Is Your FPS Raid Ready?

Written by Anaea

Monday, 08 March 2010 12:50

One of the great things about WoW is that it's constantly changing. We're always exploring news zones, fiddling with new spells, and enjoying all the other tweaks and changes that come with an ever-evolving game. Sometimes, though, this means that a computer which behaved with perfect decorum in one patch can become decrepit and cantankerous in the next.

So if, like me, you find yourself watching a stop-motion Sindragosa in your next raid, here are some steps you can take to try to get back up to speed.
It's important to note that we're talking about changes which can improve your FPS (frames per second) in a raid setting. This is the "choppy" effect you'll notice in the game. If instead it seems like there's a five second delay between when you press a button and when it executes -- that's lag, and it's a story for a whole different post.

You can see your lag by mousing over the GM help icon, the red "?" on your menu bar. Anything over 500ms is high latency (i.e. lag).

It's also important to add that these changes won't turn your old Pentium II into a high tech gaming machine. At some point, hardware upgrades will be in order. You can see Warcraft's minimum hardware requirements here. But if you think you can still get just a bit more from your machine, this article is for you.

MANAGING YOUR HARDWARE
One of the first things you'll want to do is make sure that your video drivers are up to date. Supposedly Windows Update does this for you, but it's not always timely in finding these changes. Find out what type of video card you have, and the manufacturer. Most of the time, if you go directly to the manufacturer website, you'll be able to download the most recent drivers from that site.

You might decide that you need to update your DirectX drivers in addition to your graphics card drivers. DirectX is sort of an addon for your graphics card, that allows programs to more easily access certain functions on your card. If your version of DirectX is out of date, you might need to download that update separately. It's best to do this step before you download your video card driver updates.

You'll also want to make sure that your sound drivers are up to date. This may not appear to have anything to do with your frame rate, but Warcraft is largely limited by CPU capacity -- in other words, by how quickly your processor can handle receiving and sending instructions to the rest of your machine. So, the more easily it can send information to your sound card, or the better your sound card performs, the better that Warcraft performs. It may not get you a huge improvement, but it certainly can't hurt.

Blizzard Support has very detailed instructions for identifying and updating your hardware drivers, which you can read in this support article.

CHANGE YOUR VIDEO SETTINGS
If updating all of your drivers doesn't seem to be helping you much, it's time to fiddle with your in-game settings. Some changes go farther than others, and some changes can significantly interfere with your ability to raid. Here's a handy list of what and how to change the most common settings.

Change your grass density and draw distance. You often won't notice the change in landscape tufts and strands, so this is an easy switch to make.
Lower your environment detail. This largely affects textures in the distance, and isn't something that most players notice regularly.
Mid range to high end graphics cards should have "Reduce Input Lag" turned off, while lower end cards should have it enabled. Swapping these settings can drastically reduce performance.
Disabling player names and titles can help reduce some of the FPS issues, particularly in crowded places like Dalaran.
Reduce the shadow quality slider to about half or less of the maxiumum allowed. Shadows are one of the worst offenders in frame rate problems; even the best machines freak out when this is set at the maximum level.

Desperation Trick:
If you need something to get that littlest edge from an otherwise outdated machine, you can try the following. Use these commands to reduce dynamic shadows to their lowest setting, then turn them completely off. They must be done in order.

/console extShadowQuality 0
/console shadowLOD 0

Whatever you do, try to avoid reducing spell detail by more than about half. And DO NOT disable projected textures. Modifying these settings can change the appearance of boss attacks and abilities -- sometimes making them disappear entirely!

MANAGING YOUR ADDONS
When you've done all that and you're still not happy with your computer's performance, you can look at your addon usage to try and get a little bit more out of your machine.

The first step is to enable different addons for different characters. Keeping questhelper active only on your leveling alt, or auctioneer only enabled on your banking character, can go a long way towards freeing up your computer for frame rate happiness. You can access these settings from the character screen. Simply choose the character, and then click the "addons" button to enable or disable addons for each.

You can also try to enlist your raid team to help you with this. Addons like SpamFu let you see how many addons are trying to communicate with you during a raid. Sometimes if your teammates turn off any unnecessary addons, this can help your frame rate. Both GearScore and Gatherer are reputedly very spammy addons which are entirely optional in raids. Other communicative addons, like pallypower and libhealcomm, are less expendable.

You'll also want to determine whether any of your addons are generating errors that could be decreasing performance. Take an evening and enable lua error notification in your Blizzard interface. See if any of your addons are causing frequent errors, and look to see if you can update or replace them.

Finally, combat review addons are usually worst culprits for reducing frame rates. If all else fails, you might want to consider disabling addons like Recount. If you can't imagine your life without a combat log, investigate lighter weight alternatives. Skada is reported to use less memory when active than Recount. Alternatively, very task-focused addons like Obituary or Fatality will use fewer resources than the memory intensive full combat log.

Similarly, getting rid of floating combat text addons and using the default UI for those notifications can reportedly go a long way towards increasing your frame rate.

Examples of resource intensive addons include:

Desperation Trick:
If that's still not helping your computer become raid functional, you can turn off your combat log entirely. This is only for the VERY desperate; disabling the combat log will mean addons like DBM can't warn you about all boss abilities (think Malleable Goo in Putricide). If you have no other recourse, the command for this is:

/run COMBATLOG:UnregisterEvent("COMBAT_LOG_EVENT")

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Tried all these tricks and still can't get enough of computer optimization? Then check out these additional resources for more tweaks and tactics.

Official Warcraft Tech Support forum
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11110&sid=1

Warcraft System Performance Guide, 3.x edition
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10971909544&sid=1

Warcraft User Tips and Tricks Guide
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11855820803&sid=1

Super Technical Stuff
http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t40955-wow_performance_issues_tweaks_etc/

General Blue Guide to Getting Better FPS
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=22418702630&sid=1

NVidia Specific Tips
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=160836

Last Updated on Monday, 08 March 2010 13:02