ATI 3470 mobility, WoW is extremely jerky, almost unplayable.

DanTheMan · 24 Mar 2009 at 00:52

My specs are as follows:

Acer Aspire 5920g:
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5750 2.00GHz 2MB Cache (667MHz FSB)
- Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 256MB
- Memory: 4GB DDR2 RAM

I'm getting around 25-30fps on WoW with the very lowest settings and it's so jerky that it's almost unplayable.

Coming from a system with a 256mb 6800gt and only 1gig of ram that played WoW at 1920x1080 with ~50fps, I expected more from a system with 4x the ram, more processing power and a graphics card that at the very least should be on part with the 6800gt. I'm only running at 1280x800 aswell.

Any ideas what could be causing it?

Raikiri · 24 Mar 2009 at 01:54

A 6800GT is about 2-3x faster in older games than the Mobile 3470. Also the drivers will be geared more towards newer games.

Tute · 24 Mar 2009 at 09:26

Raikiri said:
A 6800GT is about 2-3x faster in older games than the Mobile 3470. Also the drivers will be geared more towards newer games.

This. You cannot compare desktop and laptop chips like-for-like. It just doesn't work like that.

You'll be able to get it playing well I would have thought, but you're going to need to start losing detail.

sja360 · 24 Mar 2009 at 10:16

try setting power settings in control panel to performance/always on. also it could be in ATI tray tools something regarding power savings and being able to disable this or something similar.

james.miller · 24 Mar 2009 at 17:58

the 3470 mobility is a smidgin faster than a hd 3450 desktop card. if you look at the benchmarks....they are not gaming gpu's at all, which would tally with my own experiance of the 3470 mobility in my own laptop. if you bought the laptop with gaming in mine im afraid you made a mistake there :/

AtreuS · 24 Mar 2009 at 22:05

With the release of WoTLK the specs needed to play at full detail is gone up a fair whack. Machines that played vanilla wow will no longer play it well at full detail.

Wow also appears to be very cpu hungry compared to other games. First call would be to turn off shadows and shader effects in the wow graphics options. You should get it playable at some point

GaryWolf · 28 Mar 2009 at 10:16

My laptop has a 9600m GT 512, although i think its DDR2.
Anyway that runs WOW on pretty good settings, including x2 multisampling at 1200x800 with texture set to high and draw distance about two thirds.

Really impressed as the settings are not that far off what i have my desktop seto to with its 8800GTX 384MB

From limited experience, i would suggest you turn shadows down to a minimum or off to see if that helps. Dont know why but shadows seem to really eat in to the processing power

Lummox · 29 Mar 2009 at 17:47

Also, don't run it in a window, run it full screen.

DanTheMan · 29 Mar 2009 at 22:12

It runs ok at lowest settings with 1x multisampling now, It's definitely any sort of AA that ruins performance with this card.

Pity it looks crap.