Nvidia 480 & WoW

[drunkenmaster]

lol, wow is NOT a hard game to run and a 3Ghz quad is more than enough, for reference, playing around with multiboxing I can EASILY run 5 copies of the game within 4gb memory, with 1 copy using max settings and rendered at 1920x1080, 8xaa, 4 copies run at half the res, no aa min settings(max on more than 1/2 of the others and 4gb memory comes into play).

The smaller 4 "slave" wow windows all run limited at 15fps and the main window unlimited and never dips below 60fps. Ok, this is a 4Ghz Phenom, but 5 copies = not one core for each version and its clearly sharing power, and its not even that cpu limited frankly.

This is with a single stock clocked 5850, I have xfire but windowed(to have 5 copies arranged side by side) dx9 games don't use xfire.

Its NOT gpu limited and its NOT cpu limited, maybe he's only got 2gb of memory and max settings are hurting him while running stuff in the background.

Wow windowed also doesn't even kick in stock 3d clocks, I have to do that myself, maybe his gpu clocks are kicking up from idle.

Its most likely an addon, potentially a severely slow hard drive but not that likely.

A 3Ghz q6600 is only really not going to bottleneck anything bar some silly game settings in Supreme Commander 1 and a few other similar games. Its a great CPU and you're only cpu limited when you run such low resolutions/settings comparitive to the gpu that FPS is stupidly high anyway.

CPU reviews purposefully run low res to show differences in CPU's, any half decent review site STATES thats what they are doing and that in normal circumstances theres smeg all real world difference between the majority of cpu's in most games when run at appropriate settings for the GPU.

Lotro is particularly bad for lag, even in xfire, on a top end system, in town area's, it gets incredibly laggy trying to load lots of character data. With Wow, even with 5 copies(the slaves still load up all the different characters) in towns I don't really get any lag, in that sense its pretty well optimised these days.

Its difficult to check right this second, maintenance morning, but from recollection a single 5850 with 5 copies running at various quality settings, is barely using 40% gpu load, and CPU load on a 4Ghz Phenom 2 is only 55-60%, though thats when I limited the main screen to 60fps.

Its certainly some other issue, raising CPU speed might still fix it, because if an addon is eating cpu time, giving it some spare will release the game to perform better.

 

[straxusii]

A quad 3ghz is perfectly ample.

+1

To eliminate it run perfmon and see what the cpu reads during the slow downs

 

[Greebo]

I disagree. The gtx480 needs more than a 3Ghz cpu to run at it's max framerates in ANY game and WOW is very cpu dependent.

I know this is quite old with an Ultra 8800 but even then, a 47% increase in cpu speed = 41% increase in minimum framerates which looks pretty linear to me.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,631615/World-of-Warcraft-CPU-and-GPU-benchmarks/Practice/

And although is doesn't show you too many old cpus, this gives you some idea how important the cpu is in WOW.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/13

Bascially at 3.33Ghz an i7 shows a 21% gain in fps over the same speed E8600 and an i7 at 2.66Ghz shows a 25% over a q8400 (comparing quad vs quad) and an i7 at 3.33Ghz shows a 21% gain over an i7 at 2.66Ghz (25% overclock)

Cache and the latest cpu helps a lot in WOW.

Those tests were done with a 5870.

So a "better" cpu with lots of cache running at 4Ghz+ and you would probably see a 50% gain in your framerates.

You have quite an unbalanced system IMO.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Yeah a clocked i7 can give substantial performance increase over a Q6600 in certain games.

 

[Corasik]

Wow windowed also doesn't even kick in stock 3d clocks, I have to do that myself, maybe his gpu clocks are kicking up from idle.

Clocks on my 5850 scale based on GPU load, so if I sit in a corner looking at the wall, I get 60FPS+ with gpu clocks at 157mhz core, 300mhz memory. Move out into dalaran and it jumps to full clocks, but with my 3Ghz Q6700 I can only manage to get around 25% GPU in wow.

The more I clock the better the FPS.

Everyone I know have found that fast CPU, even with a modest GPU will give flawless performance in wow, but a slow CPU (especially P4's are just dreadfull) especially in certain parts of the game.

 

[Kotu]

addons and hard drive speed would be my guess.

With normal games you get loading screens where everything needed is gathered and ready to go, with MMO games like wow it cann't preload everything since the content is dynamic depending on what gear players are running around with, in places like dalaran a SSD can make a huge difference to framerates since it can grab loads of random player data much faster than a traditional hard drive.

For the addons, it's possible for them to be badly coded to have things like multiple infinate loops stuck running in the background, some of the more complex ones are quite bad for this and more so if they are out of date. Tourguide, routes, questhelper, avr, auctioneer, recount are all examples of mods which left unchecked can seriously impact game performance.

Try the game with no shadows, low detail player models and with all addons disabled to see if it helps with framerates.

 

[arknor]

wow was developed at a time when games still used the cpu for almost everything and a graphics card merely took some of the burden rather than was the main renderer.

massively out of date pos that doesnt seem to have scaled with tech at all you can play it on a 5year old comp perfectly fine and not get that much worse fps than a modern one

 

[Robert]

I disagree. The gtx480 needs more than a 3Ghz cpu to run at it's max framerates in ANY game and WOW is very cpu dependent.

I know this is quite old with an Ultra 8800 but even then, a 47% increase in cpu speed = 41% increase in minimum framerates which looks pretty linear to me.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,631615/World-of-Warcraft-CPU-and-GPU-benchmarks/Practice/

And although is doesn't show you too many old cpus, this gives you some idea how important the cpu is in WOW.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/13

Bascially at 3.33Ghz an i7 shows a 21% gain in fps over the same speed E8600 and an i7 at 2.66Ghz shows a 25% over a q8400 (comparing quad vs quad) and an i7 at 3.33Ghz shows a 21% gain over an i7 at 2.66Ghz (25% overclock)

Cache and the latest cpu helps a lot in WOW.

Those tests were done with a 5870.

So a "better" cpu with lots of cache running at 4Ghz+ and you would probably see a 50% gain in your framerates.

You have quite an unbalanced system IMO.

It isn't my machine. I have an i7 at 3.8.

For info he has 4gb ram.

He experiences the slow down in a random forest in Northrend.