Jan 28, 2007
World of Warcraft – Poor Frame Rates on Windows Vista
I finally got around to installing World of Warcraft on my Windows Vista Ultimate machine to give some basic performance samples of how it runs. I haven’t really played World of Warcraft in months, I had to sign up again and endure over 1 gig of updates just to get it running, talk about annoying. It seems like I just downloaded the entire game again, why not just start fresh! In all seriousness, this game has grown, the installer is 5 CD-ROMs, so even if all 5 were full 700MB CD-ROMs, after expansion, this game has installed two gigabytes of game updates. That’s pretty incredible. Thank God for high speed Internet connections.
I have to say that the performance results are pretty disappointing. The test machine is a 2.5Ghz Pentium 4, with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB Radeon 9600 video card. This same machine stayed regularly in the 40fps range with Windows XP installed. Now, sitting around in Orgrimmar, it’s struggling to stay above 20fps, regularly dipping into the teens. The scary part is that even standing idle, my CPU usage is pegged at 100% and 60% of my RAM is used.
I flew over to Brill and they framerates rose to the 40s while there were no other players or enemies on the screen. CPU Utilization also fell down into the 70s, but we all know that’s not how you play the game. The settings for World of Warcraft are the default for my system. 1024×768, 24bit color, 50% Terrain Distance, 50% Environement Detail, Low Anisotropic Filtering, low Terrain Texture, High Texture Detail, High Spell Detail Level, 60% Weather Intensity, Level of Detail is checked, All Shader Effects Enabled except Smooth Shading, Trilinear Filtering enabled, Vertical Sync enabled and Hardware Cursor enabled.
I will note that I am playing in Windowed Mode, I use two monitors so playing in full screen is a pain, but the performance is still pretty bad. If you consider the recommended system for this game, an 800Mhz P3, 512MB of RAM and a 32MB Video Card, it’s pretty hard to swallow these numbers. Obviously Windows Vista is the culprit.
Currently, I am installing it on a 1.73Ghz Core Duo laptop with 1GB Ram and a 256MB Geforce Go video card in it. I will update this article with the results of that testing.
Two things. Sorry for the typos in the previous post. Second, I forgot to mention that “disk caching” can be turned on for drives other than SATA (For example IDE drives), you just won’t be able to get the additional benefit of turning on “Advanced Performance”. That said, “write caching” does help no matter what. If you have ever noticed a lot of choppiness in Shatt (or Stormwind), much of it is caused by your hard disk being heavily utilized in that area. I’m not saying the choppiness will completely go away (some of it has to do with the game engine), but it should be reduced some and will help your FPS.
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…
I have a Gigabyte x48 mobo, ATi 3870’s in Crossfire (latest drivers), 8 gigs of RAM runnnig under Vista Ultimate and WoW will not run – it freezes up every time. Yes, I’ve tried everything, including replacing the mobo, replacing ram, replacing the sound card (SB X-Fi) and one of my hard drives (2 750 gigs in Raid 1). I have had it with Vista and am going to go back to XP. In Vista’s 64 bit o/s I have about 6 programs that I used on a regular basis that won’t work under it, and all worked fine in XP. If at least WoW worked I’d probably find workarounds for those other prog.s, but I’m tired of trying “fixes” for a crappy o/s. Bah!
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.
This is going to sound pretty stupid compared to some of the others but I changed the Multisampleing down to the lowest setting and my Frame rate jumped form 4-5 to almost 30! yes it dosent look as good but damn is it smooth.
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?
Don’t really know why you guys got these problems, but my WoW is running VERY smoothly (exactly like on XP). Also I am using a self moded Vista SP1 version.
http://www.vlite.net/ to pimp your Vista
.
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 =]
Erm i just got WoW And my Computer is Windows Ultimate 7 And im not sure if it is compatible with WoW?
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.
Well this is my experience with vista. My previous pc configuration running XP was
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
1.5 gig RAM
ASUS 6600 GT 256 mb
WoW cruised around 40 to 50fps. Nice and smooth. Well put Vista Premium on and i was lucky to break 15fps. I got to reading and saw how much machine vista needed so i upgraded to:
AMD athlon 64 4200+ Dual Core
ATI HD 2600 XT 512mb
4 gigs of RAM
My fps then in WoW was a steady 60fps. Put my old rig back on xp and it is running at 40 to 50 fps once again.
The real kicker is, since WoTLK came out my main machine with vista has dropped to below 20fps and my old machine on xp is still running in the 40s. I still have yet to figure out how this is possible.