Authors CurseForge

''[FONT=arial]The frame rate for those with Shadow Effects enabled under the Ultra Video settings has been improved.''



Has anyone tested this to see if it actually has improved? Currently with shadows maxed, i lose around 20-30 fps on a high-end system, which is unacceptable.
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I just took shadows off, not worth the tax

Quote from Bobbywich

I just took shadows off, not worth the tax

Is this on PTR? If so, it doesn't look like they changed it at all.

They changed it. It's still not worth the fps loss, considering the "quality" it provides.

It's no real secret that WoW's engine performs ridiculously horrible on many relatively new, high-end systems (or at the very least pretty close to a mainstream system), with Dalaran being the greatest abomination in the game's history, in terms of performance, no matter what system you have or what settings are on. My guess would be that either the engine is CPU/GPU limited after a certain point, or that it was never really optimized or tested under conditions similar to live realms.

Quote from Skylinee

''[FONT=arial]The frame rate for those with Shadow Effects enabled under the Ultra Video settings has been improved.''[/FONT]



[FONT=arial]Has anyone tested this to see if it actually has improved? Currently with shadows maxed, i lose around 20-30 fps on a high-end system, which is unacceptable.[/FONT]

Unless someone happens to have a system identically configured to your own "high-end system", their testing on the PTR is unlikely to give you an accurate sense of how the changes might affect you. If it really is important to you, you should test it yourself.

Tristanian, normally, I'd agree with you, and indeed, it may very well be the case, for Windows users.

However, my wife recently upgraded from an iBook G4 1.42ghz, to a MBP, dual-core intel Mac..

And she runs thru Dalaran at 50+ fps at her normal settings.. No glitching.. no problems..

She's running at max, native resolution. widescreen 15", and quality set to to medium..

Granted, she gets faster OVERALL fps when running windows, but, for some reason, Dalaran lags on the windows, but not in OS X. OpenGL vs DirectX: Scalability perhaps?

I've got a e8400 @ 3.6ghz and a 4850 and 4 gigs of ram. Turning shadows off completely saves me about 20 fps on max settings, which I'd rather have.

The game appears to be really CPU bound, but when standing in Dalaran I can't help but think that the engine is failing to cull non visible parts of the city and players, causing the awful framerates.

There's no reason why rendering a small piece of grass and the side of a bank should bring my system to its knees.

Here's the question I have, for many of you: RAM? The wife's system has 4Gigs... perhaps thats why she doesn't lag at bit, when running OpenGL ?

I usually use (highest - 1) setting for shadow quality, since that last step takes away about 10 FPS. (at least it goes from 30 to 20 in Dalaran) The PTR didn't change this. Using the max quality seemed to resolve certain problems with flickering shadows, though. Namely in Un'goro crater, but on the PTR I notice lots of flickering in Dalaran with max quality, so I'm probably gonna stick with max - 1.

I have a 2,6 GHz AMD Phenom X4 810, 4 GB RAM and HD 4850.

RAM will not affect constant FPS since the game doesn't really use over 1GB anyways from what I've seen (unless you manually increase some cache sizes in config.wtf), and the only way it would affect FPS anyways is indirectly (e.g., if you have so little RAM that the game is constantly having to swap data in and out).

WoW is an extreme CPU hog because the engine is at least 5 years old and is not optimized well for offloading processing onto the GPU or secondary CPU cores. They also muck things up by trying to optimize for two different render targets on two different host configurations (namely OpenGL on Mac and Direct3D on PC).

While framerates in Dalaran are hardly stellar, they were never super in Shattrath either - the large number of players to render drags framerates down. Load times are a lot worse though, I frequently see people being forced to shut off addons and get out of Dalaran in order to be able to even log in before it logs them off thinking disconnect.

I can't alt tab in Wrath areas either though without having everything grind to a screeching halt. That frustrates me more than a bunch of pixellated shadows. They seem to fix it one patch, only to break it again the next.

Quote from flarecde

I can't alt tab in Wrath areas either though without having everything grind to a screeching halt. That frustrates me more than a bunch of pixellated shadows. They seem to fix it one patch, only to break it again the next.

Does this only happen in Wrath areas? I had a very similar problem when 2.4 (i think) launched, and while running a single core CPU. The game continued to use 100% cpu when alt tabbed out to windows, instead of 1-4% like it's supposed to. I fixed this with a /console command, but i've forgotten the exact command.

Interesting, hadn't heard of that cvar before. Looks like it may only work if you have maxfps set for some reason: http://www.wowblues.com/us/does-console-set-maxfpsbk-still-work-4665489828.html

wow also needs a lot of gram. the usual 512mb is often not enough, wow can fill 800-900mb.