Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
I figured it out, well at least something out...
So here it is, all of my woes from my previous posts with my new rig, and WoW... I was really trying to fiddle with things, including my hardware/software and WoW settings and I finally stumbled onto something.
Previously I was getting about 15 fps, well I turned the "shadow quality" slider down and BAM, things started speeding up BIG TIME!!! I still have to play in windowed mode, but with the shadows set to about medium and everything else set to MAX, I've been getting about 50fps on average.
So what gives, why do I have to play it in windowed mode and why is that "shadow quality" such a strain on my graphics card?
I must admit, this is a step in the right direction and it is making me feel a little bit better, thanks again for everyone's tips and support from my previous posts.
Vista 64 bit
6 gigs of 1333Mhz DDR3 tri channel
i7 920
ATI HD 4850
Comments
Blizzard has done a lot of retooling on WoW over the years. A consequence of this is that the engine is no longer as scalable on higher-end systems. I had a rig very similar to yours (only difference is that I had a 1GB HD4870), and with everything maxed out I would get something in the ballpark of 60fps outside of Shattrath/Dalaran. My only problem was massive stuttering and frame hitches, which I could only solve by taking the shadows down and lowering the view distance. I have since switched to a GTX285, due to the fact that ATI driver support sucks, but haven't tried WoW on it.
I also experienced the windowed mode boost, though. It's a situation inherent to Vista, and most other users experience the same thing. Truth be told, it all boils down to the slightly spiffed up, yet still archaic engine the game is running on.
I have also heard good things about NPUs (network processing unit) like EVGA's Xeno - they apparently help quite a bit in correcting the stuttering problem. Too bad I don't want to drop the money on something like that, yet.
The rescent ATI video cards aren't designed well for mass textures. They have a low amount of texture units meaning it has to push textures in and out of memory more often. This depends on how large a texture file you are pushing in and out. Since WoW relies on rasterization as a rendering method, it means a shadow map; and since wow is an mmo out since 2003 they have alot of possible textures that would be loaded in and out. If you want a higher quality shadow it means quadrupling the shadow file size per iteration. If it was done with Raytracing instead, the shadows would be sharper and you wouldn't take as bad a performance hit.
Thats weird I played WoW with Ultra settings and x4 AA and never dropped below 30 FPS. Im usually about 50 to 60 fps.
e8400,
3.25 Gigs of ram cuz im on xp
ATI 4850
10k Raptor.
res at 1440x900 full screen.
I wouldn't think your rig would have any problems at all.
Well I'm running Vista, that alone might have a major impact, and I don't know if this has any effect but you're using a 10K rpm HD and I'm using a 7200.
Yeah Vista could be a problem, cuz I ran about the same on Windows 7 as I did on Xp.