Heyulp! Poor FPS with new computer...

[Quadrantid]

Hey folks,

Figured someone here might be able to help me on this one -- and if you don't ask, you don't get.

After the computer-death that happened to Kris' box on the way out here, she's bought my old one off me, and I've treated myself to a new beast... In theory, it should be much better than my old one (the one Kris now has), though both are pretty decent specs. However, in WoW, she's consistently getting much better FPS than I am -- especially in some of the more graphics intense places. A good example is twillight highlands - she's rarely, well, never, below 40fps, while I'm regularly bottoming out at 10fps. Both machines have the graphics settings fully maxed out - and hers is coping far better than mine is.

So, here's my new box's spec:

Power Supply: Corsair TX 750w PSU
CPU: Intel Core i7 950 3.06Ghz 8Mb Cache Quad Core (Stock Intel Cooler)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58A-UD3R SLI / Crossfire Motherboard
RAM: Corsair XMS 12Gb (6x2Gb) 1600Mhz DDR3
Video Card: 2x Nvidia GTX460 1Gb Overclocked in SLI 750w PSU Required
Hard Drive 1: Samsung 2Tb (2000Gb) 32Mb Cache Read/Write 90Mb/s
Optical Drive 1: Samsung Dual Layer 24x DVD+-RW Black
Sound Card: Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro 7.1 Channel Sound Card PCI-E
Onboard Network: Onboard Gigabit Ethernet Network
Wireless Network: TP-Link WN821N 300Mbps Wireless-N USB2.0
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

I'm currently just running with 6 Gb of RAM (one of the sticks is dead, so we've isolated it to one of three, and I'll be mailing them back next week). I'm running with two decent monitors, just as I was when I had the old box (which handled WoW better on said monitors). To try to fix things, I've been nosying around various forums, and tried their tweaks, all without success. I've disabled SLI using NVIDEA's performance centre thing, I've installed Game Booster, that a few people recommended in some places. I've modified the BIOS settings to overclock the CPU to 3.45 GHz (don't want to go very far with that, because I don't want to burn the chip out, and genuinely don't know what I'm doing!) - the CPU now runs at ~55C, so I'm loathe to push it harder. I've also modded the config.wtf file to use more of my cores, and also done the dx11 thing posted elsewhere on here. So my config.wtf now has:

SET ProcessAffinityMask "255"
SET coresDetected "8"

In it. For some reason, it keeps eating the DX11 thing, so that doesn't appear in the .wft, even though I've repeatedly added it.

I can't find anything else to try, but I'm a bit peeved that I'm getting such poor performane in the game, given I spent a lot of money getting this box built.

Any ideas/help/advice would be greatly appreciated

[FragZero]

Have you tried other games?Maybe run 3dmark and compare your score to simular systems! That system should handle wow fine.

[Commando]

Yeah, you need to work out whether this is a WoW thing or a computer thing. Run 3DMark to see what score you get, as that'll help determine if there's something fundamentally wrong with 3D processing.

My first thought would be drivers, especially since you're running an SLI setup. Make sure you have the latest 64-bit drivers for your graphics cards (from the NVidia site), then check drivers for all your other system components as well, particularly ones related to storage. Maybe try dropping down to a single graphics card and see if that makes a difference to your FPS.

[ash]

I had FPS issues in arenas (only). I updated all drivers last weekend and had no FPS issues at all this weekend (and I spent a good few hours in arena last night!)

[Greentitch]

For some reason, it keeps eating the DX11 thing, so that doesn't appear in the .wft, even though I've repeatedly added it.

When I add this setting WoW moves it to somewhere else in the config.wtf file. I thought I'd lost it to begin with. Not sure if you've already done this but search through the file and it might be hiding there somewhere.

Also see what performance you get on a DirectX11 sample such as the one here:
http://unigine.com/download/

[Quadrantid]

Have you tried other games?Maybe run 3dmark and compare your score to simular systems! That system should handle wow fine.

Right -- I ran 3DMark11 on advanced, with settings set to extreme (i.e. 1920x1080 res etc.). The result details were

Graphics Score 993
Phys. Score 7672
Combined 1266

Overall score X1114

I'm a bit surprised the graphics score is so much lower than the physics score, but I have no idea what they mean

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/502336 is the link...

I'm not sure what it all means, at the end of the day -- aside from the fact that I'm bang in the middle of the similar systems plot...

Hmmn :S

[Quadrantid]

Yeah, you need to work out whether this is a WoW thing or a computer thing. Run 3DMark to see what score you get, as that'll help determine if there's something fundamentally wrong with 3D processing.

My first thought would be drivers, especially since you're running an SLI setup. Make sure you have the latest 64-bit drivers for your graphics cards (from the NVidia site), then check drivers for all your other system components as well, particularly ones related to storage. Maybe try dropping down to a single graphics card and see if that makes a difference to your FPS.

All my drivers are up to date -- I did that pretty much when I got the box anyway, but I've been through and checked each individual one...

It could, of course, be a resolution thing, maybe -- could 1920x1080 be just too high for WoW?

I'm loathe to take out the second GFX card until I've got the RAM issue with the guy who built it sorted out - don't want to do anything that could cause him to argue I've invalidated warrenty or something. If there's no other fix, that'll be what I plan to try once I've got the RAM back from him

For comparison, my old box spec is:

Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-5400C4 TwinX (2x1GB) 1
Asus P5WDG2-WS Professional Intel 975X (Socket LGA775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard 1
Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail 1
Antec Nine Hundred Ultimate Gaming case 1
Enermax Liberty 500W ELT500AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU 1
Liteon SHM-165P6S-09C 16x DVD±RW/RAM (Black) - OEM 1
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 NCQ 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (0A33423) 1
Samsung SpinPoint P SP1654N 160GB ATA-133 8MB Cache - OEM 1
EVGA GeForce 7950 GT KO Superclocked 512MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail 1
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - OEM 1

Thinking about it, I have got a new main monitor, with a higher resolution, so that could well be part of the problem. The old one was 1680x1050, whilst the new is 1920x1080. That isn't a huge change, though -- only a factor of ~15%, if that, in the number of pixels, so I can't see that being the root of the problem...

[Quadrantid]

For some reason, it keeps eating the DX11 thing, so that doesn't appear in the .wft, even though I've repeatedly added it.

When I add this setting WoW moves it to somewhere else in the config.wtf file. I thought I'd lost it to begin with. Not sure if you've already done this but search through the file and it might be hiding there somewhere.

Also see what performance you get on a DirectX11 sample such as the one here:
http://unigine.com/download/

Running that at the moment -- very, very pretty...

Right -- running it with API DirectX11, shaders to high, tessellation normal, anisotropy 4, anti-aliasing off, fullscreen, at 1920x1080, gives the following

Unigine
Heaven Benchmark v2.0
FPS:
35.5
Scores:
893
Min FPS:
11.1
Max FPS:
79.9
Hardware
Binary:
Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release Mar 7 2010
Operating system:
Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz
CPU flags:
3449MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 SSE42 HTT
GPU model:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 8.17.12.6658 1024Mb
Settings
Render:
direct3d11
Mode:
1920x1080 fullscreen
Shaders:
high
Textures:
high
Filter:
trilinear
Anisotropy:
4x
Occlusion:
enabled
Refraction:
enabled
Volumetric:
enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation:
normal
Unigine Corp. © 2005-2010



If I max everything in the settings out (i.e. tessellation extreme, anisotropy 16, anti-aliasing x8), then I get 18.1 FPS, 457 scored, with min fPS of 6.1 and max of 44.5...

[Heeuge]

Scores mean nothing without comparison. If similarly specced setups score roughly the same as yours at the benchmarks then it's not a setup issue, you're expecting too much from the hardware you have.

However....

I'd have thought WoW should cope with 1920x1080 at most things set to maximum with a single GTX460, let alone two, especially with that CPU. Do all games struggle for performance or just this one?


Since you're up to date with your drivers and, assuming there's nothing too obvious missing like the molex power connectors direct to your VGA cards (not having them plugged in will still allow the cards to work but at a reduced rate), then it might be worth looking at the rest of your PC:

CPU
Have you checked what else is running while WoW is? Did you build the PC yourself or did it come prebuilt with 25 different applications all fighting for your CPU cycles at once? For example, is your AntiVirus software trying to scan while you game? Keep task manager open while you run WoW and check what else uses the CPU.

RAM
You mention you've already had one faulty stick of memory - have you run a full check on the rest? Though I'd expect BSoD or more serious glitches/crashes if your issue was RAM-related it can't hurt to check. Do you have all of the 6GB utilised or is there spare for the system to use when it needs to? If WoW is trying to cache the busier areas and there isn't enough RAM spare it will start to use the pagefile....

HDD
If the pagefile (virtual memory) is forced into action, it will dramatically reduce the performance of your gaming. More RAM would resolve this problem, but to minimise the effect of it, the pagefile should be system managed and on a different physical HDD than your OS drive.
Additionally, did you copy your WoW folder onto the new HDD or did you freshly install it? Can you hear your HDD thrashing when the framerate drops / stutters or is it quiet as a mouse? The more it has to seek your data (if it's fragmented all over the place it'll take longer to find/load the relevant bits) the lower performance you'll notice.

OS
If windows is trying to perform updates while scanning for viruses while running CAD software then WoW will suffer. In conjunction with checking task manager, take a look at what's running in the taskbar. If it's not essential to you, try quitting the software one bit at a time and see if any one piece makes a difference.


That's a quick checklist for now, I'll add more when I get a sec...

[Quadrantid]

Thanks for the detailed reply Sorry I've been slow getting back -- was a national holiday yesterday, so I got dragged off to do celebraty stuff... fun fun! It's a box I got built for me from this small company : http://ibuypower.com.au - pricy, but that's the cost of living over here. At least, hopefully, it should mean I get good customer service from them, though I've yet to be convinced of that. The guy there had 3dmark and Heaven Benchmark on it already, the things people recommended earlier in the thread, and had benchmarked it before it was shipped out... so I suspect he's someone who knows what he's doing. At least, I suspect he knows more than I do

Scores mean nothing without comparison. If similarly specced setups score roughly the same as yours at the benchmarks then it's not a setup issue, you're expecting too much from the hardware you have.
However....

I'd have thought WoW should cope with 1920x1080 at most things set to maximum with a single GTX460, let alone two, especially with that CPU. Do all games struggle for performance or just this one?

I don't really have any high-demand games -- but Eve-online and FM2011 seem to run fine to me -- seems to be just WoW, though as I say, I don't really have anything much to compare with :S That said, when I have WoW and Eve running at the same time (which also used to work fine on the old box), the FPS snarls up even more (dropping to 5 or 6, when it would be 20ish)

Since you're up to date with your drivers and, assuming there's nothing too obvious missing like the molex power connectors direct to your VGA cards (not having them plugged in will still allow the cards to work but at a reduced rate), then it might be worth looking at the rest of your PC:

CPU
Have you checked what else is running while WoW is? Did you build the PC yourself or did it come prebuilt with 25 different applications all fighting for your CPU cycles at once? For example, is your AntiVirus software trying to scan while you game? Keep task manager open while you run WoW and check what else uses the CPU.

I'm using AVG as my antivirus, but I've been playing WoW with the troubles for hours, and I'm certain most of the time it isn't scanning. I've just started WoW up, and am hovering over the Twilight Highlands, looking in one of the directions that gives me 25fps ish (spinning to look the other way gives me 35 -- I guess there's less to see!). Here are screenshots of my running processes (as you can see, there isn't really anything taking huge resources, except WoW), and the CPU Usage monitor - again nothing much looking bad there, I think...

Processes - http://img7.imageshack.us/i/wowprocesses.jpg/
CPU Usage - http://img441.imageshack.us/i/wowusage.png/

RAM
You mention you've already had one faulty stick of memory - have you run a full check on the rest? Though I'd expect BSoD or more serious glitches/crashes if your issue was RAM-related it can't hurt to check. Do you have all of the 6GB utilised or is there spare for the system to use when it needs to? If WoW is trying to cache the busier areas and there isn't enough RAM spare it will start to use the pagefile....

I've had the computer running pretty much full time since I took the three sticks out (one of which is the faulty one), and it hasn't crashed. In those two weeks, or so, Firefox has crashed once, but aside from that, things have been really stable. How would I go about running a full check, out of interest? Is there software, or is it just switch in, switch out?

HDD
If the pagefile (virtual memory) is forced into action, it will dramatically reduce the performance of your gaming. More RAM would resolve this problem, but to minimise the effect of it, the pagefile should be system managed and on a different physical HDD than your OS drive.
Additionally, did you copy your WoW folder onto the new HDD or did you freshly install it? Can you hear your HDD thrashing when the framerate drops / stutters or is it quiet as a mouse? The more it has to seek your data (if it's fragmented all over the place it'll take longer to find/load the relevant bits) the lower performance you'll notice.

I copied the WoW folder accross, but I've not heard the HDD thrashing over and over... that said, when I use the disk defragmenter to analyse the disk as a whole, it claims that it is barely fragmented (0%) -- I've run defrags already, so it should be ok...

OS
If windows is trying to perform updates while scanning for viruses while running CAD software then WoW will suffer. In conjunction with checking task manager, take a look at what's running in the taskbar. If it's not essential to you, try quitting the software one bit at a time and see if any one piece makes a difference.

I've tried running it with as much shut off as I can -- and even used the Game Booster software I downloaded (some website recommended it, and I figured it was worth a try!) to shut down anything non-essential... sadly, it didn't help

That's a quick checklist for now, I'll add more when I get a sec...

Thanks loads I really appreciate it I'm suspecting I might have to try to persuade the guy who built the box for me to take the two GFX cards back, and send me a single card instead... dunno if he'd be willing to do that though.

[Commando]

I'm suspecting I might have to try to persuade the guy who built the box for me to take the two GFX cards back, and send me a single card instead... dunno if he'd be willing to do that though.

No point doing that unless you can identify that the SLI setup is definitely causing problems, and for that you'd have to take out one of the cards and test it.

One thing I notice you mentioned is that you copied across the WoW folder. Now, in theory there's no reason that shouldn't work, I know - but I've had major issues with doing exactly that in the past for no immediately obvious reason. I'd recommend renaming your existing WoW folder, downloading the latest fresh install files from Blizzard and reinstalling it from scratch to see if that makes any difference. Especially if it really is only WoW that's causing problems and not other games.

[Quadrantid]

An update: Finally got around to removing the second gfx card but that gave no change at all to the FPS of WoW.

Although it did kill the sound on my box. Which was weird, but fixed itself when I put the second card back in (I have no idea, really).

The dead RAM is currently off at RMA with a nice company (not the guy who built my box, who has officially done a runner), so hopefully I'll get that back in the next few weeks.

Next step is to do a full WoW reinstall, as Ian suggested Ah well, will have to get onto that later...

Thanks for the help everyone!

[Quadrantid]

Further update -- the fix to make WoW use dx11 seems to be the cause, at least, so I'd guess...

So I keep trying to add

SET gxapi "d3d11"

to my config.wtf file. I add it, save the file, then run WoW -- at which point the config.wtf file resets to its original version, as though WoW is resetting/removing the command. This is confirmed using the following macro, which shows I'm not using dx11

/run message(GetCVar("gxApi") == "D3D11" and "using dx11" or "not using dx11")

Any ideas how how to get WoW to actually accept this command? Hopefully if it does, it should fix the issue...

[Quadrantid]

Seem to have finally fixed it... went into NVIDEA display software, made a custom profile for WoW, turned ambient occulsion off, and now the dx11 change works and I'm getting decent FPS.

Very, very bizarre - but apparently the ambient occlusion thing was stopping Dx11 working, so it always defaulted back to dx9

[Commando]

How very strange. Ah well, good to know it's fixed, even if it's not entirely clear why.