Wow and Video Frame Rates

[Saxywoo]

An interesting development when I was playing was WoW last night. I had started up the game, loaded up the game like usual, but there a little nagging difference…my frame rate right from the get go sucked. 6 or 7 frames a second. I was about to exit the game, when something popped up on my system, which tasked me out of WoW. I looked at the window, and tasked back, to find that I was getting 30fps! So I continued to play, and the frame rate never dropped down lower than 17fps. But then I died, ended up back in town, and discovered that my fps were down to 7-9. So, going on a whim, I hit CTL-ESC (Start Button), which pulled me out of WoW, and I just clicked back in. The end result was WoW was back to running at 30fps.

If you’re getting really funky frame rates, try tasking out of WoW and going back in. After talking with Bolty, we’ve theorized that doing this will clear the texture memory of the video card, so that everything is nice and fresh. I have yet to try this on my desktop system, to see if that might help that system handle the game better. Here’s the specs on both my desktop and my laptop.

Desktop System:
Pentium III 600MHz
756MB Memory
Diamond Stealth 550
Windows XP Retail (Pre SP1)

Laptop System:
Pentium M 1.5GHz
512MB Memory
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
Windows 2000 SP4

I have another video card that I’ve been thinking about putting into the desktop system, which is an ELSA Gloria/Synergy 8 ViVo. But I don’t quite know what I’m going to try it out, should this task-swapping thing work out.

IMPORTANT Other Note: I had ALL the detail on my system turned down to the minimum, just to ensure that the game was playable. For me, the detail level is enough at the minimums, since I’m more worried about other aspects of the game than the level of detail that I’m playing it in.

[DeeBye]

What's the memory on your laptop's Mobility Radeon 7500, 16 MB or 32MB? Also, I assume that it's an integrated (onboard) card?

I'm now considering installing my old ATI Radeon 7000 PCI card to see if it can handle the game. It's specs are rather close to a Mobility Radeon 7500. If a Radeon 7000 PCI card can handle WoW, then the minimum system specs just got a whole lot lower.

[Saxywoo]

Yes, it's an onboard card, but I think that it's loads better than my desktop's Diamond Stealth 550. It was doing the same thing as the screenshot you made from my Skeptic's Point of View. Except that it was doing it when I was looking straight down to get it so I was getting more than 3fps. Yeah... you read right.... 3fps. And that was with EVERYTHING turned down, though I haven't tried to do the consol commands that Bolty posted.

I don't really think that it'll chance much.

Good luck with the video. I'll continue to try and test, if I can....

Did you know that if you are in the right place at the right time, you can see sax and violence at the same time in WoW?

[apandapion]

Two things:

First, have you reported this bug? It's interesting and probably fixable.

Second, can anyone recommend a graphics card to go with this game? Are there cards that work particularly well or particularly poorly?

[Saxywoo]

PICTURE LINKS FIXED

In response,

First, yes I did.

Second, I think to answer that, perhaps we can see what people are running. I'll get a poll going on what the memory is on people's video cards when I get done with this post.

Zen is good. Zen is your friend. Be one with Zen.

A NEW UPDATE.....

Ah… it seems like there is much talk about the frame rates within WoW. I remember a post about the new update to the beta, where they were changing it so that one of the larger cities (Stormwind, I believe) would take up half as much memory as it currently does.

I’m hoping that those of you that are experiencing problems or slowness with your frame rates have heard of what I’m doing here, but if you haven’t, I hope that anything that I find out can help you.

Playing the other night, I realized that I didn’t put any comparison screenshots to show what the difference of the task-swapping work around will do for frame rates, so I got some for you.

Before Task-Swapping

After Task-Swapping


Note the difference in the FPS... Impressive, isn't it?

One of the more amusing things that I found was that there are some cases where this doesn’t help you much, like in caves where the floor is littered with bodies, both of players and monsters. The discovery of this was when I was in a cave with a monster that had been listed as “dead” for at least 5 minutes. He was standing, and still interacting when I got there….only funny thing about it was that he WAS dead. I was in the cave for at least 5 minutes, and he was still there, doing his thing, except while he was dead when I left.

Which is another little aspect of the game. Speaking people and reading about this. It’s like the WoW Server has so many bodies to deal with that it’s having problems keeping up with what’s supposed to be dead and where bodies are supposed to lie. Which beings me to another thought…Perhaps keeping all the bodies of players that die around isn’t that good of an idea. I do think that it’s a nice early warning system that you’re coming up on a rather intense area, but to the cost of slowing everything down to the point where you’re bound to deposit more bodies on the ground? I think that it’s a little excessive. I personally think that they should keep a maximum of 30 bodies on the ground (after the player has resurrected) so we have that warning, and it doesn’t get to an excessive mark. Once another body goes from being “mostly dead” (thank you Miracle Max), the oldest lying body disappears. It would be different for the “mostly dead” bodies, but say for instance someone is dead and they log out. They can all their dead bodies with them. I know that in some places I’ve left at least 5 bodies on the ground. And I truly apologize to those of you that I might have slowed you down.

But in all, it's just another day in the life of a warrior she-elf.

SaxyCorp

[--Pete]

Hi,

First, thanks for the info, here and in your other reports. As always they are clear and useful.

Second, minor problem. Your links to geocities all come up with a "This page is not available" message.

--Pete

[Saxywoo]

"First, thanks for the info, here and in your other reports. As always they are clear and useful."

Thank you. Though half the time it sounds like I'm not making any sense to myself. :huh:

I'll keep them coming while I can!

SaxyCorp

[Saxywoo]

It's me again...

As in my other post, I talked about my visiting places like Rachet, Booty Bay and Stormwind. I didn't talk about the funny video that I saw there.

What kind of funny?

Eerily funny. As in you couldn't see the first floor/dock/walkway/stairs/missing walls funny.

Now I did go through the councel and used the showwater command (disabling water), but I don't think that command is supposed to take out walkways that are over water. When I used that while I was in Darkshore, sure enough, the walkways and bridges all remained intact.

I even tried doing my little video memory refresh trick, but no dice. No water, no dock/floor in Stormwind. I also went as far as thinking "this is going to kill my frame rate" and turned the water back on. It was as though I still had it off. Kind of funny.

I would rather deal with non-descript polys than not having polys to walk on.

There was also the arena looking place (or at least that's how it looked on the minimap), where it looked like I was walking on thin air. I believe that it was the same one that Jarulf had mentioned in his post.

Oh yeah, this it was the laptop that I was doing this on, and the stats for that are in this thread, and in the Video Card thread-poll that I also put in.

Has something like this happened to any of you? If so, when, where, and did you try doing something to clear your video memory?

Thanks everyone.

SaxyCorp

[Ruvanal]

What kind of funny?

Eerily funny. As in you couldn't see the first floor/dock/walkway/stairs/missing walls funny.

Now I did go through the councel and used the showwater command (disabling water), but I don't think that command is supposed to take out walkways that are over water. When I used that while I was in Darkshore, sure enough, the walkways and bridges all remained intact.
...

It is not a matter of your settings. It is a matter that some of those areas that you are going through have not had all graphics set up completely. A couple of days into playing I went up into the mountains next to Stormwind and found a route of travel tha I could persue, but unlike most of the other areas around there were very few terrain features like rocks or shrubs. After I had past the single Defias camp that was in the area there were no monster or other special little things that you can usually find every 2 dozen paces or so. Then I pushed on further and entered an area where the river literally had various square holes in where the graphic for the water had not been set up into the data base for that location (at this point I was well off the beaten path).

I suspect that this is what you are encountering in some of those funny video places. Areas that they are still fleshing out and have not set up all the artwork or MOBs for it. If you want to see another funky place, try going down into the dungeon under the barracks in Stormwind.

[Saxywoo]

I just moved to Philly from Chicago, and it was time to get my computer setup last night... Well, to test it and see what was going on, I signed on... with the desktop system (the worse of the two machines that I have).

I could actually see the floors, walls, and just about everything. It was choppy, but I could see it. So now I'm wondering why my laptop is having problems, since it has the better video card between the two systems....

SaxyCorp

[Roane]

If I remember correctly, the video driver for that card that is by default installed (assuming you mean the Thinkpad) is utter junk. There is a hacked version somewhere on the web (and it's been too long since I found it for me to remember where) of the Catalyst drivers. That helped me to be able to run things like SWG and DAoC acceptably on the laptop, though still not well. You could probably find it with a web search.