*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

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.

Please send message at my e-mail =]

http://www.vlite.net/ to pimp your Vista .