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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Vista and wow is very disappointing. i tried playing it for like 10 minutes and couldn’t stay at my PC. The sound is all juttery and the gameplay is just terrible.
im thinking of downgrading my pc to XP…
Rory
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 have the same problems with the sreen going black every once in while mostly during pvp and it sucks really bad. is there a way to fix this.
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!!!
i have it in stalled but it wont even start its says fatal error and also has a massage that says the memory could not be “read” iv never had this problem on xp… anyone know what to do?
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 cant install WoW on Windows Vista? Anyone can tell me why?
I recommend getting a mac – WoW runs great for me!
exctly, its not realeased officially, so its not fully pimped.!
Also just to let you guys know i was playing wow like 1hr ago and i had 17 Fps… on a 800×600 screen :S? that should not be happening, so i changed to a higher setting and it worked just the same? i was exremely confused… so now i play in windowed mode with a wide screen set up, works the same as the nooby one so why not.
Rawwr
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!
learn to install the correct drivers.
use the 64 bit version of vista.
Eventually, WoW started running like it did in XP. I don’t know what I did, but it worked.
I’ve been reading all down this page and trying many of the things that people suggest. But, after all this work experimenting with vista, I’m gonna reformat and go back to XP because 1, I got this version of vista off a msdn subscription and 2, because I’ve been wanting to reformat for a while. I think XP is more for getting things done and Vista is more for experimenting. Microsoft spent plenty of time making this and they’re probably just testing different things. I recommend to those of you that have the option of going back to XP and want to work with a compatible WoW operating system to switch back for a while until they work of some of the many problems with Vista.
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
It’s the ATI driver. Vista doesn’t fully support and video cards yet. They still need the drivers to be fully updated. You can have 20 gigs of RAM and 1gig video cards and it wont run as good as XP with 1 gig RAM & 56mb Video card.
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.
i was thinking about buying World of Warcraft for my desktop it is a acer t180
harddrive:160GB
System RAM:1 GB
Operating System:Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and NVIDIA nForce 430 MCP integrated graphics with up to 256 MB shared graphics memory
will WoW run okay with my desktop
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
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.
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
Regarding LCD monitors and refresh rates:
1) When running via VGA (analog) you get 60/75/etc HZ vertical refresh rates.
2) If you are using DVI (digital), the picture you get is much better than analog, but you only get 60 HZ.
At least it seems that way with my Sony 19″ monitor, but I think it will be the same for all monitors…
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
i have an HP Pavillion DV6000 (2007 release) with core 2 duo processor and a gig of ram 512 MB of video. WoW laggs like a whore, but my CPU level always stays around 10-20%, which is nothing really. by contrast, my ram is usually around 70-100% constantly. WoW rarely laggs when im by myself, but as soon as there is three or more people around, my comp laggs like crazy. its not a video issue (especially if you only need 32MBs min to run wow), and i have a realitivily fast connection to the interent. my latency is usually around 70-200 ms, which isnt too much, but my FR jumps around anywhere from 80-1 FPS. i find this odd, because when i had XP installed, my FR stayed around the 40FPS mark. its gotta be somthing to do with Vista. im gonna try plaing around with the vdeo settings some more, but im thinking of just re-installing XP on this machine. i guess ill wait untill SP1 comes out then decide.
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?
Okay you lot, this should help you all out.
Here’s some lag issues with vista i faced and fixed.
Having problems installing Wow, errors occuring while installing?
Turn Windows Firewall off, and your general fire wall (Norton, Mcafee etc).
Having bad issues with Fps and general lag in the game?
Right click your World of Warcraft icon, click the compatibility tab, tick the box saying ‘run this program in compatibility mode for:’ and choose XP SP2.
Also tick the box at the bottem for ‘run this program as administrator’.
And tick the boxes for: Disable visual themes, disable desktop
composition, & disable display scaling on high DPI settings.
Once this is done, click OK.
Still have problems/issues with Fps or general lag in the game? Click ESC in-game, click the video option, and click ‘defaults’ down the bottom. Once that’s done, go to the bottom and click the option for getting rid of full screen glow affect, and then turn spells, weather intensity, ground clutter and the other ground option all the way down. The turn terrain distance either all the way up, or almost all the way up, and turn enviroment detail all the way up. Reason for this is, it gives the PC more time to load lands further away so it doesn’t lag as much when you get there, useful for low RAM and small hard drive PCs.
If you still lag, i found that turning off verticle SYNC helped wonders. and set your screen refresh rate as high as it can be without noticing any ‘tearing’ on the sides of the screen.
I wish you luck, i can pretty much promise your Fps will shoot right up doing this for your vista users, since i am one too. Good luck!
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 =\
geoff you saved me hours of installing xp and reconfiguring, changing the compatibility mode settings did the trick.
Well it worked out for me just fine , but I’m still having sound problems , any idea how to fix that :\ ?
hi all, I just bought WOW and I have Windows Vista.
It happens that Whenever I opem the installation file, it gives me error e closes the installation even before it starts.
Do you think it’s because of the OS? :S
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.
[...] Vista has been said to decrease WoW FPS. World of Warcraft – Poor Frame Rates on Windows Vista | Philoking.com [...]
[...] 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 [...]
@junglist
tried your suggestion and noticed quite an improvement. still not as good as it runs on XP, but much better framerates.
thx
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
I have a core 2 due 1333fsb 4gb ddr 800 mhz ram with an sli mobo made by xfx with 2 gforce 8600 gts vid cards. with all the new hardware out there people are going to have to learn vista. I was having major issues since the last patch on my xp machine. with this machine i pull 65+ fps with lat of avg of 200ms. I recently bought the Killer K1 nic and this droped the lat down to an avg of 100ms. i don’t think vista is all to blame for poor fps. If you are running vista with less then 2 gb ram GL to you. Hardware and proper config fo modems and routers and having a port for wow will help.
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
\
the game world of warcraft is so sick
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lmao no wonder, you have a shitty video card, 2 moniters and running it in windowed mode. vista isnt the problem dumbass, go lrn
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 an Alienware laptop with vista. I have a AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology ML-44 2.40 GHz processor with 2047 RAM. When I run World of Warcraft my CPU goes up to 100% and balances there the whole time I have the game running. My laptop isn’t even a year old yet so blaming my computer isn’t the answer i’m looking for right now. Especially since i have recently (yesterday) done a complete system restore and updated my drivers. I have taken it to the Geek Squad and they said this isn’t the first time that a person has come in and questioned the CPU. All of their systems were also run with Vista. The man told me that those people have all downgraded to XP and from there the game has worked fine.
I thought getting Vista would be awesome because it was an upgrade from a great Microsoft program (xp) so naturally I thought it would be great. After all the trouble I went through with doing a system restore and then loading everything back up I would really like it if Microsoft would do something since I have googled this problem and seen a many MANY people with the same complaints. So im sure that they are well aware that this is going on. Grant it I know they have bigger problems, but they should TRY to stop vista users from downgrading to an older product and this CPU usage thing is one of the causes for downgrading.
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
2x2GB DDR2 800Mhz
BFG 9800GTX OC
2x250GB 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???
“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..
xD, everyones moaning about frps at 20- one time mine got to 1000 and it was still only bit laggy, can we not just stick to subject anyway?
Make sure you turn off the windows indexer service. I did that and the wow framerate went from around 10 to 60.
hallo ppl . like i see allot still having probs with wow + vista im running vista on a laptop witch i buy with vista instaled on it already my laptop has:
2gb ram
dual core T2060 @ 1.80 Ghz
Ram 2039 mb
945 intel Express Chippset Family 225 Mb Shared.
not altough good video card but should run it (atleast did it on xp)
altough i installed the patches and wow with outproblems unitly i stared wow up and enter my char and i was standing in Ogrimmar and i have huge like spike and it scared the crap out of me . when i walked i was a shocking screen also my FPS was 4 around 7 way to low didnt had problems with it at vista . i readed allot forums to get some trickes with the vista crap to run it smoother it all helped a bit still runs like shit . and yes i have every update for my Vid card downloaded and still runs like crap >< anyone have some tips ?:)
Greetz
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.
My set up:
Vista 64
4 gig of ram, ATI certified for crossfire
Asus m3a3mvp Mobo
300g HD
Dual ATI HD 3870′s w/ newest drivers
22″ westinghouse Monitor
15″ generic monitor
AMD Quad Core Phenom Black Box edition 9600 2.31
When I ran XP i was getting 20-40 fps w/ a much worse comp.
I am in window mode, which apparently I’ll change. But I still get horrible FPS 20-40, and will get down into single digts and crash on some boss fights. I also get that my vista recovered from a display error at times.
So i uninstalled and used vista’s basic drivers for my cards…same issues. shitty fps, and the occasional error in the atikmdag.
I assume its vista. But I will makes the changes about XPSP2 and such. I’ve also searched hi and low about the atikmdag issues. Seems i’m not the only one having it. So if anyone has come up w/ a better solotuion for fps, or this stupid driver, let me know msu_trainer@hotmail.com
cheers!
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