1fps during boss encounters in wow

blunty86

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2011
7
0
18,510
Hey ppl

Looking for a little guidance on improving my frame rate as it seems to have got beyond ridiculous.

Spec is:
Radeon HD 3850
Pentium D 2.80 ghz
DDR2 2gb 333 (in 2 1gb)
Dixonsxp rc4107ma-rs2h
Hitachi HDT721075SLA380 700GB
Windows XP Pro SP3

I have my graphics as low as they will go, and I'm talking as far as running 800 * 600 here, and i still get 1fps on some boss fights in 25 man. I'm not the most amazing person on pc's these days as I haven't really kept up to date on technology, but i'm pretty sure I should be able to run wow with this graphics card with at least 20fps. I keep a clean machine, generally running around 32 processes, have no viruses/adware/malware, at least according to avg, and the fact that most viruses are pretty obvious, and take me 10 seconds to just remove manually (i dont trust antivirus to be thorough, they are just an alarm system). My HDD is getting towards the full side at around 85% full, but isnt fragmented so shouldnt cause me problems. Basically I have ran out of ideas on improving it. My brother is under the belief that i need to change my CPU as mine is just 2 p4's slapped on top of each other, which is fair enough, but a second opinion would be nice before i have to fork out on a new pcu.

Thanks
 

blunty86

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2011
7
0
18,510
nope, dont crash at all to be honest. pretty sure my ram has no errors, wow is usually the first thing to be picky if it does.
 

blunty86

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2011
7
0
18,510
Ok thank you

So you're suggestion would be to upgrade the cpu and ram?

Ive been wondering if it would be possible/worth it, to overclock the cpu to tide me over until i have a little more cash and where i might find out about that?
 

daship

Distinguished
Basically you need, Motherboard, cpu, and ram.

If your on a budget I would look into buying a AMD dual core with hopes of unlocking 2 extra cores. If the budget allows you, just buy a quad core so you get 4 cores for sure.

No upgrade your motherboard supports will give you a better WoW experience.
 
Yeah, I think if you can scrape together $300, buy new mobo, CPU, and RAM and more than likely you can just reuse the rest of it. Maybe down the road if you can, buy a newer graphics card too.

Actually with just a quick look you could get an Athelon II X4, 4gb RAM, and a motherboard for around $250
 

fishing666

Distinguished
Jan 31, 2011
6
0
18,510
how are the temperatures of your computer? maybe your gpu is really dirty and it's not getting enough airflow to run on maximum speed
 

blunty86

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2011
7
0
18,510
It's a possibility, I dont have any software to test the temperature of the gpu, any suggestions?

My Hdd's are both around 30 c
 
One thing about hard drives they get slower the more you fill them especially when the drive is a boot drive that also has the swap file. When you do your round of upgrades get another drive for storage needs to help your current drive out a bit.
 

Griffolion

Distinguished
May 28, 2009
1,806
0
19,960
Sorry i haven't read all the posts, but looking at your system, you are getting massively bottlenecked by your CPU and RAM.

Considering the age of the overall system, it may be time to start on a new rig as there honestly isn't a great deal you can do to your existing one to remedy the problem you're having.
 


That's a very good point! At 80% full the transfer speed will be significantly reduced as it is at the small portion on the inside of the platter.
 
Your going about it wrong. Your CPU is bottlenecking you not the graphics you need to turn the graphics settings up in an effort to releive this problem not turn them down. Sounds wrong i know but at the moment the graphics is just throwing finished frames away while its waiting on the CPU.
If you give the GPU more to do then it gives some space to the CPU. It may not work it may be that the miss match is to great but its worth a try.
What about V-sync is that enabled ? you could try tripple buffering as well.

Mactronix :)
 
Your going about it wrong. Your CPU is bottlenecking you not the graphics you need to turn the graphics settings up in an effort to releive this problem not turn them down. Sounds wrong i know but at the moment the graphics is just throwing finished frames away while its waiting on the CPU.
If you give the GPU more to do then it gives some space to the CPU. It may not work it may be that the miss match is to great but its worth a try.
What about V-sync is that enabled ? you could try tripple buffering as well.

No, raising graphical settings will NOT help. The GPU will do more work, yes, but it won't take any work away from the CPU, so it won't help anything [and with only a 3850, probably hurt a bit]
 


I'm not entirely sure about that. At first thought I would agree with you, but let's think about this. If you increase the graphics, the GPU will be stressed more. This means it won't be able to output as many frames. Less frames being output means less data, and that might in fact free up some CPU right? I guess it depends, does the CPU try to throw as much info at a GPU as possible, and FPS is strictly related to the GPU's ability, or does the CPU only send as much data as the GPU needs?

Regardless, I think we can all agree that a new cpu/mobo/ram will make it workable.
 
@gamerk316

I didn't say it would take work away from the CPU, that in this scenario is not actually possible. What i said was "If you give the GPU more to do then it gives some space to the CPU"
I probably should have explained that its to give the CPU a chance to be able to keep up with issuing the instructions needed but I guess you could argue that what you are actually doing is slowing the GPU down to stop it overwhelming the CPU either way its the same thing and I wasn't going for an exact technical explanation just trying to get the general idea across.

I have actually had the pain of having a set up that was CPU restricted and I have actually physically implimented what I advovated above and it did work. It may not work for the OP, we dont actually know that the issue is a CPU restriction but thats how it looks. That being the case lowering the graphics settings will only compound the issue.

@ blunty86
Its up to you my friend try it or not, all I know is it worked for me back when I had a similar issue. Im not saying it will work but it sure cant hurt now can it ? People couldnt understand the concept back then either, even after I posted screen shoots with a FPS counter to prove the point.

Mactronix :)
 


Yes you are right its time for an upgrade, just trying to gain the OP some performance untill thats possible.

Here you go taken from Tweakguides.

Performance Tip: This step highlights an important fact: your graphics card can only work as fast as your CPU can allocate it information. So a fast graphics card will typically perform better on a system with a faster CPU. In fact many high-end graphics cards are artificially bottlenecked because they are on a system with a CPU that is not fast enough to allocate data to them. At the same time, the higher the resolution and graphics settings for a game, the less important the CPU becomes as the bulk of the work will be done by the graphics card.

Source: http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html

Mactronix :)









 

blunty86

Distinguished
Feb 2, 2011
7
0
18,510
Again, thank you all for the responses, I can see what you are saying about the graphics being turned up and I will give that a try. I'm pretty certain to say now, from the responses that I have had here and from others, is that it is definitely my cpu bottlenecking the graphics and I do intend to sort that out by starting from fresh, as my current mobo cant take a cpu more powerful than the one I have in atm, as always though, money is currently the problem.
Great help from all, given me some things to think about, thanks.