Low FPS in Wow Question

[Confederacy]

Im having trouble with extremely low FPS in WoW 25m raids, specifically TOC.

Using a

-Radeon 4850 HD
-AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 3.0 Ghz
-4 Gigs of DDR3 Ram
-Asus M3N HDMI motherboard
-Seagate 1 TB hard drive
-650w Cooler Master Power Supply.


Outside of raiding i have to keep shadows turned off, but other than that i run view distance and partical effects on full.

Im wondering what my bottleneck is, and whether my best option is to Crossfire it with another 4850, or just pickup another card.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[hunter315]

What resolution are you running at? Try turning the visual effects down, if you dont get a performance increase then its a CPU bottleneck and a GPU upgrade wont help you. If your FPS increases then it is a GPU bottleneck and a GPU upgrade would help, unfortunately 4850s are getting extremely hard to come by.

 

[daedalus685]

Wow does not get a long with ATI cards in busy cities, but I've never had a problem with raids.

There are places in ToC with very dense spell effects, try lowering those, and shadows, first.

If you want an upgrade in order ot play at max all of teh time you will probably need to start with the CPU, then depending on resolution perhaps the GPU.

If you are on a 32bit (as you won't be using all 4gig on 32bit) system you might want to keep an eye on ram usage. Wow can get greedy with it, if you are having to page some of the data in a raid yuo will crawl.

 

[Confederacy]

Running it at 1280 x 960.

In raids i usually just turn everything down completely except particle effects i drop to about half and i have to keep projected textures on so i dont eat ***.

Im running 64 bit through W7.

 

[Confederacy]

Screwing around with it in dal, i went from 23fps with my normal high settings to 43 - 36 with everything all the way down.

 

[hunter315]

Particle effects actually both the CPU and GPU. Try just playing with texture detail, if you can floor that and get a big boost then yes a second 4850 would help but im surprised it doesnt fare better at that resolution considering it can run crysis on high at that res.

Found a nice benchmark, the 6000+ is 3GHz is that what you have? From the look of the chart an upgrade would probably help you significantly.
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,693737/WoW-Wrath-of-the-Lich-King-CPU-benchmarks-with-Phenom-II-and-Core-i5/Practice/

 

[ordos96]

Check if you have verticle sync enabled, if you do try disabling it. It is in the wow video settings. No matter what card i have ever had, my frames drop to 20-30 if this is enabled. Once i disable this my average jumps up to 60-80 depending on what card i am using with maxed out video settings at 1920X1080 (i think that is the resolution i use).

 

[daedalus685]

Running it at 1280 x 960.

In raids i usually just turn everything down completely except particle effects i drop to about half and i have to keep projected textures on so i dont eat ***.

Im running 64 bit through W7.

A 4850 is plenty at that resolution. More than likely your CPU is choking on some of the particle effects.

Upgrading the CPU would get you much more than another 4850, in fact I don't think extra GPU power will help at all.

 

[abracadvr8]

Not to hijack, but thanks for the settings info. I myself have been having some slowdowns and wasn't sure what settings to tweak.

I have a Q9300@2.5ghz, 6gb ram, and a Radeon 4830 512mb @ 1600x1050. I was eventually thinking of getting a 1080p monitor or dual 1080. Do you think the bottleneck would be more on the lines of the video card for me?

I have been thinking about upgrading, but I am not sure if/where I would see benefits.

 

[daedalus685]

Not to hijack, but thanks for the settings info. I myself have been having some slowdowns and wasn't sure what settings to tweak.

I have a Q9300@2.5ghz, 6gb ram, and a Radeon 4830 512mb @ 1600x1050. I was eventually thinking of getting a 1080p monitor or dual 1080. Do you think the bottleneck would be more on the lines of the video card for me?

I have been thinking about upgrading, but I am not sure if/where I would see benefits.

WOW is not multi core optimized. It responds much better to raw Mhz than a quad core. You are probalby CPU bound as well. WOW just doesn't use GPU resources well, and uses the CPU more than most games.

 

[ordos96]

As long as your latency isn't through the roof your hardware should be just fine for WOW. I would also look into what you have running while you are playing and what programs come on at startup, these can also make a bit of difference, but with 6Gb of RAM they shouldn't be doing too much to your preformance.

 

[Onyx2291]

Well WoW has a lot of texture to load for all the armor and stuff so I would say that it would benefit quite a bit from faster HD reads.

Especially going in and out of instances and traveling between them and porting around.