The Warhammer "I am having performance issues" help thread

saguy · 19 Sep 2008 at 12:54

Let me just start off by saying that for most people WAR appears to perform great by MMO standards, but there are some of us that are experiencing performance issues. If anyone has any tips or solutions please post them as this would enable us to play what appears to be a very good game.

I am experiencing severe hitching in areas that have a lot of PC and NPC characters such as PQ areas. In these areas when standing still my frame rate is between 25 and 30. When I start moving the frame rate fluctuates between 8 and 25. I am fairly sure it has something to do with textures loading which is evident when I alt tab to windows and then back they can take up to 14 seconds to load up again. Apart from the more populated areas I still am experiencing hitching when moving even though the average frame rate is much higher 40 to 50

I have tried running the game on low detail settings, low resolution, AA AF on or off and yet nothing makes much of an impact on performance. There are a couple of posts on this thread and other forums by people with much better setups than mine experiencing similar issues.

I am going to experiment with different drivers to see if it makes a difference. Any advice as to settings in Control panel or RivaTuner that may improve performance would be appreciated.

saguy · 19 Sep 2008 at 13:10

chris_uk333 said:
Yep i have the very same problem

The thing that worries me is that this is an issue with a small minority of us so the chances of having this resolved are slim due to zero technical support and no official forum.

saguy · 19 Sep 2008 at 13:11

Sleepery said:
First thing to check would be that slider on the graphics settings, I'm in work now and can't remember what it's called (it's not clear from the name and tooltip what exactly it does anyway), but it's set to off by default, and there was speculation that by having it set to off you weren't using all your GPU memory.

Sorry, not very helpful I know. GPU cache or something like that.

I tried that and it makes no difference.

saguy · 19 Sep 2008 at 14:32

cr!spy said:
Thank you for starting this thread, I'm having the same problem.

Try installing the the beta 177 driver mate. I installed them last night and it made a bit of a difference, but still not running as it should.

I agree with the textue loading as well being the problem. When you log into the game you can see it loading them slowly and if you move it obviously gets worse.

This is a really weird problem as our specs are fairly similar if not better (in some cases) than people running it at max settings with no problems.

My spec:

C2D 2.6GHz (stock speed)
2x 4GB Ballistix
8800GTX

Yeah this totally bizarre and I hope that Mythic realize that this is an issue for some of us. That's why I started the thread hoping for constructive help and not the often condescending "your PC sucks" wisecracks.

I will try the beta drivers tonight along with setting the priority for war.exe in the control panel to above normal. Other than that I am all out of ideas.

saguy · 19 Sep 2008 at 15:36

Bones said:
what effect does lowering your resolution have? If the problem persists after lowering the res its less likely to be a gcard issue. Try defragging your hard drive and possible running it on a separate drive as it sounds like (as you said) a texture loading problem.

The difference between 1024 x 768 and 1680 x 1080 is like on average 7 FPS. The minimum when it starts hitching remains the same.

My hard drive is defragged. I checked memory utilization in task manager and it never goes above 1.6GB so there should be no reason for the swap file to be utilized on the hard drive. Lol I do truly appreciate your help, but I would love to have a quid for every time I heard 'defrag your hard drive' as a solution for every PC problem known to man.

saguy · 21 Sep 2008 at 18:14

Thanks for the help as I have it running much better. My frame rate is not effected that much any more by loads of characters running around anymore. I do still get a bit of hitching while moving and the minimum frame rates could be higher but I can live with it. The thing that made the difference is the latest beta drivers or possibly something they patched in the last 2 days since I last played. I tried some of the other advice like v-synch and windowed mode but this did not make any noticeable difference.

saguy · 22 Sep 2008 at 10:36

Sweetloaf said:
I'm using XP a 9600Gt, 2Gb RAM and a dual core Opteron.

My frame rates are fine with everything maxxed out, HD is defragged and seperate from my OS.

The game runs pretty much the same on min or max detail it also runs similarly well at 1280 x 1024 and 1920 x 1080 on my LCD with or without AA and AF there are some performance differences using the different setting but the main problem remains under all conditions, the glitching and pauses.

It's ruining a good game for me although I do think the problem is at Mystics end, anyone got any further suggestions? The visuals are hardly groundbreaking after all.

Have you tried the latest 177.92 beta drivers?

saguy · 22 Sep 2008 at 12:24

Sweetloaf said:
Nope but I really don't see them making a huge difference tbh.

That is the only thing I have changed and it has completely transformed the performance. Do not ask me why or how but it has. Previously I was using the latest official drivers. I would suggest trying every solution provided on this thread as some of them do appear to work.