battle slide show

[LochnarITB]

I play WoW on a 2 year old laptop. It exceeds all the minimum requirements Blizzard lists for WoW. It even exceeds the recommended system specs. Up until Molten Core, the only issue I have had with performance (once I went to 1 gig memory), is that it is slow to load on entering an instance. Once I get inside, I don't have performance problems, even with 30+ people raiding Onyxia. I can enter Molten Core and move around just fine, even with a full 40 player raid. However, once a battle starts, I go into a slide show. I can get spells targeted that channel, and they do their damage, but damage output is diminished because the targeting and movement is stuttered. Last night, in the Lucifron battle, I was able to decurse with the keybound decursive addon, even though I couldn't actually see the casting each time.

I've turned down all the graphic options. I've turned off combat log reporting of all messages besides my own damage done and taken. I've gone without CTRA and used the limited function of the WoW raid tab. If I saw any improvement, it was very marginal. I want to be in on these Molten Core raids. It has been a long road getting here. I do not want to be a liability to the raid or to take the spot of a player whose hardware allows them to make a more reliable contribution.

Any suggestions on what else I can try to make this work? If I could set the graphics to stick figures or text to make them flow, I would do it to remain a part of these raids. If I know we are going into the core, or eventually beyond that, I may try to get access to another machine, but I don't know if it will be much more capable, even though it would be a newer desktop machine. Having to resort to that would be physically difficult as well.

[Tal]

I have a 2.4 ghz Pentium machine with a gig of ram and a newer video card (for the life of me I can't remember which one) and it was a slideshow for me too. :)

[Kevin]

I was never a slide show, but things dragged down and were getting close them them whenever there was a battle and for some reason I ended up in a large group of players. Actually the first imp battle was a slide show for me. Lucifron went pretty well for me as far as graphics go. I think what you may be running into on the laptop is graphical memory. With lots of players and lots of players being drawn since you are a mage and in an area where they are on screen all the time that you might be running into a situation where your grapics card is having to hit main memory to get textures. I've got a 128MB Ti4200 but I know people with similar spec systems to me who have the 64MB version who have a lot more slow down in raids than I do.

It may be possible to upgrade the memory on the laptop graphics card (it may be a possibility to upgrade the card too, I've done that on a couple of Dell's before). It's also possible that your graphics card is using shared system memory on that laptop. Try upping the amount of memory your graphics card uses if that is the case and seeing if that helps. Upping the AGP aperture size could also help performance if the slow down is from what I think it is.

[RTM]

Hard drive speed seems to be an important factor as well, and laptops generally come with slower hard drives than desktops. I've never paid attention to my HDD activity light during big fights to see if spell effects & etc. are loaded from the hard drive, but if that's the case then defragmenting might help. It's good to do every once in awhile anyway. It also helps if your hard drive isn't chock full of stuff.

[Xanthix]

Supposedly you can run the game without textures and lighting by adding the command option -notnl:

"C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe" -windowed -notnl

Also, I recommend turning off the sound (control-S). If your issue is your RAM or hard drive, this will help since the game will not load the sound effects from disk into RAM.

[LochnarITB]

Supposedly you can run the game without textures and lighting
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No textures or lighting? How would that affect the display? How would I see if it made any difference without being in a raid battle? I have created an icon with the target from above. It is setting it to windowed mode so I know that part is working. BTW, wouldn't windowed mode also be a hit on performance? Isn't there more overhead required to monitor the window?

I didn't see the slow hard drive being accessed during those fights (I did think of that) so I am sure it is memory getting hit too hard. I was looking at my card being a Geforce 4 and the minimum mentioning Geforce 2. I also thought mine was a 64MB card but it is 32. I checked to see if I could change the AGP aperture size. There was nothing in the system BIOS for the video and the only thing that sounded close, when using the nVidia setup utility, was memory size for PCI textures, although PCI mode is a choice elsewhere that seems to turn off AGP acceleration (running at max of 4x). I upped that from 128MB to 256 but I am not sure it did anything. Everest still reports 128MB for non-local video memory. It may be that it is a hardwired setting that can't be changed.

I'll also try turning off the sound during a battle. This may not be good though since I do you use audio cues to know what is going on. At least in those fights, it is less likely that something will come up from behind me so it might not hurt.

Maybe I should just go farm gold and sell it on EBay to get money for a new machine. The problem with that would be finding goodies that I wouldn't want to part with.

[Xanthix]

No textures or lighting?  How would that affect the display?  How would I see if it made any difference without being in a raid battle?  I have created an icon with the target from above.  It is setting it to windowed mode so I know that part is working.  BTW, wouldn't windowed mode also be a hit on performance?  Isn't there more overhead required to monitor the window?[right][snapback]84447[/snapback][/right]

I cannot see any difference in graphics using -notnl, but then I have a weak graphics card to begin with.

As for windowed mode, I do not know if it takes more or less power to use. I just copied my WoW shortcut path so it snuck in there. :)

Turning off the sound yields a definite performance upgrade for me at least, in big cities and raids.