - 120fps according to titan bar.

Randomly, doesnt have to be a busy area or hard work for the graphics card, i will get very bad jerking on the screen, almost unplayable, as if something intensive is loading in the background, but it isnt? The titan bar is still showing about 60-70fps which is still good.

To sort this problem, i just minimize the window, and restore it straight away. Put my fps back upto 110ish instantly, and stays that way for about 5mins, until the problem repeats itself.

Me and my friend are both on Vista, but this has done it to me on XP before

Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 @ 3.0GHz
2GB DDR2
7800 GTX 256MB
Hit. Deskstar 320GB
OS: Vista Business

Running all the latest drivers from all manufacturers websites.
I do run a few addons...are there any that are known to cause this issue??

The fact that minimize + restore fixes the problem is what confuses me.

Thanks all :thumbsup:

[Kalos]

Those frame rates are completely normal. If they were going to 30 or below, problem time. But that's literally nothing noticable, or shouldn't be noticable. Remember, Television screens have an output frame rate of about 24/26. Even if you get down here, you should barely seen any decrease in speed from 180 frame rates.

This isn't a graphics related slowdown. This is an OS issue. Welcome to the Vista Open Beta. As far as I can tell, it sounds like Ram use maxing out and files hitting the swap file, a very slow process that effects low ram systems; with vista, nothing is enough. If it did it on XP however, it could be the ram is really slow, poor timings, low frequency, and was bought fairly cheaply. That would hurt performance equally.

[monolith]

I leveled my shaman to 38 on an athlon 2500XP with 256 meg of ram, running asynchronous to the main system clock. This used to happen to me a whole bunch, untill I went and got a gig of ddr, but since you're running on a system that is undeniably superior to mine, I don't know what to tell you other than the things I used to make wow playable on my system before I upgraded the ram.

Close things. Go through all your icons in the system tray. If they're not neccessary for what you're doing, or vital for system stability, close them.

I know most of us have up-to date Anti-virus software, so that's probably not the case. Perhaps you could look for updates before starting a session, then kill of the auto-update procedure?

On an XP system i could give you a few more tips, such as setting the pagefile size manually. The one thing that always slowed me to a crawl was XP updating the size of the pagefile. Of course I have exactly and precisely no experience with Vista, so so much for that.

[Penny]

I'm thinking you need 4 GB ram.

Yes, I'm serious. 4 GB seems like overkill and if you were running under XP it would be, but you're not - you gotta slop the hog of an OS so it will let you play.

[Kalos]

I'm thinking you need 4 GB ram.

Yes, I'm serious. 4 GB seems like overkill and if you were running under XP it would be, but you're not - you gotta slop the hog of an OS so it will let you play.
Only problem with that is, Vista can't see 4 gig. You can physically fit them in the slots on the motherboard, but the OS will see a maximum of 2.7-2.9 under regular 32bit versions.

You'd need a 64bit Vista for it to ever have enough ram to feed it properly.

[Voyto]

I thought it might be RAM at first, but why would minimizing and restoring the window make it run perfectly again for another 5mins or so? :S

[Kalos]

Because windowing and pulling back to the forescreen shuffles the priorities. WoW starts as Primary Priority. Then in the background, Vista decides to fill up all available memory. It stores your most "Likely choice of programs for next booting" in all available ram. Now when WoW boots, it chooses a certain amount of ram and basically says "Hands off, don't touch these allocations, I'm going to be addressing them" after a few minutes, Windows detects the Ram being unutilised. This is because Wow ram use fluctuates, sometimes it uses alot, sometimes it doesn't use as much. So it detects this as not actually being used, and reassigns it. Therego, when it is actually recalled by WoW into service, it's not available, it has to tell the OS, OS has to clear the Ram, Ram has to be readdressed, Ram has to be filled with Wow data, while finding a place for the old data, page file goes into overdrive trying to cope.

This is absolved by Windowing, giving the system time to catch it's breath, and whenever the dominant program is windowed/bounced back up it reaffirms it's demands, the OS clears them, the cycle starts again. This is one theoretical way to which the problem could be being solved, reaffirmment of allocations to WoW being enacted by the windowing action.

This is solved by not more ram, as Vista is trained to fill it all up no matter what with utterly useless garbage, but faster ram. This can be achieved by: A good motherboard. What I mean by this is Intel keep their memory controller there. You need a truely excellent one, not just "one that shall do". Next you need Ram. Good Ram, with solid timings and less than rock bottom frequences. Running around at 533Mhz with a latency of CAS-5 is pretty bad.
Aim for 667 or 800 mhz on the frequency, Cas-4 as it's DDR2.

You'll most likely want to go for the motherboard option, it's cheaper for a start. Obviously not too cheap, else this symptom will just repeat itself. Poor memory controller and bad memory management by the OS=Sucky play experience. The new Mobo would at least take that effect away, a good addresser shouldn't be releasing Ram for other uses until it's given an all clear, not just waiting for X amount of time and assumes it's going to be unused.

[sycamore]

I know most of us have up-to date Anti-virus software, so that's probably not the case. Perhaps you could look for updates before starting a session, then kill of the auto-update procedure?

That's exactly what I was going to suggest, my antivirus (mcafee, supplied free by work which is why I use it) completely takes over the whole system when it decides to run a scan. Frame rate is still showing well when I use ctrl-r, in the 30s-40s, but the whole game is juddering and what I'm seeing is near 1-2fps. The sound gets screwed up, everything just grinds to a halt to let mcafee scan.

Edit: what Kalos says about the OS shuffling priorities for the ram (bad paraphrase, sorry) makes a lot of sense, if I alt-tab and then restore when the above is happening, everything settles down again.

[Penny]

Only problem with that is, Vista can't see 4 gig. You can physically fit them in the slots on the motherboard, but the OS will see a maximum of 2.7-2.9 under regular 32bit versions.

You'd need a 64bit Vista for it to ever have enough ram to feed it properly.I pretty much stick with UNIX, so it could be you're right, but here's what I got from the horses mouth...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/64bit.mspx
Memory specifications

All editions of Windows Vista 64-bit provide increased memory support beyond the standard 4 gigabytes (GB) available with 32-bit editions. Refer to the specific edition of Windows Vista 64-bit to determine maximum memory capacity.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523
Microsoft's on-the-box minimum RAM requirement "really isn't realistic," according to David Short, an IBM consultant who works in its company's Global Services Divison. He says users should consider 4GB of RAM if they really want optimum Vista performance. With 512MB of RAM, Vista will deliver performance that's "sub-XP," he warned.From this site, I see that Windows Vista Starter has a 1 GB limit, the others are 4 GB for 32 bit versions up to 128 for Vista Ultimate.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa366778.aspx

Here's how to tune for 4 GB in Vista:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa366521.aspx

[Kalos]

I pretty much stick with UNIX, so it could be you're right, but here's what I got from the horses mouth...

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/64bit.mspx

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011523
Well yes, that link is in complete agreement with what I said. The operating system can only see 4 gig of memory totally. However, memory does not mean just RAM. The total applies to more things it needs to cover memory on the sound card, the video card, the hard drive's cache, reserved/protected memory addresses; any physical memory caches including the Ram; and the page file. It's not just counting the ram ammounts, it's all memory in the computer being addressed. You can't physically address more than 4 gig of data using a 32 bit code, so you could address 4 gig of ram, but that'd mean you'd have to be unable to address all other caches of memory, and that's impossible. The maximum amound of RAM that can be addressed to under a practical system is 2.7 GB, the rest is sucked up by other needed memory addressing. Everything needs a unique memory allocation to be addressed to, addressed cannot be shared, but they all come under the same limit.

Talk is good. Practical simulations and demonstations have shown the limitation. Just like XP can only address 3.2 gig of Ram, because of there being other features needing memory addressing. The 4 gig limit is a provision for all memory utilisation, not just Ram.

For the record, that last "Tune" doesn't open up a full 4 gig for utilisation either. Careful reading clearly indicates that it will only open by so much, the system relies on the "wasted" addresses, they can't simply be taken away fully. It's impossible to get a full 4 gig like I said. The number I gave took into account of this feature. Normally Vista is capped at two gig of Ram, only after whacking away at it for hours could 2.7 be achieved. That's how you tune higher memory allocations, not to actually acheive complete access.

[Voyto]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte DS3 965P Chipset which is ment to be pretty good. And my RAM is Geil PC6400 800MHz @ 4-4-4-12 so i donk think thats causing a problem?

[Kalos]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte DS3 965P Chipset which is ment to be pretty good. And my RAM is Geil PC6400 800MHz @ 4-4-4-12 so i donk think thats causing a problem?
What brand of Geil? Have you tried substituting it with other Ram sticks?

[Voyto]

Ultra i think? (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-058-GL)

My friend is having the same problems aswell, i thought maybe it would have been a common problem.

Ill try taking off all my addons and see if any of them sort the problem. Could it be one of them is a sort of memory leak?

Thanks for all your help so far by the way :)

[TRIAIN]

Voyto, it very well could be the memory. Geil doesn't get very good reviews from what I have seen.

I have the same mobo as you, the Core2duo E6400, Nvidia 7600 GT, and also 2GB of ram but mine is Wintec 800Mhz 5-5-5-15. I have had zero problems with any kind of framerate drops. Of course I recently dumped Vista and went back to XP MCE2005.

You may also want to check your settings in your video card's drivers. There's ALOT of tweaking that can be done in there and some of it says it is not recommended, and I agree with what they say...

Also, I completely disable my virus scanner when I play, but even when I am transcoding a video and streaming it to my daughters room or the living room, while I am playing, WoW still plays flawlessly. So check the RAM...

[sudyke]

Why is it that my build is almost the same as yours, and I only get half the fps you get?

My build is:
C2D E6600
AsusTek GeForce 7950GT
1GB 800Mhz (not some good brand, can't remember the name)
Asus P5B Deluxe
Windows XP Prof. SP2

No tweaks, OC.
Not jealousy, just wondering...
My fps is 70 rarely dropping to 60. Could it have a connection with my internet being laggy (640ms)??? Also I've heard that WoW had problems with dual core CPU-s. Have they fixed that? It isn't supposed to go above 64Fps.

[Kalos]

1. Your FPS are fine, stop obssessing. Televisions work on 24 frames per second just fine. You're doing over double what you need to even see the difference. There's no point cracking heads over it.

2. If you insist on Analysis. The company that produce the card matters more than the card's designation. A 7600 GT from one company will put another companies' 7800 GS to shame, and the opposite can be found. ASUS make great motherboards, some of the best available, but they produce crappy video cards, the lowest performing often out of thier peers with the same name. BFG, Gainward, and to a lesser extent XFX. These are common high scorers. Remember, the only Nvidia bit is the GPU. The rest of the card is bashed together however the manufacturer pleases, sometimes as cheap as possible with poor circuitry, faulty interfaces, and poor quality or lower grades of Video Ram. ASUS are not famed for good graphics cards.

3. You card is essentially two GPUs, a form of internal SLI is used. Some games work better with SLI, convincing many games to buy two cards. Other games don't utilise or even work worse with two graphics cards. Normally if WoW was the Dominant game on your system, and you have seperate cards in SLI, I'd recommend you pull the link and play with only one card for better performance. That's not an option on that card.

To sum up, framerates are fine for this game, they never fly high typically compared to other games. It's well above visability level, and the GPU is modern. However it was kitbashed by a manufacturer not known for quality GPUs, which probably does hold it back somewhat. And it's in perminant SLI configuration I believe, and this game doesn't like SLI.

[sudyke]

I wasn't being upset with my performance, it's more than enough I know, I was just wondering....
Thx 4 the quick insight.
I didn't think that two brands would have that big difference. I bought AsusTek, because I thought that it would work better with the motherboard... lol I was wrong... :D

[Mercot]

I'm reading this thread and lmao.
Not at you guys. It's just that I recently upgraded my RAM and video card to 2 gigs and an nVidia GeForce 7300, respectively.
I was previously on 1 gig with a GeForce 6100. I was getting a MAX of 13 FPS, and it would drop to 5-7 when running through a forest or flying. This was my WoW experience until yesterday.
Now my lowest framerate is 33 and my average is 55-66. My jaw was on the floor for the first hour I logged in with the new specs.
I just think it's funny how some people never realized what they're missing with "low-end" hardware.