World of Warcraft – Poor Frame Rates on Windows Vista

[...] WoW + Vista = poor frame rates. [...]

Wow, that’s pretty appalling. If you intend on hanging onto Vista, I’d recommend taking a look into what optional services are running in the background and disabling them. I’m curious to know what new features are available in Vista that could be contributing to all of the business.

I have not updated the drivers, but the problem seems to be mostly CPU usage, not video bandwidth, as soon as WoW takes focus, my CPU usage spikes to 100%, never dips below 93%. I can try the updated drivers, but I have a feeling it won’t help drastically. I’ll update the post when I do.

I experienced quite the opposite. IMHO the game looked better. The graphics were more crisp and clear. Someone told me the game looked more cartoonish because of the increased detail. I noticed no difference in framerate, but I did not have a framerate program running like Fraps or anything. The game experience was pretty much the same. The eye can only see 30 fps anyway, so as long as it doesn’t dip lower then that you will not see a difference.

I have a core duo2 with nvidia 7600gs, did not install drivers used default, Vista RC1, 2gb ram

Yeah the moves you watch at the theaters run at 30 fps.

Its going to be a bit before the performace is good with vista. the changes from direct x9.0c to direct x10 are pretty substantial. But when the game is coded with these changes in place i would say the benchmarks will heavily favor vista.

Oky doky. Vista=choky

Acer Notebook. 40fps with XP & WOW. 2gb ram.
Upgraded to Vista Ultimate
Installed latest ATI drivers (x1300 card)
10fps WOW
Disabled pretty desktop
12fps
Stood in a basic looking inn
Spiking standing still between 14-20fps – Ran outside . Below 10fps.
Disabled sidebar. 12fps running around.
Yawn.. Are we back to Windows 3.1 optimisation again lol.

Disabled everything in taskbar. Disabled pretties to basic desktop as well. (from before)
12-16fps. Spiking by itself. Unplayable still.

Something in Vista is making CPU spike to 100%. Went through taskmanager and couldn’t find anything suspicious.

Argghhh. XP=40ps. Vista=15fps average. Hmm.

[...] UPDATE: or not for a while yet, thanks philoking (This seems to be the standard, Vista runs WoW like Crap) [...]

Movies are actually 24 fps, not 30. Despite that, the human eye can actually see more frames per second than that. It varies by person but 70 fps is closer to the point where things are as smooth as they will ever get for most people. The problem with having a low framerate like 25 fps isn’t that 25 fps is bad, but rather that if you’re averaging 25 fps the game will probably dip to 15 or so fps when there’s a lot of action going on, and you’ll notice that for sure.

If your FPS never goes above 60, it could be that you have vertical sync on. Most LCD monitors refresh at 60 hz, so if you have vertical sync on you’ll never get more than 60 fps even if your hardware is capable of rendering more. But I don’t recommend turning v-sync off because then you’ll get tearing. VSync is best left on as long as your framerate isn’t dropping below the frame rate cap of your display device.

As for the original blog post — you’d probably get much better performance if you played fullscreen. Assuming you’re using Aero, Vista renders the desktop UI using the 3D accelerator, so WoW (or any other game) has to share a bunch of resources with the desktop rendering engine that it wouldn’t have to if you ran it fullscreen and on a single display. Given the way the Aero UI renders itself, Its kind of like you’re running two games at once if you play any 3D games in windowed mode.

I’m still having the same problem. At first my framerate was rediculously low, going from ~40 fps in XP to around 10 in Vista. Then I realised 100% of my CPU was being eaten by Vista’s built in search indexer, so I shut that off. Helped a little, but still framerates are much lower now than they used to be. Also tried turning off sidebar and Aero, not much luck, about 2 FPS increase.
I’m thinking of just freaking dual booting with XP or something.. It’s rediculous that I can’t play WoW (which doesn’t need a great system in the first place) at the framerate I used to be able to play it at (3.2 GHz dual core w/ GF7800 and 2gb ram). /sigh.

i had a similiar problem with my new dell inspiron e1505, duo 2 core 2.0 ghz, 2gb ram, x1400 hypermemory.

they said that i should try right clicking on the game’s icon, go to property, and run in xp sp2 mode.

i’m not at home right now to try, but perhaps this could be of use to others who are experiencing the same problem.

I have just bought a new system Core2Duel 6600 with the 8800 GTX 768m video, raptor 10,000 rpm drive. pritty much the fastest system I could in my price range.

The requirements for WOW are low, but have you seen the requirements or what they suguest? I think 2 gig’s of ram is the min for WV. I have bought Vista and am installing it as we speak, I have a Insprion 9100 from Dell. I like my sweet little 2 year old Dell Laptop and it has ran WOW up untill BC came out which now drags my CPU usage to 100% in any 2 man group or more. all Video turned to as low as I can.

I hope you can use Vista as the other options in the program look cool, I think the patchs over the ….next year will really help all of us that want to see it work. I also feel they brought this out too fast and the problems that are happening are a lot like windows 2000.

70 warrior hoping to do Steamvaults tonight with out 2 FPS. makes it very hard to fight a mob when every second he’s somewhere else and you didn’t see him move.

Could anyone tell me how to install the WoW BC updates on Windows Vista Ultimate as i cant, says cannot find path or something like that please let me know,

Thanks,

Jase

Yeah, obviously it’s Vista…

Not.

The video drivers out for vista right now are crap. The sound drivers, worse. Add into that the fact that WoW uses outdated DX components that are no longer supported in Vista, and you *might* begin to see that the problem actually lies with Blizzard and hardware manufacturers being unable to keep pace with decent drivers.

Blizzard needs to release a patch for WoW that will allow WoW to no longer requires admin privs, XP SP2 compatibility, and outdated DX components to run decently.

Setting the WoW shortcut to be run as admin, with compatibility set for XPSP2 and visual themes disabled has solved all but the sound glitches. Disabling VSync fixed the sound issues (go figure).

Don’t assume a game that’s been on the market for years will work without a hitch on an OS that’s been out for only a couple of months. It takes a while for drivers and game patches to catch up.

Thanks alot that worked perfectly, cheers!!

Just installed Vista last night. I’m patching WoW and then i’m going to set the compatibility options. The frame rates will probably still low, but even lower than XP was. C2D E6300, 1 GB DDR2, 250 GB SATA, EVGA Nvidia 7300GT

Hey. i have just recently got new laptop, pentium dual core 1gb ram radeon mobiloty x1400 and vista. i found bad frame rate with default settings and so decided to lower all my gfx but no frame different then i disbaled some bits and peices and found that when i disabled full screen glow effect they went from 12.5-26.5 and upwards. maybe just for me but i reccomend if you have it enabled try this and it may work for you as it did for me.

to the guy who posted about vista. vista will in time be better for gaming than xp but its early days there are bugs and wow hasnt even had a patch for vista yet. i havnt had the cpu thing evryone else has my cpu speed is bout 4% normally doing nothing and bout 60% playing wow about 66% playing wow and listening to music thru windows media player. afdmittedly vista doesnt seem to have alot of differences to XP at thr moment but its early days we have yet for all compatibility issues to be sorted and alot of fixes to come. you could say nearly the same about xp when it came out as it wasnt that dissimilar from 2000 just better looking and look what it had become. XP now is a great OS compared to 2000 so give vista a chance and cut it some slack.

That’s weird because i have absolutely no issue at all with Vista X64 and WoW. I am running a X2 3800+ @ 2,4Ghz with 2Gb of ram and a 512mb BFG 7950GT. At 1280×1024 with details set to the maximum (including 4x AA), i got between 70 and 160fps with an average of 95fps. I’m using the lastest non-beta nVidia drivers and the lastest Creative drivers for my Audigy Platinum. I haven’t checked my CPU Usage but it enough to make my cpu fan spin faster. I haven’t disabled anything on my Vista installation and I’m running a lot of programs in the background while playing. So, I guest this is really a driver issue. I haven’t tried the game on Windows XP but i guest I have no reason to do so at this time.

For everyone still having problems, you should try updating your drivers. there’s new drivers every month for Vista…

I’m currently running:
Geforce : 100.65
nForce4 : 15.00
Creative Audigy : 2.12.0002

Every1 is just posting their PC’s/fps, but does any1 actualy have a solution :/ ?

BTW, pressing ctrl + R will display your FPS in game. You don’t need any extras or add-on, its a build in hot key.

DX9 games have to run some things in software which used to be done in hardware due to architectural changes in DX10 – which is why the slow performance.

Blizzard need to patch WOW …

Anyone notice a pattern between the people thave notice acceptable performance and the people who dont?

RAM…..

The people who are running high frame rates and dont notice any performance degradation have 2 gigs of RAM or more.

I know this wont cause all of the problems, but it’s a place to start. I personally am tired of trimming a brand new OS, its back to XP for me.

Just got the Inspiron E1505 1.6 duo core 1 GB RAM and geforce go 7300 256MB .I tried to play Need for speed Carbon and had a lot of problems even with dells updated driver I had to keep the game at the min. setting to play it .

Not sure if this has already been stated:
I was having a pretty hefty performance drop with Vista, until I experimented a little bit..
Make sure that the refresh rate and resolution that you are running WOW on are the same as your desktop. I went from averaging 45 fps to getting 75(seemed kind of weird, 75). I expect that it has something to do with Vertical sync on, but it gave a major performance increase.
Here is my theory, and I have only fleeting knowledge of how Vista runs, so it’s probably a bunch of malarky:
Vista renders everything in 3d, all windows etc(with Aero activated) and relies on the video card very heavily. So logically if it only has to keep track of one refresh rate and one resolution performance should be better.

Oh, and if you are trying to run it in windowed mode, and you are complaining about frames per second…. Don’t do windowed mode..
‘Nuff said.
Hope that helps.

if you are reading this looking for some way to make world of warcraft run better on your new computer with windows vist, scroll up and read EVERYTHING that drivers said…or just read what i copied from him –
————————————————————————————-
Drivers
#27. March 3rd, 2007 , at 5:15 PM .

To install the patches in Vista, set the WoW shortcut to run with admin privs (right-click on the shortcut, go to the compatibillity tab and check “Run as administrator. Also set it to compatibility for XPSP2 and disable visual themes while you’re there to avoid the framerate issues. Once in the game, disable Vsync (video) and hardware acceleration (Sound) if you are having sound issues.

—————————————————————————————

I have tried everything that has been listed here and am still having the same problm.
My system will run fine for a while but then will freeze for a moment and show a black screen then will comback and work for about 2-4 minutes and then repete the process.

I am going to install WoW on Vista Cause its the only computer i have so should i or should’nt i install it on it

Signed out!!!

ill be playin wow and out of nowhere my computer crashes and i have windows vista HP on a brand new gateway with dualcore 2.4 ghz with 2gb ram. I also have the 6100 nivida geforece grapic card. If u have an anwser please tell me!!!

I recommend getting a mac – WoW runs great for me!

confirmed. my new laptop came with vista. the ram/procesor, etc is easily twice as good as my fossil of a pc. but my framerate is constantly in the single didgets. all the video options, such as detail and terrain distance, are turned down to the bare minimum. i also limited my addons to chords only and make damn sure nothing is running in the background. its pretty painful.

unfortunately xp drivers for the laptop, which was a gift, are hard to find. not a big computer person but my fiance has been exhausting himself to fix the problem. there’s no all purpose xp disk for it or whatever so the search is on for these xp drivers. can’t wait to downgrade. gg microsoft!

Eventually, WoW started running like it did in XP. I don’t know what I did, but it worked.

Well I just upgraded my sytem to Vista Premium from Windows XP…WoW had never given me a problem on my old sytem, ran smooth as silk. Unfortunately thats NOT the case with Vista. My frame rate jumps around and gameplay is choppy.
My system is as follows:
320 Gig Hard drive
Dual core duo 2.1 ghz processor
Nvidia gforce 7600gs graphics card
2 Gig Memory

In my opinion I should NOT being having issues at all with this setup! Vista is definately the culprit though…Drivers are all updated and such so I dont know what to try now

I was playing wow on an XP just two days ago, fighting Lady Vashj and all that good stuff.
Then yesterday I upgraded to Vista. I upped my 1.5 DDR to 1.5 DDR2, upgraded duo core proc. 3.2 GHZ from single proc. 2.8. Put in a Radeon x1300 Pro from No Graphic Card at all. Tons of Hardrive space and reinstalled WoW.

Xp = 50+ FPS
Vista= 10- FPS

That same day. The second i logged in, i was pulled in for Lady Vashj, it was so sluggish, My char floated in the air it seemed jumping from the top of the platform to the bottom when just two days ago i was jumping down to get tainted elementals with finese.

So XP > Vista.

Does anyone know if i can change any settings to up the proformance of WoW untill the day either Blizard, or Vista has an update that will fix some of the issues

i just bought a laptop with 4x the power of my old pc witch ran windows 2000 and vista runs slowly plus i get the black screen every few second which annoys me. but wen i played in 2000 my fps was always 110+ down to 70 in org any1 know why there is such a huge difference

if you installed vista on a pc that didnt come with it it would take up some RAM etc to run it unless you took xp off youd technically be running 2 operating systems at once even though one would be idle i may have missed something but thats my take on the issue

Hmm, I gues it’s possble it is Vista.

I just bought a new laptop fo college and it runs programs fine, and was initially meant for studies. However, I do like to play WoW on the side, but WoW lags horribly.

The Laptop I bought was “HP Pavilion AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core Mobile TL-58 1.9GHz Laptop (DV2622CA)”

2 gigs of RAM
Integrated video memory
Graphics Chipset: NVIDIA GeForce Go 7150M
up to 1024MB expendable video memory
Video memory: 559MB

Now my old computers specs were much, much worse. My question is…

Is Vista causing the lagging problems, or is it due to the fact that I’m running a laptop with integrated vieo memory, which I know isn’t ideal for gaming. I get huge frame lag issues sometimes around 6fps in IF, and 12fps in an inn…

Anyone know if it is Vista or my laptop?

I just bought a windows vista (Yeah I know…I’m not going to pay an extra 200 bucks just to install XP)

I havent installed WoW yet, but I hope its not as bad as it sounds…
I used to have an XP and wow worked perfectly..

Vista should update sooner or later which should help with WoW preformance, so like everyone else is saying, hang in there =\

Well it worked out for me just fine , but I’m still having sound problems , any idea how to fix that :\ ?

This is my first time posting on any sort of forum so grats, you\’ll are special.

I have an Alienware Area 51-M I custom built to suit my gaming needs, and I\’ve never had a problem running WoW. I\’ve had problems with my CPU fan overheating and automatially shutting my computer down but nothing I couldn\’t work around. Until now.

I upgraded to Vista and all the sudden I couldn\’t play longer than 20 minutes without the damn thing getting 2 to 5 fps, and then shutting down completely.

I read through the 14 pages of comments posted on this fourm and wanted to day the post by wowforums on August 14th was perfect. It solved all my fps issues and I\’m now getting an average of 30 fps in shatt, which wasn\’t happening before. Previously I was getting 1 maybe 3 fps in shatt. I\’m going to repost his fix below so anyone experiencing the problems listed in this forum will hopefully have the same luck I have had.

Thanks again wowforum person whoever you are. It worked wonders! And to think I was gonna spend the afternoon reformatting.

#

wow forums

August 14th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
69

Got this from the WoW forums and it raised my fps from single digits to 30+.

Try these steps and see if it helps;

1. Press the Windows key and the R key. In the run box type services.msc and click OK. Find Superfetch in the list of processes. Right click on it and select Stop. Right click again and select Properties and then Disable.

2. Close the Sidebar and don’t open it again.

3. Open Windows Explorer. Go to your WoW folder in the left hand pane and right click on it. Select Properties. Click on the Advanced button and make sure the box next to “Index this folder for faster searching” is un-ticked.

4. Go into the WoW folder and right click on wow.exe. Select Properties and then click on the Compatability tab. Tick the box under Comptability mode (select XP service pack 2) and put a tick in the box next to “Disable desktop composition”.

Try the game again and see if it runs any better.

[...] Posted by Tom Vista has been said to decrease WoW FPS. World of Warcraft – Poor Frame Rates on Windows Vista | Philoking.com yeah i’ve read up on some of those, but as i said i doubt the performance would drastically [...]

My god, i’ve been trying to tweak vista for ages now.
1GB RAM intel core 2 duo 1.8Ghz geforce 7500 le 250 gb harddrive.
Now, this is no monster of a machine.
I’ve tweaked the hell out of it, actually so much it almost died (literally).
All latest drivers, clean, no vista interface crap, just a tweaked out system.
Now, i get around… (with my currant in-game configuration) 38-54 fps anywhere outside and around 25-38 fps in a bit town/city.
Now what really annoyed me about all these forums, is that people go on about fps. My problem seemed to be loading times, and bad flickering, especially when loading new places up. I fixed this, wow performs overall very smoothly. But i came accross something quite stunning.
I ran Wow in windowed mode to talk to a friend. In this, i get around 25 fps outside and 18-25 in city/towns.
But… i have no loading difficulties… ??? Wtf, it’s just… ultra smooth loading, all the time…
I went to see how much RAM was being taken up, 900mb were taken up…
So, would more be used in full screen causing loading troubles when playing like that? Idk…
My currant in-game configuration…
50% terrain 100% enviroment default texture, full terrain texture, everything else way down. 75Htz refresh, verticle sync & tripple buffering on. (btw always have your refresh rate in game the same as on desktop).
If anyone wants smooth gameplay, try the settings i have.
Also> right click Wow folder, propertys> compatibility> run xp mode, disable desktop composition, visual themes, high dpi settings, run as admin.
I actually don’t know why i made this post but uhh… yeah :S

running a 2.6 gig quad processor with 2 geforce 8600 in tandem with 1264 mb of ddr3 and 2 gigs of ram on baord im easily hitting 155 fps in wow and loving it
screen shot to follow if i can get it to load

sparkyred and sparkypal on cenarius
\

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Yeah man, It’s not vista. Your OS has to be able to run on your computer and you’re just asking for issues if you think you can run vista on a machine like that. Should have stayed with xp with ur current build imo.

I also think that this attributes to why people don’t like vista…I know it has its fair share of bugs but I see a lot of people putting Vista on POS machines but no one likes to hear that

I have just installed WoW on my prety strong machine and was shocked to see FPS values when maxed up settings with 1280×1024 resolution. In Shattrath my FPS are strugling to pass 20.

Core2Duo E8400 3.0Ghz
2×2GB DDR2 800Mhz
BFG 9800GTX OC
2×250GB RAID0 HDDs

“this is not a microsft issue. vista runs in dx10 wow runs in dx9, why should microsft accomodate for a big name game company like blizz and downgrade there OS when blizz needs to step up and make the game compatable for DX10???”

That’s a really bad argument. There are very few games that are made with DX10 yet.. I agree, it’s not so much an MS issue, as Blizzard should take the time to optimize the damn code to work with Vista..
DX10 has nothing to do with it… There is no reason for WOW to be running DX10, as the graphics engine is quite old and antiquated. Most of the features that DX10 offers wouldn’t be used in Wow anyway..
BTW, it IS DX10 compatible, it’s just not optimized for DX10..

Make sure you turn off the windows indexer service. I did that and the wow framerate went from around 10 to 60.

Vista uses Direct X 10 as its 3d standard. Vista is going to perform badly compared to XP unless you have a video card capable of using Direct X 10 and OpenGL 2.0.

The high end Nvidia cards are all Direct X 10. Also, you should set your screens to single mode when playing games instead of duel span. Duel span uses quite a bit of resources and will low your frame rates quite a bit.

I HAVE AN ANSWER THAT MAY HELP!

My problem is that in order for my screen to be clear, I have to run WOW at the recommned settings for my LCD monitor (1680 X 1050). Needless to say this is a fairly high resolution and I automatically take a FPS hit.

I was unable to find an answer on the internet, but I was able to dramatically increase my framerate by doing some tuning and testing of my own. On average I am getting about 10-15 FPS more than I was before tuning my installation of Vista.

Here are some things that helped me inrease FPS in WOW on Vista (32bit):

1. Don’t run WOW in windowed mode — Just wanted to state the obvious before we begin

2. Aside from needing to run the game as administrator, you should also run the game in Windows XP SP2 compatibility mode. This helped me a lot.

3. Turn off “Super Fetch” under services. Super Fetch is cool for people who run office, play music and browse the web. But it causes unnescessary disk IO in WOW based on my testing. As soon as I turned this off, I had considerably less disk activity while in the game.

4. Turn off ready boost. It doesn’t really do much for WOW but hardly any one uses it and for those of you with 1GB of RAM or less, it will help you some. It helped me a bit before I got 2GB of RAM.

5. If you have a SATA drive, turn on “Write Caching” and “Advanced Performance”. This is not reccomened for people who do not have their computer connected to a UPS.
These settings can be found by going to the properties of your SATA drive in device manager and clicking on the “Policies” tab.

6. Some people have experienced better FPS by shutting down DWM under services. DWM is the service that gives Vista all those “Cool” glassy effects.

I hope with information helps. As I said before, I am getting an additiona 10-15 FPS since making these changes.

If these settings helped you please let me know. My email is deboot01@gmail.com

I was getting low frames with Vista as well, I removed the tablet pc feature in the control panel…
start, control panel, programs and features, click turn off or on windows features – then turn off tablet pc features..
That seems to have improved performance for me…..
my machine AMD 3700+, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 8400, nothing special but it should run WoW without a problem..
in the undercity now with 57 FPS…

Got laptop with Vista home Premium, (Acer Aspire 7730g, Intel centrino 2 duo 2.0ghz, Nvidia Geforce 9600m gt 512mb, 4gb ram. After i instaled wow i had it runing at 100fps. After 1 week of playing, it droper dramaticly to 20fps, everything on computer started lagging, even my mouse pointer, so i have reinstaled my vista for 5 times allready, and it works fine for about 1week, after that the lag starts all over again, I instaled xp pro once, but then i did nto find drivers for xp(everything was only for vista) Im nearly at the state of troughing my laptop out of my window.

ok i gotta a couple problems with the framerate too…
i have a 2ghz processor, 2gb of ram, a nvidia 7600, and of course, vista. I had xp before and the game worked great, but for some reason i downloaded vista. Now the framerate sucks and i want a couple tips just in case there is a way to up the framerate without going back to vista….any ideas?

I’d like to know something.
It’s almost my birthday and I had a question about Windows xp/Vista.
i’d like to know what’s better for Wow. Is Windows Xp better, or Windows vista? I really wanna know this, What computer should i choose? about 2 days is my birthday >.<

Please send message at my e-mail =]

Most of you that are posting poor FPS dont have systems strong enough to run vista.
XP is much better for 2 year old or more systems.
If you dont have a DX10 video card, capable of runing DX10 games, why bother?
To the above guy having problems with the Crossfire ATI cards, 2 things, first WOW does not like nor use CF or SLI, 2nd the game just runs better on NV cards.

i started playing wow on a pc then i quit wow got a vista and then wanted to play agian but i noticed it wouldnt work. can somone please help me