Is WoW Getting Worse With Age - 8800 Ultra

I am using 169.21 drivers and I have also tried 169.09 and 169.28. Is there something wrong with my rig or is this game getting worse with age? In tech terms WoW is pretty much a fossil and its eating my Ultra up in cities like Shattrath.

I have been on a hiatus from World of Warcraft since around May and back then, my computer setup consisted of:

Intel X6800 Core 2 Duo 2.93GHZ
Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX
2GB DDR2 SDRAM
X-Fi Creative Xtreme Music Sound Card

Now my system setup is as listed in my profile to the left <------

Back in May, WoW ran quite well, and I would say that I could maintain 60fps or more in 90% of all basic PvE situation and in most areas. Shattrath on the other hand would dip into the 50's maybe 40s. Well with this system, from what I have seen, many areas do in fact play fine, but Shattrath seems even worse than before, often dipping into 40s even 30s and it has made me wary of my new system.

Has anything changed that has affected performance in Shattrath? My server Lightinghoof also seem to have become a bit more populated and it does seem like there were tons of people in Shatt. Could this also be it?

Another area that seems randomly laggy and low in FPS for seemingly no reason is the Alliance area teleredor. I have no idea why

I am just trying to rule out my system and wanted to know if there was anything else to explain it?

I appreciate any suggestions that could be provided.

On a side note, I have two other questions. In SLI WoW seems to act a bit erratically. Is it still as troublesome as before?

And the new sound system, would enabling hardware sound speed me up or slow me down in comparison to before it was introduced?

 

I have the exact same problem. WoW actually ran much smoother on my 7600GT then my current 8800GTS ><

As for SLI, as far as I am concerned, SLI + WoW does NOT mix.

 

It's WoW. A lot of people have the same problem as well. With patch 2.3 FPS is "supposed" to be better since the client now supports dual cored processors, but it made it worse (at least for me). Lots of people are crashing and stuff too. It's just a huge mess.

It's not your problem

 

Alright, well at least I am not alone.

I didn't exactly know how to phrase this question, but in Shattrath city, is the GPU even much of a factor? Does the sheer number of people at times pretty much put all of the weight on the CPU?

I mean, its an 8800 ultra, and I don't say that to brag, but c'mon. Compared to my gtx its either same or worse now in there.

 

I have played wow from the get go now and have went through 4 diff cards playing it.. Ati x700pro, 7900gtx, 1950xtx,and my current 8800gt ssc. I play at 1600x1200 also. The x700 was a dog so ill skip that card. The 7900gtx would give me around 35-45 fps in the expansion (i always use vsync) and would drop to around 25 in shatt. The 1950xtx was better giving me 50-55 in the expansion territories and 30-35 in shatt.. The 8800gt is by far the better card giving me 55-60 in expansion and 40-50 in shatt. Shatt fps is entirely based on population and congestion issues.. Look at your fps when your standing around the battlemasters in lower city.. Its terrible because you have a huge combination of npc's and players close together.. The flightmaster in shat is another place for very poor fps. Its because you have about 20 npc's performing drills right next to 15 players taking off and landing there.. The biggest way to get better fps in shatt is to disable (uncheck) character shadows in video settings down at the bottom.. This will drop your fps by 20 in itself.. Its just too demanding on the card to run shadows on 30 npc's in a heavily congested area.. Also running a low to mid range sound card on all high settings will give you a fps hit.. Run the sound card on low settings if its onboard or early audigys.. Another tip is to run most things in Nvidia control panel on application controlled and a mixture between performance and quality. Running everything on max quality is tuff on any card.. Let the game settings make the decisions on AA and AF also..

 

lol alot of ppl go on and on about how wow is not very video card intinsive, but crank every thing to max, in game 8Q AA and 16 AF and mine will hit around 20FPS in shat.

 

Yep, definitely worse.

Still playable, but there's the odd few times you think good god.

 

Alright, now I am feeling a little better.

For the record, they should have just made two damn large faction cities in the Burning Crusade instead of making a syrup sweet cliche sanctuary. It may have served a purpose for the Aldor/Scryer setup, but it was a really bad coding idea in my opinion.

Actually, Shatt might actually be a whole lot better minus the needless excess of scripted Dranei soldiers running about.

Anyway, another question of mine. I have an X-Fi sound card, the Xtreme Music edition. With the new sound system implemented in WoW. Would I get the best performance leaving it is at software, or by enabling hardware? I've been curious about this.

 

well i use softwear and dont notice any change in FPS, but when i raid i use vent, and i turn sound off.

 

In theory, putting it on hardware would be best. But with WoW who knows O.O Also, I don't know if you guys noticed this as well or if it's just me but in Sound Options when you try to put the sound quality to "high", reset your client, check it again it goes back to "low" or the slider doesn't even show anymore. Kinda odd...

Also, the new WoW expansion is planning to have 4 entry points (2 horde/alliance, 2 aldor/scryer) so I guess that's something to look forward to if you plan on checking it out. They should of done that in the first expansion instead of cramming everyone in the portal imo.

But yeah, gaming at 1680x1050 with everything max I can dip down to like 20-30 FPS with a lot of people in Shatt.

 

Put your sound to Hardware Acceleration, and make sure you use Alchemy to adjust the sound back.

Especially if you're using Surround sound, it'll sound weird as hell without it.

 

2 or 3 patches ago blizzard removed sound acceleration from wow.
It's all software.

-scheherazade

 

I'm not too sure about that. If they removed it they would of removed the box that says Use Hardware.

 

My findings:

I don't think i have these issues at all?

Running 1920x1200 AAx4 and 60fps almost all the time (drops to 40 in crowded sitiuations), all settings at max.
Also have a lot of addons running, and if i turn these off, it runs even better.
I find that the multi core support made the game run much smoother than before. Also running with no hardware accleration in the Audio settings (vista).

/nexgen

 

My rig is mostly doing 60+ FPS at 2560x1600, max details + 4xAA except Shattrath where ti stalls quite a bit near the gryphons for example. Spell detail was upped in recent patches so max details will make game somewhat clumsy with a large raid doing lotsa aoe and camera is zoomed close. I had to disable triple buffering and vsync though. While they made the game very very smooth it resulted in BSOD quite a few times randomly. All in all there is still some work with wow-compatibility in current forceware.

 

I think its safe to say that the Burning Crusade just isn't as well optimized as the original game. I don't say this to bash, and I don't have any actual proof, but there are alot of areas in Outland that use special effects and atmospheric effects that were used in Azeroth sparingly. In Outland some of this is used to excess. I remember on my last computer my rates would take a nose dive in terrokar forest when my character was near one of the areas where light broke through the treetops. Zangarmarsh with its massive haze also caused some issues.

I have to say after playing around for several hours last night, Azeroth is 99% in the 60+ FPS zone. Even former lag cities like Stormwind and Ironforge.

 

what are you guys talking about. I am getting like 150fps most of the time. around 80-100 fps during heavy fights in battleground.

1440x900 res, max AA, everything set to max.

 

^

Thats b/c you got vsync off and not maxed out af/aa and lower resolution. Put that on and you will see what they see.

I tried the free 10 day trial thing old WoW players got sent some months ago and had 60 fps almost all the time, and in shatt 40-55 this was a while ago so the new patches you are on was not there etc.

1680x1050, all af maxed and all settings very high. I too was surprised I didn't cap out on 60 fps all the time in the new zones.

 

well there is a huge difrence in runing around in old Azaroth and 25 man Black Temple raid with 5 mages 2-3 locks AOEing every thing.

I get 60FPS with VS on all over the world, but during heavy fights it will drop to 20FPS.
I run 1680x1050 4aa 16af every other setting maxed out.

Back when WOW first came out i had a AMD Althlon 64 3200+ 1.5gigs of Ram FX5950UT and i got 75FPS 90% of the time.
I realy thing its TBC cause the lower FPS, now i did go from WinXP to Vista so that might be part of it.

 

i play wow like 60 hours a week so ill answer some q's for you. They redesigned the sound engine and took away hardware sound in 2.1 then added hardware back in in a recent patch. thats where most of your performance hit comes from. and all because they wanted to put an ingame voice chat system. Even though it was an "upgrade" says blizz. we know how blizz is though some of their "buffs" could be confused with nerfs pretty easily (i play a shaman).

As for SLi, its never worked and never will work, blues have stated it like 50 times. in patch 1.11 i think it was, the patch notes said "added SLi support" and by "support" they mean you can have SLi enabled without having to run maximized windowed mode like you used to. Reguardless SLi still doesn't use both GPU's in wow and i tried for months to plea with them and start an sli revolution. its just not going to happen. one GPU gets hot while the other idles. I was so pissed last year when i bought my 7950gx2 just for wow fps.

They just fixed the dual core stutter bug and dual core fps cap bug when BC came out, so don't expect any miracles.

But yeah Burning Crusade hurt a little too because they almost quadrupled the polygon count in the outlands zones by putting foliage everywhere. I would have much rather had better textures put in. My Gorehowl looks like a damn level 25 AH green.