Interesting world of Warcraft issue...

[Tehpyrate]

So, running into very strange set of problems..

My system specs:

ASUS M4A89TD motherboard w/ NB @ 2750 MHZ
AMD 965 BE @ 4Ghz - water-cooled. 1.475 vcore prime95 and LinX stable
OCZ Gold 1600- @ 1667 - 1.75V - 8-9-8-24- 1T
2x XFX radeon 5850 crossfireX 1GB DDR5 725/1000
eyefinity running @ 5760x1080
3Dmark vantage score is P20495
HDDs are in RAID 0

drivers are all up to date. Running Catalyst 10.10 and latest cf profiles
clean install of windows 7 with updates

I bought this new pc and got it up and running like the same week of patch so I have nothing to compare it to pre-patch.

So, issues I have..

If i have water set to Good or Ultra and not have my AA set to 8x I get massive drop in frames, hovering around 30-40fps. But when I do set it to 8x I'm back in the 60 to 120 range...that cant be normal..though, things do look great at 8x AA.

My other issue is when I set my view distance anything beyond 'good' along with environment detail and ground clutter, I get massive drop in frames if I try to turn too fast. It stutters, it'll freeze... Any advice on this? I also noticed that the view distance on my side monitors doesn't change, always appears to be at maximum.

Any advice?


I believe I should be able to run wow pretty well with my rig.

[Dreadloxxx]

i found this out as well with the mulitsampling. i set mine to x4 and it works well. the view distance is one of the biggest factors in framerates in wow, i keep mine at high but i get the occasional dip in fps in certain areas... its normal and i think its something that will get better as new drivers come out

[ithrial]

The water is bugged at certain angles - The pool in Ironforge is almost invisible for me so something is wrong.

Keep in mind though that WoW doesnt like 2 video cards - I have 2 of the 6870s right now and I actually get better framerates when I take the cards out of Crossfire and just use one card to push the eyefinity. Did the same thing to me when i had my 2 GTX 275s as well. Its more processor intensive, which your proc should be running it just fine @ 4ghz

[Tehpyrate]

So.. after a few hours of fiddling with it...

Code: Select all

   SET componentTextureLevel "9"

   SET terrainMipLevel "0"

   <span style="color: #404000;">SET farclip &quot;850&quot;</span>

   <span style="color: #408000;">SET horizonfarclip &quot;2112&quot;</span>

   SET projectedTextures &quot;1&quot;

   SET shadowTextureSize &quot;2048&quot;

   <span style="color: #804000;">SET groundEffectDensity &quot;128&quot;</span>

   SET weatherDensity &quot;3&quot;

   SET gxTextureCacheSize &quot;800&quot;

   SET environmentDetail &quot;125&quot;

   <span style="color: #808000;">SET groundEffectDist &quot;64&quot;</span>

   SET gxTripleBuffer &quot;1&quot;

   SET maxFPS &quot;0&quot;

   SET maxFPSBk &quot;0&quot;

   SET gxCursor &quot;0&quot;

   SET waterDetail &quot;1&quot;

   SET reflectionMode &quot;1&quot;

   SET shadowMode &quot;1&quot;

   

Those were the key settings I fiddled with to get some better performance out..
:(

I built my machine to run at Ultra settings... which it does... but meh... Now I feel like I kinda wasted alot of money on my computer...

[Unknownsock]

Wow is a demanding game. Especially with the new patch.
And it runs on a very old game engine, which is horribly optimised for todays standards.

Shadows, water and multi-sampling for me are the worst contributors, i just turn these off.

[Tehpyrate]

I feel like their new graphics improvements were made to run more on DX11. Unfortunately, dx11 = no eyefinity.... Which is really stupid IMO.

[Dreadloxxx]

You shouldn't feel like you wasted your money. You have a good machine which can run games at max in a standard resolution. You have to keep in mind that at eyefinity resolutions there is ALOT more screen to fill which requires alot of graphics memory. You have 2 5850s so that's only 2gigs. That fills up quick with these resolutions. I think we will see more 2 gig single cards and 4 gig duel cards coming out in the future as eyefinity gains ground and matures.

[Falcon1]

I doubt this is normal.

I dunno about WoW, as I stopped playing it a few years ago when Lord of the Rings Online came out.
I run LotRO @ 5040x1050 DX11 all Settings maxed out, which really looks good and definitely better than WoW (and more demanding, too). And I get 60-80fps outdoors in the wild and ~25fps in Twenty-First Hall (Most demanding place in the game, one of the main "cities") and ~40fps in Bree. And my machine is not as good as the thread starter's.

Did you install all drivers? Latest Hotfix for Cat10.10? Try any Beta driver? Latest BIOS for the Board? How's it running with everything at default clocks (Non-OCed)?

[Dreadloxxx]

I doubt this is normal.

I dunno about WoW, as I stopped playing it a few years ago when Lord of the Rings Online came out.
I run LotRO @ 5040x1050 DX11 all Settings maxed out, which really looks good and definitely better than WoW (and more demanding, too). And I get 60-80fps outdoors in the wild and ~25fps in Twenty-First Hall (Most demanding place in the game, one of the main "cities") and ~40fps in Bree. And my machine is not as good as the thread starter's.

Did you install all drivers? Latest Hotfix for Cat10.10? Try any Beta driver? Latest BIOS for the Board? How's it running with everything at default clocks (Non-OCed)?

Its normal. You basically said the same thing that the starter said. "Great in certain areas, worse in others" WoW uses an old engine, my system is more than capable of running games maxed but i still get the lower framerates in certain areas too. Like i said in the the previous post, Eyefinity is using most of the graphics memory so you cant expect u run at maxed settings and not get frame rate dips. If you dont believe me then set your resolution back to a single screen 1920x1080, 1920x1200, whatever it is and you will be frame capped 99% of the time.

[Tehpyrate]

I've run wow at 1920x1080. I can run it at ultra on everything 8x aa and 16x af and get 60 fps synched everywhere. At 5760x1080 I have to turn down view distance to 300 and I have water and shadows at good.. I think the water is bugged on ultra because the trails don't work right..

I'm gonna download lotro and try it to see what kind of fps I get. In wow I noticed my fps drops are in north rend and out lands

Running the latest 10.10e drivers.

I just cant go back to a single monitor again....

[Junlee]

Well I just built a new rig a week ago and I am able to run WoW at absolute max settings at 5877x1080 resolution.

my specs:
core i7-950 (stock)
SLI EVGA Superclocked GTX 470s
12gb G.Skill triple channel @ 1333mhz (stock)
Asus Rampage III Formula mobo
OCZ Vertex Agility II 60gb SSD (boot)
WD 500gb Blue 7200rpm (WoW installed on this drive)


I haven't had any framerate drops whatsoever, however occasionally WoW will crash with a memory related error saying its requesting 24gb of memory..lol memory leak? Though I am playing without the game fully downloaded yet (about 70% done on the patcher, so that could have something to do with it.

I think your problem is AMD related. You see, crossfire scales HORRIBLY compared to a similar priced sli-set up. You can find a ton of tech sites that have done performance reviews comparing Eyefinity vs Nvidia Surround with crossfire/sli and SLI tends to get 40% or higher framerates in almost every game. This is especially true in DX11 games (if i remember correctly, nvidia cards currently get something like 3x more fps than the amd cards).

Maybe AMD will get their act together and start making decent cards that can scale like their Nvidia competition in the same price bracket...but i doubt it.

[Tehpyrate]

Downloading AION today.. Gonna give that a try...

Ran LOTRO on 5760x1080 on dx11 ultra high settings... 60 fps everywhere.

Its not that I have frame rate drops in WoW. My cards are perfectly capable of rendering at 80-120 fps when I'm flying forward or are in any zone other than grizzly hills and zul drak.

I'm ready to give up after fiddling with it all day yesterday... Gonna go to running at 1920x1080 ultra 8x AA ... Or quit :( stupid game is making me miserable..

[Tehpyrate]

so yeah... loaded up aion jumped into a server.. ran around.. flew into the air.. the lowest FPS I got was 80.. highest 120 vsynced ... in Sanctum I got like 49 fps for like 1 second as I was rotating around maniacally... other than that smooth sailing in all the zones I have access to with all settings at max and fov @ 150..

[psychosomatic]

My other issue is when I set my view distance anything beyond 'good' along with environment detail and ground clutter, I get massive drop in frames if I try to turn too fast. It stutters, it'll freeze... Any advice on this?

This is likely caused by a bottleneck while loading textures/mapping data from disk. Consider purchasing an SSD for WoW's game files.

I haven't had any framerate drops whatsoever, however occasionally WoW will crash with a memory related error saying its requesting 24gb of memory..lol memory leak?

I think you miscalculated the amount of memory it's requesting... it was probably 24M and not 25G; the issue is that the game client isn't LMA, so it's hard locked to 2G of working memory. At triple monitor resolutions, however, the client can easily require so much graphics data loaded into memory that it runs itself outside of the 2G limit and throws an error. The only workarounds are: use a modified client executable that is LMA (bannable, but it increases the limit to 4G) or lowering graphics settings.

[Tehpyrate]

How do I verify that swapping out drives will correct the issue? I do hear my hods going crazy when I do get stutter.

[allanstrings]

WoW will crash with a memory related error saying its requesting 24gb of memory..lol memory leak?

WoW is still built on 32 bit code, and they have said in dev chats that they are not planning on rewriting the whole codebase anytime soon. This means that the game engine has hard limits on the memory it is able to address for the video buffer. If you run triplehead and have your view distance set better than halfway out at any of the higher detail settings, you will eventually hit that memory overflow error (it's probably saying 2.4gb not 24) It doesn't matter if your PC has 16gb RAM, it doesn't matter if your video card has 4gb of RAM, the game code itself will kick the error if you try to view too much at one time. Usually this happens when you are flying on a very fast air mount, or on an air taxi (anything that can get faster than 250% run speed) and you go high enough to draw a long ways out, or you swing your view around fast from side to side...

[suiken_2mieu]

WoW will crash with a memory related error saying its requesting 24gb of memory..lol memory leak?

WoW is still built on 32 bit code, and they have said in dev chats that they are not planning on rewriting the whole codebase anytime soon. This means that the game engine has hard limits on the memory it is able to address for the video buffer. If you run triplehead and have your view distance set better than halfway out at any of the higher detail settings, you will eventually hit that memory overflow error (it's probably saying 2.4gb not 24) It doesn't matter if your PC has 16gb RAM, it doesn't matter if your video card has 4gb of RAM, the game code itself will kick the error if you try to view too much at one time. Usually this happens when you are flying on a very fast air mount, or on an air taxi (anything that can get faster than 250% run speed) and you go high enough to draw a long ways out, or you swing your view around fast from side to side...

I do believe that cataclysm is supposed to be 64 bit. But this is just from word of mouth, i'm not sure if it's true. But that should alleviate some issues.

[lef1337]

I do believe that cataclysm is supposed to be 64 bit. But this is just from word of mouth, i'm not sure if it's true. But that should alleviate some issues.

no it wont be and they will rewrite the code for 64bit even in the next expansions.

[Valldemar]

I experiencing exactly the same issues as you do.
And I am running a rig wich I tought should be able to handle it.

Crucial RealSSD C300 2,5" 128GB
355MB/140MB sec read/write. (One of the faster ssd disks out there)
i7 2600k SandyBridge @ 4.8 Ghz
2x 6970 in Crossfire.
3x Dell U2410 UltraSharp.
16GB DDR3 1600Mhz ram.

Its more or less unplayable if I dont have View Distance to the absolut minimum settings.
Must say Im quite disappointed.

When Im just flying straight forward, I get 100-140fps.
Once I make a turn, the entire game stutters and brings my fps down to everything from 5-20 fps.

Looks like I should have gotten Nvidia Cards. Tought AMD cards would be better, hence more memory. (2GB on each card)

[fuzioninfinity]

WoW will crash with a memory related error saying its requesting 24gb of memory..lol memory leak?

WoW is still built on 32 bit code, and they have said in dev chats that they are not planning on rewriting the whole codebase anytime soon. This means that the game engine has hard limits on the memory it is able to address for the video buffer. If you run triplehead and have your view distance set better than halfway out at any of the higher detail settings, you will eventually hit that memory overflow error (it's probably saying 2.4gb not 24) It doesn't matter if your PC has 16gb RAM, it doesn't matter if your video card has 4gb of RAM, the game code itself will kick the error if you try to view too much at one time. Usually this happens when you are flying on a very fast air mount, or on an air taxi (anything that can get faster than 250% run speed) and you go high enough to draw a long ways out, or you swing your view around fast from side to side...

I've had several games crashed due to running out of memory, even though I had plenty of free RAM because they are built on 32-bit code. This typically happened with RTS games with huge levels, such as Sins of a Solar Empire, Supreme Commander and Anno 1404. The fixed I used for these games was a program called "Large Address Aware" which allows programs to use additional RAM (past the 32-bit limitations). These worked for other games in the past, so I decided to try it on World of Warcraft - and it worked! I haven't had the game crash due to running out of memory since using the program once. I can max out view distance and all that jazz (though framerate is lower than desirable) and fly around azeroth and northrend with no crashes.

You can find it here: http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=112556