an elusive WoW problem

[virtuzoso]

Hi! I am a WoW addict . I confess, need some help feeding my addiction though. THat's where you all come in, since Blizzard techsupport has been as helpful as a solar powered flashlight.


WoW runs fantastic for me- looks great, runs great, plays great . With one major exception---- unless im around alot of other people. a few people is ok, but mroe than 12 or 15 people on screen, and my FPS goes from my average 60-70 down to 5-15.

Now, I am no computer expert, but i am semi- competent. I know you gotta load those textures and such, but the problem is the frame rate never goes back up to normal ( as long as I am around others). Even if all the players are standing still, and i have loaded thier info and textures, etc, FPS and performance never returns even remotely close to normal. I expect a FPS hit, but my FPS never climbs back up out of the gutter.

ZOnes like Molten Core or Alterac Valley where you are always in the prescence of a large group of people make my PC seem like im playing on my 5 yr old HP with a radeon 7500 PCI card
THis is especially frustrating because I want to spend alot of time in those zones. This frame rate gets worse when in a raid group, and is accompanied by very sluggish performance.

Now for the techincal stuff:

CPU: AMD Athlon 3000XP Barton
( slightly overclocked to 2280 Mhz, in an attempt to fix this problem)

Mobo: ASRock K7S41, current Bios

SiS chipset

Radeon 9800 Pro ICEQ w/ fan
( also overclocked to get rid of this problem runs at 417/374, no problems)

1 GB DDR Ram PC3200

480 W Thermaltake PSU

various drivers, Omega 4.9, 5.1, 5.6 5.7
Catalyst drivers 5.1, 5.6, 5.7
Using ATI Traytool to overclock
game runs at 1024x768 @ 85Hz


Now I hae tried ALOT of different things to fix this, and at one point the game ran just fine in groups of people on my old 9600XT ?

Have tried reinstalling the game
manymany drivers
tried my hand at overclocking
custom UI or no custom UI, doesnt matter. problem persists.

memtest86 ran for about 3 hours, no problems

disabled background services ( i have 24 processes that run, 7 of which are user process, the rest are windows xp apps)

checked BIOS settings

PCI latency

AGP aperture

AGP speed

So if your feeling gracious and want to help a fellow addict out, im all ears Im out of ideas at this point.

I dont think i'm expecting too much from this machine, because at one point it ran well on a stock 9600xt, so.. not sure about what to do next.

CPU seems to be performing fine, everything else runs like normal. Overclocked or at default, this problem persists.

40-50 FPS in BF2
3Dmark03 scores a 5916


thank you so much in advance.

[Repo Man]

first of all i wanna congratulate you on a fine opening post, you gave us a lot of information regarding your problem whereas some people just post: i have a game "Y" and i got problem "X" HEEEEELP!

now then on to your problem, you've done a lot already but im afraid the only thing you really can do is to turn down some of the eye candy. with the rig on my profile if i enter alterac valley and see lots of people fighting, im looking at 15-25 fps so it aint that different for me either. you also forgot to mention your ingame graphics settings, one of the main problems might be that your card has only 128 megs of ram wich is enough for basic gaming these days but might be insufficient in rendering those large busy scenes.

i'd start from shader and glow effects as these can be a bit tricky for some older cards, i think there is an option to disable fullscreen glow so i recommmend you disable this and see what happens. also you might want to check your driver settings or ingame settings for anisotropic filtering and try turning it down if it is enabled and you havent done so already. i remember experimenting with the multisampling settings myself and i remember some of the settings giving me a bit funky performance so try those settings, the high and low ones and see which does wich.

try to enable Level of Detail, its default on and what it does is it uses low quality textures in objects or scenary at a distance but once you get closer the game changes to a higher quality texture instead of giving a smooth transition, it looks a bit dodgy but may improve performance especially on cards with less ram.

theres a few things you can try, report back with your findings

[virtuzoso]

Thanks for your reply. I forgot to mention what video settings, sorry about that. I've been reading these forums for a while, always been helpful stuff i've found. I know this isnt tech support, but i havent found solutions anywhere else.

As far as video settings, i've tried just about ever combination imaginable. They only have an effect on my top end FPS. THat is they determine if I can hit 80 FPS or if i can get 60. Regardless of the settings i have tried, the laggy performance remains the same, so I general opt to run so the game at least looks good when im alone. Even with every setting on minimum, this problem is just as bad as on my normal video settings. Full screen glow is always off, i dont like that effect much. And i have tried turning all the shaders off, and turning them off one at a time.

This is why this is such an elusive problem- nothing i have tried has had an effect. Combine that with the real test of this problem meaning being in a raid group ( Molten Core is once a week for me) or ALterac Valley ( low poulation server, so that is only once or twice a week) its really difficult to give anything a true test. FOr the most part, I change the settings then run around Ironforge durink peak times and watch my framerates. In heavily populated places, it will allways be 10-20.


I dont have any more ideas of what to check, I've already spent a nice chunk of change to fix this ( upgraded video card, ram and PSU) which i dont mind, since they are upgrades for all uses of my PC, but i really want to get this fixed. Im spending more time trying to get this fixed than playing, so starting to get annoying heh

TIA

[rsjrv99]

All i have to say is Yes. I have the same card as you and in Orgrimmar i get 20 fps tops. But i've learned to deal with it.

[virtuzoso]

It's not necessarily the low FPS i mind, its the choppiness that comes along with it. 20FPS is not all that bad for a RPG, but this is a very very choppy lag- it pauses and hiccups slightly about once every second.

Here's a very small video ( 2 MB) .wmv that shows this exact problem. The pauses you see here are not from crappy video compression- that is the sort of performance i get, even when everyone is standing still doing nothing. I dont believe that is considered "normal" behavior

http://files.filefront.com/laggy/;40.../fileinfo.html

[Repo Man]

ok that pausing looks really odd since your FPS seems to be pretty smooth. i bet that by now you've done the obvious wich is defragged your hard drive ( can help quite a bit sometimes ).

you might also reset your page file ( virtual memory size ) to a fixed value. there was a guide here somewhere but i cant find it anymore. anyways to play it safe you should set it to what ever size windows recommends but the trick is to set the minimum and max size to same value. first set it as no page file, then reboot your PC and then set the page file and reboot once again.

[edit] found a guide for page/swap file, some of the info might be a bit outdated but the principals are the same

http://www.rojakpot.com/default.aspx...ar1=0&var2=207

[rsjrv99]

Dude thats normal i get it all the time

[virtuzoso]

Thanks, Repo. THough i have defragged ( the page file as well) I will try setting it to system reccomended size now. If you can't tell, I have pretty much exhausted all my options, except for actually shelling out for a LONG long-distance call to thier techsupport. ( which I am probably going to be doing tommorrow )

ALso, that video i posted is one of the more tame examples, that pausing is generally much worse, especially if there is combat going on.

Originally posted by rsjrv99
Dude thats normal i get it all the time

Sorry, man. I don't believe thats normal. For one, it didnt do it at one point, and two, none of the other 50 people in my guild seem to have this problem, and after bugging the hell out of most of them, lots of them have even less capable hardware than i do and get better performance. Take my word for it, it doesnt "feel" normal at all.

Anyways, I very much appreciate the help. I might try to get some more footage so you can see just how bad this can get.

[Repo Man]

have you updated windows to service pack 1 or 2 ? a friend of mine had some nasty crashing after the latest content patch and after he downloaded SP1 ( or was it 2 ) the problems went away.

and yea that really doesnt look normal. the pausing i get is only when i enter orgrimmar/ironforge or some other big area, once everything is loaded all is fine.

[dzutrinh]

Try to reduced the Terrain Distance to lowest value. That will help a bit.

[virtuzoso]

yes, windows is fully up to date. actually, i had the day off to day, so i reinstalled windows and WoW.

same problem is there, no matter what. Unless my CPU and/or harddrive is having problems ( i dont think it is, everything else is performing normally) i dont really know what else to do.

as far as the video settings, i have tried everything-

no AA
no AF
terrain min
textures minimum
environmnet detail minimum
its on the lowest possible settings possible.
turned multisampling down
tried 16 bit color
even tried 800x600 @ 60 Hz

this is one hell of a frustrating problem because i get fantastic performance--- until i get too many players on the screen. I can be getting 100 fps, and turn a few degrees till there are 15 or 20 players on the screen, then all of a sudden, im at 15 fps.. even after i have fully loaded or cached the data from those players, the fps stays in that low range.

i'm not expecting ot to run perfect. Hell, i wouldnt know perfect if i saw it, i've never had a system that could run everything on max, and i dont expect this one to, but i can tell theres definitely something not right. what it is, i dont know... ive spent a ton of hours looking for solutions.

Maybe someone can reccomend a decent benchmark for CPU or HD testing? ive already tested my RAM and video card, and they did well enough i think. thanks for all the replies.

[Repo Man]

Originally posted by virtuzoso
Maybe someone can reccomend a decent benchmark for CPU or HD testing? ive already tested my RAM and video card, and they did well enough i think. thanks for all the replies.

heres an ok program to test some parts of your PC: http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=177

heres the link to futuremarks site, they do the 3D mark series. download 03 or 05 and give it a go if you havent done so already: http://www.futuremark.com/

you got any other games that you can use for testing ? if other games give the same sort of pausing, then theres definately something wrong with your setup.