World Of Warcraft Fps lag

[KeEn88]

Hey all buddy of mine said this is the perfect place to get problems fixed so i thought id give it a try...

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz
Memory: 3070MB RAM
Windows Vista 64bit
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS

ok well when i play wow i set it to maxxx fps 45..so ok everythign runs great high ok but about every 15-30 sec my fps drops to about 19 for 2 3 sec..and this happens all the time every 15-30 sec and its rly annoying and its just lag and im not rly sure what it is...all my drivers are up to date...direct x is up to date...and i rly dont know whats the problem is any idea id love to hear them ty

[Mr.Guvernment]

MIN FPS are usually related to the CPU.

are you doing anything while playing?

can you keep task manager open and trying playing in window mode to see if your CPU is spiking?

[Hardin]

You'll probably have to turn your details down. Wrath of the Lich King brought down the framerates. I get 12 fps in Dalaran.

[thideras]

Have you tried disabling all your addons?

Try turning down details, etc.

With that being said, that CPU is heavily holding you back.

[Prodigious]

Your system should easily be able to handle wow. The periodic spikes indicate there's an issue that isn't directly related to straight up cpu/gpu power. Only thing I could see is 1- the ram. vista 64 is a memory hog, as is wow, together they might push things over the top, especially if you have lots of background apps and processes. Personally I find most things I do use like 5% of my processor but I'm almost always at around 50% memory usage. Try to see how much available memory you have when running the game, if it looks bad, try disabling addons, shutting down background programs etc. This way you won't be constantly having to page stuff off the hdd, which brings me to point 2:

Make sure your system is defragged. If you are loading lots of info off the drive but you've got a very fragmented system, you will probably experience some lagging/fps drops as new info is being loaded into memory.

And obviously make sure you check your task manager to see what, if anything, is using up lots of resources while you play wow.

[shard]

You'll probably have to turn your details down. Wrath of the Lich King brought down the framerates. I get 12 fps in Dalaran.

Lich king graphics are hilariously low intensity. He has plenty of power to run lich king, even 25man raids. I would also agree, Vista 64 and 3gb ram can get eaten up very fast. Also they have yet to fix the Vista 64 memory bug with WoW. WoW will just keep eating memory until it caps, and then your framerate starts dieing. Wow is extremely sensitive to how much ram you have, and have available.

[Hardin]

Lich king graphics are hilariously low intensity. He has plenty of power to run lich king, even 25man raids. I would also agree, Vista 64 and 3gb ram can get eaten up very fast. Also they have yet to fix the Vista 64 memory bug with WoW. WoW will just keep eating memory until it caps, and then your framerate starts dieing. Wow is extremely sensitive to how much ram you have, and have available.

Yeah they are and they don't look much better than pre lich king, but the performance dropped significantly.

[thideras]

I'm not complaining, they really haven't changed much graphics wise and it still looks great.

[shard]

Yeah they are and they don't look much better than pre lich king, but the performance dropped significantly.

Dalaran suffers from the same problem that shattrath did. They have it as part as the global world instead of most capitol cities that run in independent areas. So much more network taxing.

[Hardin]

Yeah and it gets worse as the number of people there increase. It's the only place where I get 12 fps though. Normally I don't drop below 30 fps, but I wish I had the constant 60 fps that I used to get. The new spell effects sure do look nice though.

[KeEn88]

ok if i have anything up it would be vent thats pretty much about it... Would you suggest just going to normal vista...or back to xp...but if i go to xp i gotta find all my drivers and all that **** that vista just haves..ya know...and i set it to 35 but in dalaran i get about 23 and still get lag spikes so should i get more ram or just change windows

[KeEn88]

ok when im sitting with firrefox and steam open i get cp

cpu Usage% spikes from sitting here from 0-10% normal i dunno Physical memory 30%
with wow in windows mode and task maanger open i have cpu usage 34-47 went 62% once and pyhsical is 43% so i dunno what it is

[ratbuddy]

Have you tried disabling all your addons?

No addons running?

Are ya sure Vista is updated to SP1?

[KeEn88]

what folders should i rename i know wtf but what others

[Hardin]

Try turning down the details and see what that does.

[KeEn88]

just did it with all addons on off still does it

[KeEn88]

detail down looks bad and didnt fix it...mayb not enough ram ?

[thideras]

Wait, do you have Teamspeak or Vent in the background? If so, kill it and try again.

I had this *exact* issue with Teamspeak on my previous install. Exactly every 10 seconds, the game stuttered, it drove me NUTS. Started up with TS disabled and it worked, took me a bit to figure out what happened.

[Hardin]

You should be fine with 3gb, I only have 2gb and it gets close to the top but never reaches it. I should probably put more in here. Do you have folding or seti running in the background? Sometimes wow doesn't like it when I'm running seti and I'll get stuttering.

[LmpPns]

Sounds like your GPU could be getting too hot and is scaling itself back. Make sure your temps are normal under load and do not go over 80C.

Also, when "maxing out" WoW and getting everything up there, are you in the same relative place when the FPS drops?

[KeEn88]

the fps drop happens everywhere it doesnt matter whewre i am it always happens and my tmps are fine gpu about 54c

[thideras]

the fps drop happens everywhere it doesnt matter whewre i am it always happens and my tmps are fine gpu about 54cWait, do you have Teamspeak or Vent in the background? If so, kill it and try again.

I had this *exact* issue with Teamspeak on my previous install. Exactly every 10 seconds, the game stuttered, it drove me NUTS. Started up with TS disabled and it worked, took me a bit to figure out what happened.Do you have TS/Vent open?

[KeEn88]

even w/o ts open or vent just wow open it does tihs

[thideras]

even w/o ts open or vent just wow open it does tihsFirst, disable all the addons (at the character screen) if you haven't already, see if that helps.

If that doesn't, do Start<Run, type in 'msconfig' (no quotes). Services tab, check "Hide all Microsoft Services" then Disable all. Go to Startup and then hit Disable all. Hit Ok, then Restart. See if that helps.

If that doesn't, there is something in game or something wrong with Windows itself.

[Hardin]

What area are you in that's getting the drops in fps?

[thideras]

What area are you in that's getting the drops in fps?If it is an every "x" seconds, then something is causing it to do that. Either a program or addon.

If it was stuttering while only turning, then it could be memory related.

[ratbuddy]

even w/o ts open or vent just wow open it does tihs

Are you running Vista SP1 or not? It'll definitely stutter with vanilla Vista.

[John G]

He has plenty of hardware horsepower. My wife runs WotLK with much less on her PC and does fine. Obviously her graphics settings are not maxed out, though.

Getting regular stutters like that is likely some sort of software issue.

Vista 64 is a suspect...I don't run it, so I can't say much.

Turn down all your graphics settings to minimum and see if it persists. If it goes away, turn things back up one at at time.

Sounds like you already hit up add-ons and other programs running.

If you can watch WoW in windowed mode and watch system information at the same time...when it stutters, see if resource usage spikes a bit, try to see which process is associated with the spike. It might be some wierd windows service or something. If it is WoW itself, then you know where it is coming from at least.

[4GHZ_or_bust]

Do you also run BOINC (SETI@Home for example) or something in the background? When I have it forced on 100% even while I play WOW, I get a lag spike every few seconds due to heavy disk writes. Putting BOINC on snooze or suspended lets me play WOW smoothly.

[KeEn88]

i can play wioth it open but what im i looking for specificly with task manager open what am i looking for

[John G]

i can play wioth it open but what im i looking for specificly with task manager open what am i looking for

You want to start with the Performance tab...watch the CPU usage and/or memory usages. While actually playing, and a stutter happens, see if there is a spike in cpu usage (even if a small spike) or changes in memory usages that coincide with the moment a stutter happens. In particular, the CPU spike is useful because then you can switch tabs over to Processes. On that tab, each process says "cpu" and shows a % number. Keep watching for when the moment a stutter happens if that CPU % number registers for a certain process. It might be some process/program that you would have never thought of that is periodically causing the stutter. It might even be a virus or various nasty-ware. If some process is showing 5% every time a stutter happens, then you have something to investigate. The same thing can sometimes be seen with the "Mem Usage" number for each process. If it is just the WoW process numbers that are bouncing around and nothing else...then at least it points back to WoW, Windows, drivers...things like that instead of random program as probable culprit.

[KeEn88]

ill look into it...tonight im reformatting back to xp...64bit vista is just bad...i cant even hook up my svideo...it plugs in reconizes theres a tv cuz i can change settings...but then it also says there isnt anythin plugged in...so i dunno

[John G]

Without even knowing what your actual problem is... I bet it goes away when you set things back up in 32-bit XP. :)

[LmpPns]

That may be likely, but not neccessarily due to Vista. There could be any number of issues causing this. To be honest I haven't seen a lot of good advice here, the author's extreme lack of specifics being a main reason for that. If the problem goes away with a reformat then great. If it doesn't and similar symptoms are experienced when the system is on load then it is probably going to be a hardware problem; most likely a heat issue. This could be due to a dead or dying fan, poor airflow/cooling in general, or an unseated heatsink. GPUs will scale clock speeds back and this operate slower than normal if they are subjected to an abnormal amount of heat. Check your temps and verify proper clock speeds under load if the issue persists.

[Couraga]

Hi!

Registered on this forum only to write this post so here it goes:

I had the same problem after formating and installing Vista x64 instead of the good ol' XP.

Here's all the things I did to try fix the problem, hopefully it will work for you too.


Checked for heat/cooling problems.
Turned down all graphic effects to the lowest in WoW.
I turned down all the visual effects in vista to maximize the performance.
Ran virus scans using AVG, Spybot search & Destroy, Ad-Aware and Malwarebytes.
I re-installed World of Warcraft (without installing any add-ons)
Downloaded and installed all the latest updates to Vista.
Downloaded and installed the latest version of Direct-X.
I re-installed both video drivers and audio drivers using safe-mode.
I disabled the scheduled disk defragmentation in vista ( I personally believe that it was this that caused the lag).


I cant say for sure what fixed it, it might have been a combination of some of the things mentioned above but it fixed the regular fps drops that I've been having since I changed to vista.

My computer has the following:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+
Corsair 4gb DDR2
GeForce 8800gts 320mb

Took some of the advise from this forum and I wanted to give something back in return. Anyways, I hope this post has been helpfull.

Cya

[4GHZ_or_bust]

You have more RAM and faster CPU than I do and similiar video card yet I don't have bad lags. At worst I get about 15 fps in Dalaran when it's crowded and that's in windowed mode. I get better in full screen but I don't like having WOW crash every now and then from alt-tabbing often so I leave in windowed mode.

I don't know if there's an issue with Vista or drivers. Have you tried tech support forum at Blizzard? Try here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11110&sid=1

[ratbuddy]

He never did answer if he was up to Vista SP1 or not. Like I mentioned before, it will definitely give a periodic stutter if it's not.

[Jeff7477]

See this post: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=12368277969&sid=1