ATI 4850 + WoW

[jeb1517]

But I'm getting kinda sick of debating what is, IMO, the worst game in the universe.

AGREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED.

 

[tgmchuck]

Having played WoW and Several other MMOs I feel the need to point out that several of the posters above are all correct about FPS. The game will keep playing with the last refresh information indicating that server latency/connection don't play a part in FPS lag. On the other hand, the client in a heavely populated zone such as shat or one of the major cities is constantly recieving updates of other characters moving in or out of your "draw distance" causing it to have to recieve the information for those toons (eg armor/race graphics and such) characters casting spells and can cause the FPS to drop in an effort to draw everything. All those graphis and textures that arn't stored in memory have to be loaded from HD and we all know that is the slowest part of the pc, unless you are running a wickid raid. In short a slow connection, an over populated zone or combination of both can cause even the hardiest PCs to stutter and chop.

 

[frozenlead]

Just have to interject...

Lag occurs when a game slows down. It doesn't matter what the cause is. If the game is lower than 30fps, and you can see it being slow, that's called lag. Whether it's because of a render issue, or slow hardware, or a bad connection, or a high traffic connection, lag is lag.

Google speaks
define:lag
In computing and especially computer networks, a lag is a symptom where result of an action appears later than expected. While different kinds of latency are well defined technical terms, lag is the symptom, not the cause.

 

[f_ho99]

really appreicated for the response. I will go to Asus and download the most up-to-date driver for my motherboard and graphic card.
I hope it will stay at around 50 ish fps....

will keep you guys update.

again, many thanks

 

[radnor]

I played the game during the time frame in which you speak. The low FPS out was due to a large amount of characters being rendered at one time, for example, during the opening of AQ in Silithus. People who were not in this area didn't have a low FPS not because of server latency, but because they were not maxing out their units computational capacity.

Again, this is not based on lag and never was. WoW renders all information on the screen in real time, regardless if the servers are running with a high latency.

You agree with me. You just didn't get the message. Alright i explain again seeing that i have people that know WoW.
Forget AQ (it was not that massive), lets remember the battle of Hillsbrad and the turteling from Tarren Mill to Southshore.

200+ vs 200+ , and the servers crashed frequently. If in that time you zoomed your view to the max possible, you should see players "blinking" in the far. Like mages, you know, Blink. You FPS wouldnt go down, the client would just not render all of it. WoW Client is pretty well done, but WoW server is not. The WoW server was never made to have those kind of communications at the same time. He does a lot of verifications, keep alive bits, redundant checks and loads more of stuff that you don't need in game. Your Client NEED to be in synchronization with the server. That is why you sometimes see other players warping (this common when rogue sprints and that same rogue is lagging alot, for example).

So, the FPS goes down in Shat, Og, IF, when the server is synchronizing you with the environment. but this only happens when there is a crap load of players on screen, all of them with their different latencies.If they were NPCs you would have no problem. This is when the client is forced to process, and reprocess information. The rendering of the Characters itself is of low consequence and low resources.

To solve this matter, they made much more dungeons than they planned initially. You will never lag in a dungeon even in a Razorgore fight, witch can have much more than 250 NPCs/Players at the same time in the same room.

This "gaming problem" was first identified when playing in 14K modems. When we had a j4ck4ss that was to cheap to buy a decent 33k modem and still used a old 14k one, the servers lagged a bit during sync. Some other games STOP to sync.

In case of WoW, stopping a server or cluster in that matter was gramebraking. So it is YOU, the player, that needs to stop. And get InSync (horrible pun, i know) with the rest of the gang.

 

[pbrigido]

Just have to interject...

Lag occurs when a game slows down. It doesn't matter what the cause is. If the game is lower than 30fps, and you can see it being slow, that's called lag. Whether it's because of a render issue, or slow hardware, or a bad connection, or a high traffic connection, lag is lag.

Google speaks
define:lag
In computing and especially computer networks, a lag is a symptom where result of an action appears later than expected. While different kinds of latency are well defined technical terms, lag is the symptom, not the cause.

Nice defination, I find it to be mostly correct. However, the original post and follow up responses indicated that network lag was the cause of his low FPS. It is not. Your definition applies to network lag, not FPS rendered by your computer.

Again, the quality of a network will not effect your FPS in WoW, even the slightest bit.

Here is a test. Download a program called Network Limiter. Restrick WoW's network bandwidth to 3kbps, for both upload and download but don't turn on the program yet. Then, download Fraps (fraps.com) or use (Ctrl-R) in WoW to indicate the real time FPS rendered in game. Move your character to an unpopulated area where your FPS is at 60.
Turn on Network Limiter. The end result will show a lag of about 3-4 seconds, perhaps more, with your FPS unchanged at 60.

 

[JonathanDeane]

Having played WoW and Several other MMOs I feel the need to point out that several of the posters above are all correct about FPS. The game will keep playing with the last refresh information indicating that server latency/connection don't play a part in FPS lag. On the other hand, the client in a heavely populated zone such as shat or one of the major cities is constantly recieving updates of other characters moving in or out of your "draw distance" causing it to have to recieve the information for those toons (eg armor/race graphics and such) characters casting spells and can cause the FPS to drop in an effort to draw everything. All those graphis and textures that arn't stored in memory have to be loaded from HD and we all know that is the slowest part of the pc, unless you are running a wickid raid. In short a slow connection, an over populated zone or combination of both can cause even the hardiest PCs to stutter and chop.

This is correct while people may think oh your FPS has nothing to do with your connection... it does.

Food for thought to the people who think otherwise.... All the gear people wear in WoW is drawn by your machine but must be loaded to your machine from the WoW servers... So if you have 200 people in Shat thats 200X200 connections all of them feeding information to the server and back out and nothing can be drawn on the screen until your machine knows what to draw...

Thats the reason why no matter what machine you have you will always experience lag in shat. Now if you have a nice fat pipe it is not as bad (I rarely drop below 30 in Shat)

Edit: It's a minor miracle that the game works at all.... lol

 

[pbrigido]

Your example of Southshore and TM proves my point. The low FPS is the amount of characters being rendered on your screen, not the high lag.

Let me make my point, short and sweet. WoW does not use a synchronous network algorithm when transfering data. Therefore, your computer is able to render WoW in real time, regardless of network connection, good or bad.

 

[pbrigido]

This is correct while people may think oh your FPS has nothing to do with your connection... it does.

Food for thought to the people who think otherwise.... All the gear people wear in WoW is drawn by your machine but must be loaded to your machine from the WoW servers... So if you have 200 people in Shat thats 200X200 connections all of them feeding information to the server and back out and nothing can be drawn on the screen until your machine knows what to draw...

Thats the reason why no matter what machine you have you will always experience lag in shat. Now if you have a nice fat pipe it is not as bad (I rarely drop below 30 in Shat)

Edit: It's a minor miracle that the game works at all.... lol

You are incorrect, and I think we all can agree to this. All character models are stored on your computer, as well as terrain, sound effects, music, spell effects, textures. It isn't a questions of getting them from the server. It is about getting them from your HD.

Again, original poster, your network is not effecting your FPS in WoW.

 

[JonathanDeane]

You are incorrect, and I think we all can agree to this. All character models are stored on your computer, as well as terrain, sound effects, music, spell effects, textures. It isn't a questions of getting them from the server. It is about getting them from your HD.

Again, original poster, your network is not effecting your FPS in WoW.

Sure its all stored on the HD but what tells my HD to load said graphic from the HD to display it
The content is all on your machine hence the huge install thats really not much of a problem though since most HD's are capable of throwing out 50-80MB's per second at least. How ever I have yet to see anyones Internet that fast (at least in person)

Edit: Also I think everyone can agree that WoW is not exactly the most graphically intensive game in the universe... So loading WoW's textures are overloading people's HD's. Damn then Quake 4 must absolutely destroy them.

 

[f_ho99]

so basically , that's normal to drop in such a high population area?
no matter what graphic card you using?

 

[pbrigido]

Correct, I have a Q9550 and a GT280...I have basically the same result that you do. Everything seems to be just find with your system.

 

[gamerk316]

First off, measure FPS while playing any MMO fromwithin the games console. FPS calculates how quickly frames can be drawn to your screen, andis not affected by the rest of the network in any way.

Does the game slow down when the server is overloaded? YES! But that also doesn't cause a FPS drop, simply a delay in the game while all the users are put into sync. The syntoms are the same, buthave two diffrent causes.

If you are having a legitiamate FPS drop, then something is clearly off. Either you lack the power to run your card full speed, are heat is causing something to slow down to cool off. My old Pentium3 and 6600 (GPU, not CPU ) can handle WOW at 60FPS, so its not hardware...unless the 4850 is overrated, but that can't be it...

 

[pbrigido]

gamerk316, you are right once again! Right on the money.

 

[f_ho99]

but I am using a 24" Samsung, 1920x1200. So I assume that's why!!
Anyway I will update the latest driver and see how it goes. Will keep u update and thanks for all the info.

 

[pbrigido]

Yeah, I'm in the same boat again as you. I have a 26" in 1920x1200. Good luck with it all!

 

[JonathanDeane]

so basically , that's normal to drop in such a high population area?
no matter what graphic card you using?

Honestly yes, updating your drivers may help a little the best help is to make sure your network is as fast as possible. No P2P running of course lol

In high population area's your machine is not the limiting factor after all people play WoW just fine on laptops with 5400 rpm drives (horrible transfer rates)
I have seen all kinds of machines playing WoW (I have 3 machines in my house capable of running WoW and at times people come over and we have a mini WoW party)
Universally they all have the same issue different hardware different drivers hell even different OS's (Vista and XP)
The worst I have personally seen is some one trying to play WoW on a 64Kbps DSL lite connection... ewww solo play out in the woods was fine but even a small party was painfull.

 

[MrIcky]

I got my ATI4850 and it works fine for me. Game run very smooth, graphci is great, I'm gettin' 60fps in average. But when it comes to S.city / Orgrimmar or battle ground it will drop to 35-45fps. It there anything I can help to improve or that's a normal behaviour? I haven't been to raiding yet, but I assume it will be the same since it has more animation effect.

p.s. I have tried to tune down all the animation settings, i.e. spell effect, terrian effect..etc. but same thing happening so I just max. out evrything now.

ASUS P5LD-X/1333 X series
Core 2 Duo E6550@2.33GHz
2G RAM
Samsung 24" LCD 1920*1200

Please help ^6, many thanks

I think there's been some topic drift. It sounds normal to me. MMO's are not the best place to test max fps. If you are consistantly running at playable framerates at max settings and 1920x1200 (and 35+ in org, 60ish everywhere else is very playable) you are doing well. Orgrimmar will always a large hit to your framerates. There are just so many people doing so many things in major cities. If you can stay about 35 in Org, you'll do fine raiding.

The basic problem with MMO's is that a lot of the problems posted above do come into play. It can be very difficult to narrow it down to one factor even by very experienced people without them sitting down in front of your pc and testing things one by one.

 

[nottheking]

No, your framerate is not dictated wholly by your video card. Never was, never is, never will be. (unless future computers are nothing but video cards)

Rather, your framerate is determined by whatever the slowest thing is in the whole process of running. In an MMO, that usually tends to be the connection and server; the computer has to sit there waiting for the data, and has to be ready to drop everything when a packet arrives. If it's inefficient enough, yes, the CPU will be slowed down and stuttered as it places priority on sending and receiving data, cutting off how quickly it can assemble frame data to send to the graphics card.

And if the graphics card can't get the data it needs to draw each frame quickly enough, not even all the graphics power in the world can allow it to get 60fps; it's a domino effect.

This is actually compounded by the use of vertical sync; for that, the game will only ever flip a frame if the time evenly divides into 1/60th of a second; if the CPU was late in getting the data to the graphics card for the frame at 05:07, (seconds:60th seconds) the graphics card will wait until 5:08 before it "flips" (displays) the next frame, whatever it is... So If the CPU gets the data out at 05:07.01, and you've got a graphics card that powerful, then it'll probably finish the frame before 05:07.10, and then spend the remaining 90% of that frame's time doing nothing. As a result, you get a strong domino effect where a tangle at one point in the line holds up everything.

I mean, seriously, the 4850 is stupidly powerful for World of Warcraft; that's a game that was designed to run fine at medium resolutions on ancient hardware like the GeForce 6600GT. Something like the Radeon HD 2600XT or GeForce 8600GT should actually be sufficient to get 60fps even at your high resolution.

If your reduced framerate is causing stutter that you can see, my recommendation is to actually disable Vertical Sync. That way the graphics card wouldn't bother waiting and will go ahead and flip each frame as soon as it's finished drawing it. The game will still have stutters, but they will no longer be rounded up in length to the nearest 60th of a second. The downside of disabling this is that your framerate will shift more than normal, but with the CPU being held up like that, I doubt that it'll actually be noticeable or even really show up.

 

[lasttarget]

Guys i have BF2 and a 3.8 AMD dual core. It does fine on 32 player servers but when i get on 64 player servers it lags. In battlefiled everybody has the same gear too. Even when i look at the ground the FPS are much lower than on 32 player servers.

Fact
1.More players = bottleneck for CPU = less FPS

2.Server off loads most of the processing to your computer which is why you must have a fast CPU

 

[pbrigido]

nottheking, while your statement, " your framerate is determined by whatever the slowest thing is in the whole process of running. In an MMO, that usually tends to be the connection and server; the computer has to sit there waiting for the data, and has to be ready to drop everything when a packet arrives. If it's inefficient enough, yes, the CPU will be slowed down and stuttered as it places priority on sending and receiving data, cutting off how quickly it can assemble frame data to send to the graphics card." is not true in WoW.

WoW does not wait for packets to be sent and received for FPS to be determined...it is not programmed using a synchronous network algorithm. Your FPS IS NOT determined by your network connection...it is only determined by your computer and its hardware.

edit: For games that may use a synchronous network configuration, a drop in FPS may be the result, but not in WoW.

Again, we are talking within the parameters of WoW and f_ho99's computer configuration.

 

[rfatcheric]

No, your framerate is not dictated wholly by your video card. Never was, never is, never will be. (unless future computers are nothing but video cards)

Rather, your framerate is determined by whatever the slowest thing is in the whole process of running. In an MMO, that usually tends to be the connection and server; the computer has to sit there waiting for the data, and has to be ready to drop everything when a packet arrives. If it's inefficient enough, yes, the CPU will be slowed down and stuttered as it places priority on sending and receiving data, cutting off how quickly it can assemble frame data to send to the graphics card.

And if the graphics card can't get the data it needs to draw each frame quickly enough, not even all the graphics power in the world can allow it to get 60fps; it's a domino effect.

This is actually compounded by the use of vertical sync; for that, the game will only ever flip a frame if the time evenly divides into 1/60th of a second; if the CPU was late in getting the data to the graphics card for the frame at 05:07, (seconds:60th seconds) the graphics card will wait until 5:08 before it "flips" (displays) the next frame, whatever it is... So If the CPU gets the data out at 05:07.01, and you've got a graphics card that powerful, then it'll probably finish the frame before 05:07.10, and then spend the remaining 90% of that frame's time doing nothing. As a result, you get a strong domino effect where a tangle at one point in the line holds up everything.

I mean, seriously, the 4850 is stupidly powerful for World of Warcraft; that's a game that was designed to run fine at medium resolutions on ancient hardware like the GeForce 6600GT. Something like the Radeon HD 2600XT or GeForce 8600GT should actually be sufficient to get 60fps even at your high resolution.

If your reduced framerate is causing stutter that you can see, my recommendation is to actually disable Vertical Sync. That way the graphics card wouldn't bother waiting and will go ahead and flip each frame as soon as it's finished drawing it. The game will still have stutters, but they will no longer be rounded up in length to the nearest 60th of a second. The downside of disabling this is that your framerate will shift more than normal, but with the CPU being held up like that, I doubt that it'll actually be noticeable or even really show up.

OMG... for the last time... WoW DOES NOT drop in FPS depending on network connection... This is the most commonly stupid myth perpetuated by people on the internet about WoW. Its simple not true... Not in the least.

 

[frozenlead]

At any rate, if you're trying to suggest his hard disk is to blame for not being able to load a measly WoW texture, you're wrong. My phone could probably produce and render the texture just as fast. If you're trying to suggest that it's his computer's fault in any way that WoW is lagging, you're wrong. That machine can handle it. That leaves two factors left.

1.the internet connection
2.the speed/load of the server he connects to

If I played WoW on a 56k modem, it will lag.

Been there, done that.

 

[supadupanerd]

Is the performance hit in Orgrimmar and Shattrath even avoidable??? haha

But seriously the fact that you are getting performance hits in battlegrounds are interesting if it's in WSG. If it's in Av well then that i would say would be expected.

 

[pbrigido]

frozenlead, you are missing the point. f_ho99 was not asking about lag...not at all. He was concerned that his FPS was low and was asking why. This whole thread went in depth as to why. The end result is that his machine is performing within the expect range that it is supposed to. The conclusion that was reached should by now be common knowledge. FPS is NOT dictated by a bad network connection, high latency, ping, lag, etc. Both of your points are totally off topic.