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.
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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.
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
BY FAR the best advice and most improvement I have seen yet.
*DISCLAIMER – This information was assimilated from many different sources including the official Blizzard Forums and Google searches. It is geared towards nVidia users and probably has some Vista references. I was having big time lag issues that affected me in 25 man raids most especially when I started rolling afflication again. These changes drastically increased my personal framerate and allowed me to stretch WoW over 2 monitors again. These are my notes from my research.. this isn’t a step by step guide.. I’m posting it because it might help someone*
WoW Video Performance Issues
Turn off Aero in Vista
Double check that SP1 is installed (maybe even reinstall it to make sure)
Turn down terrain distance setting from high
Turn off hardware sound in sound settings
Check inside of computer to clean and overheating issues
Check network options for improvement here
http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=2574
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\W insat
Change SharedVideoMemory to 0
First make sure that AntiAliasing, Anistropic Filtering are set to Application controlled in the control panel of your video driver.
Next Goto The setting called Texture filtering Negative LoD bias and set this to Clamp. Default is allow.
Important: Do not run Windows Performance Index check after this change or it will reset values.
-Go to your Video card settings outside of WoW in this case you have Nvidia so you can right click the desktop and go to the Nvidia control panel or if you don’t have that option you can right click your desktop and go to properties->settings->advanced. NOW HERE IS THE IMPORTANT PART
-turn OFF vertical sync OR vsync this will alow your computer to exceed 60 fps
-turn OFF anisotropic filtering
-turn OFF antialiasing (on this setting if you have up to date drivers it would be set to none check for transparency antialiasing)
-turn texture filtering to high performance but you dont really have to since now graphic cards are so powerful it doesent really matter i think you can simply just turn off vsync and go from their
-next go to your video options IN GAME and turn OFF vsync
First is sound performance
click > start > control panel & double click the sound and audio devices, down towards the bottom you see speaker settings in that area click “advanced” this brings up a window with two tabs you want to click the performance tab. Now look for the slider “Sample Rate conversion quality” and drag that to the far left the setting you want it good, this will allow decent sound while giving back a few Fps I gained a huge chunk of fps by doing that alone.
Next is graphics performance
whether you are a Nvidia or ATI user this will help greatly and is always over looked. Bring up the Nvidia or Ati control panels, this setting keeps the image quality and gives some Fps back you will notice this setting greatly when you load up WoW again.
Nvida Geforce Users: bring up the Nvidia control panel (right click on desktop) and in the left hand pane look for “3D’” and look for “use my preference emphasizing” which has a slider you want to drag that slider to the left to performance click apply at the bottom.
ATI/AMD Radeon Users: Bring up the CCC panel (right click on desktop) and in the left pane is “3D” setting that brings up a slider you want to drag that to the left for the performance setting then click apply.
Next is ethernet performance (wireless 802.11 doesn’t have this option)
click > start > control panel you want to double click system which brings up a window with tabs, you want the “hardware” tab now towards the top you want device manager this brings up a whole new window. In that window we are looking for “Network adapters” just click the plus+ next to it to expand it then double click your network which brings up a window with tabs you want to select “advanced” tab. Now you are looking for a feature in the window on the left its called “speed duplex” this will be named different for some users. Once you select that a feature to the right becomes avaible its named “value” (for most users) select the dropdown arrow and select 10Mbps Full Duplex then click OK at the bottom, now this will disconnect & reconnect you about 7 seconds. I gain a good amount of Fps from this.
Vista has additional features that can control CPU speed.
Open the Control Panel, then open System and Maintenance.
Go to Power Options, pick High performance.
Click on Change plan settings underneath it, then click Change advanced power settings.
Go to your Processor power management section and change both minimum and maximum processor states to 100%.
Hit OK
Intel users may want to check on the Intel Speedstep (or EIST) setting in their BIOS
Windows Search/Indexing
Some users have reported that their performance will drop down to single digit framerates while Windows is searching or indexing the drive. Try disabling it. Go to your Control Panel, then System and Maintenance. Click on Administrative Tools, then Services. Find “Windows Search” and disable it.
Windows may try to index your World of Warcraft folder. It tends to have more effect if you use a lot of custom UIs or have multiple characters. Right-click your World of Warcraft folder and go to Properties. Click on the Advanced button in the Attributes section. Uncheck Index this folder for faster searching and hit OK.
Enabling Reduce Input Lag may help some systems with lower-end video cards. Try enabling that to see if it helps. For 2.4.3, it is in your Interface options. For 3.0.x, it is in your Video options.
This feature should be OFF for anything mid-end or better. Turning it on on a good video card will cripple your performance
If your video card is capable of shader effects (native DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 hardware), make sure those are enabled in-game. It will accelerate the game. The option to enable/disable this was removed from the GUI as it should default to on if your video card supports it. Try typing in /console fixedfunction 0 and hit enter in your in-game chat window to set the setting. Restart it and it’ll go into effect.
World of Warcraft’s performance will suffer if your video card’s bandwidth is very low (PCI cards, PCI Express cards being ran at 1x). Try using a utility called GPU-Z to find out if you are running the card on a low bus speed – GPU-Z Video card GPU Information Utility
Dynamic Shadows has a huge hit on game performance. If you have the Shadow slider maxed out and you’re getting low framerates, try lowering the setting or pull it to the leftmost area to turn it off.
Make sure you did not use the framerate limit command and set it to very low numbers. Type this in your game’s chat window to remove it:
/console maxfps 0