fps issues

[rgirty]

I'm not sitting in front of my wow machine, but it has 2gb of ram and some flavor of amd 64x cpu. I bought it about 20 months ago, and by no means is it a performance beast.

Up until the last large patch I seemed to be enjoying 20-25fps which is fine with me as a healer i'm pretty much staring at health bars fairly consistently anyhow.

Then, I bought a 20 inch lcd monitor, changed the rez that coupled with the patch and my healing addons left me with single digit framerates in many aspects of the game.

My wife plays, has a machine and has the same symptoms.

We're both using 256mb, 100$~ video cards from ati and nvidia respectively, they are nothing special. I keep the drivers up to date and use their control panels to turn everything to high performance.

I turn all game settings to the lowest.

Recently, i decided that it must be my video card itself trying to compensate for the new resolution, so I changed my play from full screen to windowed mode.

I made it about 75% of the normal size and saw my framerate return to 20+ in all areas and often 30fps in instances and other places that are important.

My question is, short of buying a new computer, new video card or other such is there any other way to squeeze more fps out of my machine?

I don't want to shell out for a new card/machine. I hope to buy 2 new machines prior to wotlk and am just holding out for that.

I know, details about the machine would help, i know my machine has a radeonx500? I think in it...cheap card always worked ok until recently.

[Pisken]

try to lower the bit mode from 24 to 16 ... worked for me when my gfx card broken down and i use the onboard crap , could even raise some deatail ingame and maintain stable 20+fps

and look into the driver itself and set all settings to "performance" instead of "Quality" (simple , but you could go in and tweak all settings manually but that can ofetn be worse)

[Artad]

Unfortunately whilst low spec cards were great for WoW pre BC they can't cut it with the improved graphics engine that BC uses. Out of interest what happens if you try going to Azeroth and playing there?

As an aside you 'should' be able to see a notable improvement by changing the card, what spec AMD processor is it? 3000, 4000 series (socket 939) or is it an AM2 processor?
Ram does play a large part, certainly increasing the amount of ram improves city fps (Shatt, IF etc).

One final thing for you before you have to spend money, are you running with any AntiAliasing or Anisotropic Filtering at all? If so turn it off, also turn it off ingame.

[PlayThemAll]

Can you shell out to update the card and then transfer it to your new machine when you get it?

I just upgraded my video card to a XFX 8800 GTS (nvidia chipset). I bought it off a friend that was upgrading to a better card.

My fps went from 20-30 to 55-60+ running with high texture detail. The card is amazing.

I drop down to around 25-30 in Shatt but havent noticed a drop anywhere else. I don't run instances but haven't noticed any lag in BG's.

My PC is a P4 3.0 w/ 4GB ram running XP.

[elsegundo]

i really dont know what type of video card you have. $100 card tells me very little.
As Artad said, Turn off AA and AF. This will take away a lot of the terrain details and a lot of the distance details (you'll notice it whe you run along a road, the road where you're at has decent detail, but the road ahead will look muddy, especially if the road is cobblestone. turn AA and AF back on and you'll see cobblestones to a further distance, thats pretty much it!). turn down details like spell effect details. keep your view distance at max if you're on a PvP server.

i also hear running it in windowed mode helps. as will turning on Windows Media Player before starting the game.

[rgirty]

I have AA and AF off and use the CCC to turn all the options to performance based.

I don't play in azeroth, this is the same setup i've been playing with for a year. Things have just slowed down lately..more addons and larger monitor with a new rez.

The card i believe is a radeonx500 series. I can handle most of the things that decrease/increase fps.

All video settings are turned to lowest setting, 16bit etc etc.. I think its just time for a new card.

I don't think there is really anyway around it.

[Kalos]

The higher res resulting in lower performance is definantly being caused by your weak video card. An upgrade would certainly help, and your other components won't bottleneck anything bar the high end peices like the 8800 GT cards and above. I'd recommend taking a look at the 8600 GTS, or the 9600 GT might be worth an eyeball.

With an x500, I don't think there are going to be many stops to pull out that'll get it going well on higher resolutions, it just wasn't designed for higher resolution work.

[rgirty]

Thanks kalos, do those have agp versions? I have 2 machines that should be ok I think but both need new video cards.

The other machine only has an agp slot.

[elsegundo]

i dont think they make AGP for the 8xxx series. they do for the 7xxx series, but PCIexpress is the norm nowadays.

[Kalos]

Thanks kalos, do those have agp versions? I have 2 machines that should be ok I think but both need new video cards.

The other machine only has an agp slot.
For an AGP machine I'd recommend this 7600 GS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125039 It's pretty much as good as you can get on the slot still at a reasonable price. elsegundo is right, they never properly developed an AGP bridge to based products upon for the 8 series, Nvidia have pretty much set out to kill off the interface for good from thier products.


My AGP rig just blew up two weeks ago due to someone's poor attempt at installing a second harddrive while I was away. I have just spend £125 on a 7800 GS for it too... It's all toasted, such a waste. At least they're paying for a replacement of my choice, buying all sorts of parts to rebuild a new one in the same case. Here comes PCI-E for myelf, about time too.

[rottentomato]

im currently having MAJOR frame issues being caused by the newest version of auctioneer

i used to run around 20-30 fps in shatt, now im lucky to get 8 or so

in raids it drops as low as 4fps

thats the only thing ive been able to attribute it to is the newest version of the program

gear is as follows

7800gs geforce by pny
3.2 ghz p4
3 gig ram
550w power supply


i should be well above and beyond the requirements for what i run, but am still having issues...

not 100% sure its auctioneer tho...

kalos?

[Kalos]

My first question is going to be "Is the performance loss solved when the Aunctioneer addon is disabled?" I'll draw more from that hopefully. Want to put the mod as the cause for certain.