Authors CurseForge

On my rather skimpy machine combat log situations have to be rather extreme though from tests. Stuff like 80+ man AoE defense of the WG crystal room, or 2 warriors+no feral for rampage spam (in that configuration buff spam can be rather massive). As I see it the graphics spam from mass buffing is more likely to be the cause for frame drops than the combat log events. And certainly I don't have an explanation for freezes when folks die, because that doesn't create particularly heavy CL traffic.

But this is notoriously hard to test. I try to disable CL scanning mid-situation and the FPS doesn't rise (unless in said extreme WG settings), hence I'm inclined to believe that CL volume (at least client side) isn't the issue. Generic network bandwidth may be but the only blizz can fix that if that's the problem.

But raid wide buffs are a candidate, it's one of the more obvious changes from pre 3.0.x, which is when the performance degradation arrived. But there certainly is also increased graphics detail and whever else they may have done...

In short to this day I haven't found a way to crebily validate any of the explanations for performance degradation I've seen.

I also noticed a lot in beta and sometimes on live that I would disconnect on bosses in 25 man raids, but only bosses and almost as soon as we had engaged, then I was unable to log in until the boss had died then it would be fine again. There does seem to be some network issues since wrath, unsure if it's due to event spam though.

Quote from Elsia

And certainly I don't have an explanation for freezes when folks die, because that doesn't create particularly heavy CL traffic.

When someone dies there is a message for every aura/buff he had .. and e.g. if it's a dranae/tree/moonkin everybody also looses an aura .)

I think combat log parsing addons can be a culprit.. I was trying skada last sartharion raid and had some 5+ second freezes with it when I got attacked by little adds... never had any problems with recount.

Well, Omen doesn't need comm anymore since wrath dropped :P

Screw them?

Quote from Xinhuan

Raid leaders wanted version checks just to see that all raiders have it installed. Talk about unnecessary overheads!

Someone will just make an addon to spoof it then anyways :P.

CRB, whatever it is, is the most godawful mod ever when it comes to spam. Any given day I get more traffic from that from people I pugged with once a long time ago that every other mod I have combined. Healcomm isn't great, but there's no other way to reproduce it's effect and it's an invaluable tool. I actually saw something even worse once, but I don't remember what it was.

I still don't get it though. I used to raid 40-mans with Omen/KTM, and Recount running full sync. That's a heck of a lot more addon traffic than we need or likely would ever see nowadays and I had no performance issues on my rather crummy laptop I used back when. And it also ran Discord Action Bars, Discord Unit Frames, CT_RaidAssist etc etc...

I haven't had a chance to look at the load carbonite creates, but I kind of doubt it rivals the sync pulse Recount used to have :P

If addon traffic or addon performance really is an issue nowadays, something else has changed too because it used to not be that big a deal.

An occasional version sync used to be completely not worth talking about.

The system I use now used to be more than adequate in TBC post 2.4. Just with 3.0.x is there a very noticable performance issue. Raid wide CL events are a candidate, but I'd love to know for sure.

A lot of people have pointed out the huge ups and downs of the raid wide buffs, plus graphical upgrades and such. For people running higher end systems, you all have higher settings than people with low-end systems, so your "max" settings are actually different than people with older machines. I don't even get the option to set my shadow quality with my video card; and technically... it's old, but not ancient.

So considering the fact that there are double the spell effects going on in a 25 man, double the buffs ... give or take, double the combat log entries, etc etc. I could see it adding up. Especially with short - time buffs like warrior buffs. It's a lot of information being sent/received, and a lot of information to process.

That's all just a layman's conjecture though.

In my case that cannot be it though. I'm playing with all min video settings since WotLK with exception of spell details (one below max) and terrain distance (one above min). And that didn't solve my raid performance issues though it certainly helped.

That's down from some things at medium, somethings at high in TBC with no problems raiding 25-man.

Well as said, I have tried raiding with addons turned off, showing no significant effect.

I have sufficient memory (3GB on winxp) and there is no excessive disk access. I defragment frequently (much more than during TBC). The effect persists with a freshly defragmented drive though, so that's not it.

The point is though that even people who have a substantially better system than me report that they have poor FPS in 25-man raids and I haven't seen a credible explanation what the problem is.

As said addons are not it, because I had everything turned off. Surprisingly that way I found that CPU profiling isn't a paricularly big hit on my system so I use it more often now. I added expo to my lineup to help trace probable addon issues and that addition didn't impact my frame rate! I rarely use /combatlog so that ain't it either.

I do think it may have to do with a combo of network load and spell effects, which you cannot sensibly turn down all the way while raiding. But it's still a guess. The network load angle would explain why people with a much better system than mine also report lag in 25-man raids.

I'll get a new data point soon from a friend who upgraded just CPU to combat this issue. If that is successful then i'm inclined to agree that there is a CPU load factor to this, though on my machine I haven't been able to get good evidence for that. If the CPU was choked, disabling addons should help but it doesn't.

As said this isn't just my problem. People have been trying to find tricks that could help for a while now but there is still no consensus what is going on. See for example here: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=7701043754&sid=1&pageNo=1 and the thread on EJ that OP posted is another example.

Edit: Let me be more precise on expo. Expo will be detrimental to my system if you have the tooltip visible, in which case it will substantially drop your FPS and have jerky stops when it updates.

Actually just found a potentially relevant blue:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16102190247&sid=1

There is one bug in 3.0.9 that has a disproportionate impact on scenes with a lot of particle effects. You should see an improvement in 3.1.0 which has a fix for that bug.

I hope that was it. I hadn't had a chance to test 25-mans on the PTR yet unfortunately.

Quote from Allara

I recently upgraded just my video card to the nVidia GTX 295. I expected to see a significant gain in frame rate, but nothing changed. After a lot of testing, I figured out it was Pitbull 4 causing the slow down (only in raids, more noticeable in 25-mans). Since switching back to Pitbull 3, I've been able to turn all my graphics settings up to max, including shadows, even during 25-man raids.

My feeling is that WoW is very CPU constrained for me at the moment. I run a dual core 3.0 Ghz processor with 8 GB of RAM and a 4-drive RAID 0 array. If WoW could take advantage of my GPU's onboard physics support, or offload more of it's graphics processing onto the video card, or do more multithreading, I imagine it'd be able to perform much better than it does. But the Pitbull 4 issue really highlighted to me the fact that add-ons can significantly kill your frame rate.

Honestly, I'm completely amazed that the WoW client can keep up with a 25-man raid at all, network-wise. Is WoW still usable over dial up these days? I just don't know how they can possibly communicate so much information so fast without using up a ton of bandwidth. But I guess MMOs since the dawn of MMOs have done it, with far more players involved. Quite the achievement, really.

WoW is a very CPU limited game which isn't surprising considering when it came out, GPU's weren't that powerful back then. WoW doesn't scale all that well with newer hardware at all, upgrading video card past the mid range ones tends to gain you almost nothing, upgrading from a dual to a quad core also gains you almost nothing, WoW depends almost entirely on raw CPU and memory bus speed.