World of Warcraft and 120Hz/60 FPS

[Savantielle]

Hey guys!

My first post here so please be gentle :lol: I recently bought what I consider to be a really nice gaming rig since my old one was lagging even at medium setting at most games. I'll give the specs here so you can take that into consideration when reading the post!

Motherboard: P8P67 WS Revolution REV 3.0
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM (G. Skill Ripjaws)
Available OS Memory: 16362MB RAM

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Display Memory: 4065 MB

Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (120Hz)
Monitor Name: BenQ XL2420T (Digital)

Alright so to the "problem". I've been watching a lot of streams lately, and some people seem to have a really smooth framerate. I know one person using this is Khuna, a rogue who often streams at twitch.tv or hydramist.tv. He has made a movie which can be found here:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=207657

This is not a rendering setting, it actually looks like that for me when he streams. I usually have 70-120 FPS using no vSync, DVI-cables and having a steady connection at 20-50 ms. So my question is, how do I get it to look as smooth? I've tried lower settings, resolutions etc but to no avail. My computer should be able to handle it afaik, but I'm not sure it does.

I've installed the "drivers" from BenQ, and both Windows and WOW says I'm running at 120Hz with proper 120+ FPS. I still can't get it to look like that and it's driving me crazy. Do I need to get another GFX card or upgrade it to a 580/590? I'd appriciate any informative answer!

Thanks in advance,
Savantielle

 

[casualcolors]

Hey guys!

My first post here so please be gentle :lol: I recently bought what I consider to be a really nice gaming rig since my old one was lagging even at medium setting at most games. I'll give the specs here so you can take that into consideration when reading the post!

Motherboard: P8P67 WS Revolution REV 3.0
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
Memory: 16384MB RAM (G. Skill Ripjaws)
Available OS Memory: 16362MB RAM

Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Display Memory: 4065 MB

Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (120Hz)
Monitor Name: BenQ XL2420T (Digital)

Alright so to the "problem". I've been watching a lot of streams lately, and some people seem to have a really smooth framerate. I know one person using this is Khuna, a rogue who often streams at twitch.tv or hydramist.tv. He has made a movie which can be found here:

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=207657

This is not a rendering setting, it actually looks like that for me when he streams. I usually have 70-120 FPS using no vSync, DVI-cables and having a steady connection at 20-50 ms. So my question is, how do I get it to look as smooth? I've tried lower settings, resolutions etc but to no avail. My computer should be able to handle it afaik, but I'm not sure it does.

I've installed the "drivers" from BenQ, and both Windows and WOW says I'm running at 120Hz with proper 120+ FPS. I still can't get it to look like that and it's driving me crazy. Do I need to get another GFX card or upgrade it to a 580/590? I'd appriciate any informative answer!

Thanks in advance,
Savantielle

If you think Khuna's looks smooth you should see the Paladin tank from paragon's POV on old heroic LK . But to answer your question, if you're at 120 fps and on a 120hz monitor, that is the smoothest you'll be able to display. Remember that you'll never maintain 120 fps in a 25 or 10man raid during action. Won't maintain 60 fps during intensive 25man fights even. So during those scenarios you'll be hardpressed to see an image that smooth. During arena however you should be in the 120-140 fps range depending on how much you've overclocked your cpu.

The small size of the stream/video contributes to the smoothness. That and the fact that you're used to seeing other streams and videos at 30 fps (which is what most are displayed at). This leads to a perceivable difference in the display quality but is also causing a bit of a placebo effect. Khuna's game at 120 fps on a 120 hz monitor for instance, would look no smoother in person than your own. Hope this is helpful.

On a side note: before you worry about SLI'ing your vid cards, overclock your CPU to 4.5ghz or better. WoW is very cpu-bound and upping cpu clocks will have a larger impact on your fps-minimums since your GPU is on par with displaying warcraft up to 1920x1200.

 

[Savantielle]

Hey man and thanks for the answer. It sort of confirmed what I thought about the smaller screen. So if I was to Fraps my own arena games it'd look similar?

I already OC'd to 4.5gHz and I think that's about as high as it gets! I usually never raid and when I speak about the game it's about the FPS in the major cities, battlegrounds and arenas. Thanks again for the very on-point and concise answer!

 

[casualcolors]

Hey man and thanks for the answer. It sort of confirmed what I thought about the smaller screen. So if I was to Fraps my own arena games it'd look similar?

I already OC'd to 4.5gHz and I think that's about as high as it gets! I usually never raid and when I speak about the game it's about the FPS in the major cities, battlegrounds and arenas. Thanks again for the very on-point and concise answer!

If you set fraps to record at the higher framerate, yeah it would look the same.

 

[Goldengoose]

Could try a different program to fraps, remember there are alternatives which may provide better quality such as Camtasia Studio. That ones pretty pricey and for business use but you get the idea.

 

[Savantielle]

Alright so OC'd to 4,8gHz and set FRAPS to 60 FPS; but it still doesn't look the same even tho I make it smaller so there must be some other kind of setting they have. I have nvidia panel set to override any other setting, and it's at 120Hz and stuff. Must I have fullscreen and DX11 etc? Thx!

 

[Savantielle]

Oh, soz for double post, missed Gooldengoose reply. Alrite I'll see if I can get my hands on some other software and see if the result varies. Although I think I must get my gameplay to look smooth first!

 

[casualcolors]

Should ask Khuna what program he records with via arenajunkies if you have rating to post there.

 

[Savantielle]

Multiseason gladiator so ye I have ^^ But it's in the stream as well, and I know he streams with 60 FPS. It's not the actual recording per se, just that my screen (played windowed mode) etc doesn't look that smooth at all and it's bullocks Don't feel I got the bang for the bucks with my 120Hz screen and new setup...

 

[casualcolors]

Multiseason gladiator so ye I have ^^ But it's in the stream as well, and I know he streams with 60 FPS. It's not the actual recording per se, just that my screen (played windowed mode) etc doesn't look that smooth at all and it's bullocks Don't feel I got the bang for the bucks with my 120Hz screen and new setup...

Well remember that if you have a 120 hz screen and you push 120 fps, and then you stream in 60 fps to someone with a 60 hz monitor, they're not going to get your 120 displayed frames per second appearance.

Now the other point you bring up is whether you got the bang for the buck, and this is where 120 hz monitors kill me. I can see the difference between a 120hz monitor and a 60hz monitor if I'm pushing a game at 120 fps+ steadily, but I don't have the hardware to do that in the more demanding titles that I play, and in Warcraft you can't do it at all during raids because of the limitation in the ancient code the game is built on. It just can't take advantage of hardware efficiently enough.

The only other things that could visually contribute to it not feeling smooth would be ghosting. You should check around the internet and see if your monitor has many or any reported issues while gaming as far as ghosting. WoW isn't a fast paced enough game to bring ghosting out usually, but it's worth a mention I suppose.

Really I think a lot of it comes down the fact that (with regard to Khuna) you're seeing a small 60 frame stream where you're used to seeing 30. Even the 60 fps stream is going to be visibly diminished in sharpness and this goes a long way toward hiding things like texture pops and aliasing which all contributes to the overall smoothness effect. You can check some UMvC3 streams on twitch.tv which have the same illusion to the eye when you pop the player out of the webpage.

And also, Khuna uses standard UI if memory serves me correctly (I stopped playing the game after season 10). That reduces the risk of any addon that was more or less forced on the game's api causing frame-skipping and such as it scrolls or changes (sct's, icon animations, and so on).

But ultimately your question was, do you need to upgrade to a 580 or a 590 from your 560ti for warcraft, and you don't. Unfortunately the game is so ancient and so cpu-bound that these graphics cards won't cross any threshold that your 560ti doesn't already. Sorry =(

 

[Savantielle]

Well remember that if you have a 120 hz screen and you push 120 fps, and then you stream in 60 fps to someone with a 60 hz monitor, they're not going to get your 120 displayed frames per second appearance.

Now the other point you bring up is whether you got the bang for the buck, and this is where 120 hz monitors kill me. I can see the difference between a 120hz monitor and a 60hz monitor if I'm pushing a game at 120 fps+ steadily, but I don't have the hardware to do that in the more demanding titles that I play, and in Warcraft you can't do it at all during raids because of the limitation in the ancient code the game is built on. It just can't take advantage of hardware efficiently enough.

The only other things that could visually contribute to it not feeling smooth would be ghosting. You should check around the internet and see if your monitor has many or any reported issues while gaming as far as ghosting. WoW isn't a fast paced enough game to bring ghosting out usually, but it's worth a mention I suppose.

Really I think a lot of it comes down the fact that (with regard to Khuna) you're seeing a small 60 frame stream where you're used to seeing 30. Even the 60 fps stream is going to be visibly diminished in sharpness and this goes a long way toward hiding things like texture pops and aliasing which all contributes to the overall smoothness effect. You can check some UMvC3 streams on twitch.tv which have the same illusion to the eye when you pop the player out of the webpage.

And also, Khuna uses standard UI if memory serves me correctly (I stopped playing the game after season 10). That reduces the risk of any addon that was more or less forced on the game's api causing frame-skipping and such as it scrolls or changes (sct's, icon animations, and so on).

But ultimately your question was, do you need to upgrade to a 580 or a 590 from your 560ti for warcraft, and you don't. Unfortunately the game is so ancient and so cpu-bound that these graphics cards won't cross any threshold that your 560ti doesn't already. Sorry =(

Wow, your answers are really what I'm looking for. They're extremly well formulated and I wish to thank you! I can gladly inform you that I do not raid or spend too much time in major cities, but spend 99,9% of my time in arenas and/or BG's. So my FPS is at 120 at 99% of the time with vsync, never dropping below 100.

There is no ghosting afaik, I haven't noticed it at least but I still can't shake the feeling that some of my settings are wrong. I've FRAPS'ed at a solid 60/120 FPS and rendered it at lower resolutions etc with both Vegas and Adobe Premiere, but I can't seem to get it as smooth as Khuna ever did. The recording was done in half-screen though as I could no record fullscreen while maintaining that FPS. I do not know what the issue is. The CPU is OC'd close to 5gHz per core now and is performing extremely well imo.

Yea, Khuna does play with standard UI, but even with standard UI at lowest settings I can't get it to look as smooth so I have no idea what the issue can be...

Set to 1920x1080 and override game settings in nVidia settings, and set to 120Hz so not sure. Tried to fraps in 30, 60 and 120 FPS-threshold but couldn't really tell the difference between the latter ones.

 

[casualcolors]

IIRC when Khuna first started posting shadowstep vids I remember that they had a washed out hue that was due to a setting that he uses in NVCP but I cannot remember what it is. I'm not suggesting that this makes the game look smoother, but I'm wondering if it contributes to an optical illusion that his game is necessarily smoother.

I do know exactly what you mean though when you say that it looks inexplicably smooth. I remember Lazeil's POV vid and a shaman from Affenjungs Inc both had incredibly smooth videos, but I got a chance to dig into the content a bit with the shaman and it turned out that really the finished product was somewhat of an illusion and even to him, the recorded gameplay was smoother than what he felt he experienced in-game.

I'm sure this isn't the best answer that you were hoping for, but it's pretty much the extent of my knowledge on the subject =/.

I can't even think of a reasonable place to recommend to you for further researching the topic. You said that you're a multiglad so I'm sure you already know what a wasteland AJ has turned into. I can't really think of any other wow-related forum where you would be likely to get a real solid final answer.

 

[Savantielle]

Asked Khuna on stream, and he said it was the monitor which I doubt. I read this however on his first movie:

"I use a samsung 2233rz to be able to reach 120hz, recording in a second hard drive, got 2 nvidia x 580 gtx sli and intel i7 975 extreme."

I know people say WOW is more CPU based, but could those 580 SLI cards be the reason it's so smooth? Reason I'm asking is because another streamer was smooth as well without 120Hz monitor, and he had a single 580 GTX. Thanks for answers!

 

[casualcolors]

It's still being encoded. You could potentially say something about the rate of data transfer with vrm, ram and cpu but there's no way I will have an answer about that, nor do any of the top tier cards operate vram that much faster than one another.

Honestly I'd just go out on a limb and say that since he includes his 120hz monitor as a relevant feature for his cpu-encoded stream, he probably just doesn't understand how his computer works. He has a nice rig, but SLI 580's don't mean anything for warcraft. You can hold 120fps+ in arena on a single 560ti and a 200 dollar i5-2500k =/. No amount of hardware at all can hold 120 fps in a 25man raid since that is a limitation of the game's design, so you couldn't even justify it as such.

His setup is superb but I'm going to stick to the ground already covered. His i7-975 extreme is far more relevant to the subject than his 580's imo. If anything, it seems fluid because there is little degradation on the fly with an encoding monster like what he's packing for a CPU.

All of that being said, constant 120fps warcraft on a 120hz screen with an i5-2500k and a 560ti will look equally as smooth as constant 200 fps warcraft (exaggeration) on a 120hz screen with an i7-975x and sli 580's. The screen's overall fidelity is the only room for variation between those two scenarios.

 

[Savantielle]

It's still being encoded. You could potentially say something about the rate of data transfer with vrm, ram and cpu but there's no way I will have an answer about that, nor do any of the top tier cards operate vram that much faster than one another.

Honestly I'd just go out on a limb and say that since he includes his 120hz monitor as a relevant feature for his cpu-encoded stream, he probably just doesn't understand how his computer works. He has a nice rig, but SLI 580's don't mean anything for warcraft. You can hold 120fps+ in arena on a single 560ti and a 200 dollar i5-2500k =/. No amount of hardware at all can hold 120 fps in a 25man raid since that is a limitation of the game's design, so you couldn't even justify it as such.

His setup is superb but I'm going to stick to the ground already covered. His i7-975 extreme is far more relevant to the subject than his 580's imo. If anything, it seems fluid because there is little degradation on the fly with an encoding monster like what he's packing for a CPU.

All of that being said, constant 120fps warcraft on a 120hz screen with an i5-2500k and a 560ti will look equally as smooth as constant 200 fps warcraft (exaggeration) on a 120hz screen with an i7-975x and sli 580's. The screen's overall fidelity is the only room for variation between those two scenarios.

Watching stream atm, his specs are:

CPU: Intel® Core i7-2600K Processor Socket-LGA1155, Quad Core, 3.4Ghz, 8MB

Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth P67, Socket-1155 ATX, P67, DDR3, 2xPCIe(2.0)x16, CFX& SLI, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.0, FW, EFI

Ram: Kingston DDR3 HyperX T1 1600MHz 3X HyperX T1 Black 4GB DDR3, CL9-9-9, Tall Heat spreader, 1.5V

Graphics: Gainward GeForce GTX 580 3072MB PhysX PCI-Express 2.0,"Phantom", GDDR5, 2xDVI, HDMI, DisplayPort, 783MHz

and he has a smoothness too. Think the 580 has something the 560 does not. It's not about not having 120 FPS, cus I have it 99% of the time. It's somethingelse. 3 ppl with 580 had the smoothness, on fullscreen streams so it's not because it's smaller... Check it out: http://www.twitch.tv/deoxarn?utm_campaign=live_embed_click&utm_source=hydramist.tv?utm_campaign=live_embed_click&utm_source=hydramist.tv

 

[casualcolors]

Watching the stream now. Looks like standard 60 fps warcraft on good internet to me (which is what it is since I can only display 60 fps ). If you're having hitches that interrupt this visual clarity while playing, it can potentially be your latency and that of those around you as they and their abilities pop in and out. But also a large part of this is the fact that I'm watching without playing. When you're playing you do tend to only catch glimpses of spells in the air which gives a fragmented impression of their motion.

If you were asking about a 560 vs. a 580 then a 560 can potentially droop in fps harder than a 580 in certain scenarios at different ubiquitous resolutions, but a 560ti won't outside of scenarios where either would get choked.



For the record, I'm watching his stream's smoothness not skip a beat while his fps meter dips to 26 fps. This is just an illusion of his stream and its inherent lower quality mate. It doesn't look this smooth on his end in full resolution.

To reinforce that this is partially the result of simply having good internet (as far as the lack of abilities popping in and such), look at his speedtest results at the bottom of the page. They are incredibly good.

 

[Savantielle]

Watching the stream now. Looks like standard 60 fps warcraft on good internet to me (which is what it is since I can only display 60 fps ). If you're having hitches that interrupt this visual clarity while playing, it can potentially be your latency and that of those around you as they and their abilities pop in and out. But also a large part of this is the fact that I'm watching without playing. When you're playing you do tend to only catch glimpses of spells in the air which gives a fragmented impression of their motion.

If you were asking about a 560 vs. a 580 then a 560 can potentially droop in fps harder than a 580 in certain scenarios at different ubiquitous resolutions, but a 560ti won't outside of scenarios where either would get choked.



For the record, I'm watching his stream's smoothness not skip a beat while his fps meter dips to 26 fps. This is just an illusion of his stream and its inherent lower quality mate. It doesn't look this smooth on his end in full resolution.

To reinforce that this is partially the result of simply having good internet (as far as the lack of abilities popping in and such), look at his speedtest results at the bottom of the page. They are incredibly good.

Hey, your answers are insanely quick + good as usual. Feel like a douche for not replying with the same finesse. I have the same internet (100/10) and same provider xD Alright, maybe I'll just have to drop the idea to play as smooth as in Khunas videos! Thx for everything!!

 

[casualcolors]

Hey, your answers are insanely quick + good as usual. Feel like a douche for not replying with the same finesse. I have the same internet (100/10) and same provider xD Alright, maybe I'll just have to drop the idea to play as smooth as in Khunas videos! Thx for everything!!

It's mostly illusory. Like I said, after watching his still incredibly smooth stream as the in-game fps meter dipped to the mid 20's (and stayed there for a prolonged period of time) I'm comfortable chalking it up to the lower image fidelity of the stream covering what would be some pretty horrendous stutters in person. I'm sure you've seen 20 fps before. No amount of technology can make it look smooth on a computer monitor.