Friday, August 15

Increasing Wow performance

There are some simpel methods to improve your Wow performance, some will reduce your graphics a bit though but others won't or very minimal.
Now i can't guarantee each and everyone to work for you and you would be wise to backup any settings (or write them down at least) before you change them so you can revert to them later. I've tried a number of these settings aswell and i'm between 60 and 100FPS (frames per second) now depending on the zone (you would need at least 30fps to see things run smoothly), my goal is however to make a second Wow-client run smooth aswell so i'm overshooting on purpose.

Run Mediaplayer to increase FPS
For some people running Windows Media Player before starting Wow will reduce loading times, see here or here for more info on that.

Dual core owners edit config for FPS increase
Add SET timingMethod "2" to the config.wtf file in your WTF folder, use Wordpad to edit (or something) and just add it to the end. This is supposed to have to do something with having a Dual core CPU so won't benefit people with single core most likely. You can also try out 1 (which should have the same effect as running WMP), the default is 0.
You can try this out ingame by using: /console timingmethod 1 or /console timingmethod 2

Change some Network adapter settings to reduce Latency
Apart from making sure Blizzard doesn't download the next patch while gaming you can also change some adapter settings to reduce latency, check out on how to do it.

Change ingame visual settings to increase FPS
Gamespot has some nice screens on the difference between various ingame visual settings. Some differences are minimal for worth mentioning performance. Check it out here and here.
I myself did the following (minimal graphic backset):
- Disabled Terrain highlights
- Disabled Full Screen Glow
- Disabled Vertical Sync (+15FPS for me)
On lower end systems reducing Terrain Distance (1 above minimum) helps alot aswell, i prefer it near max myself.

Change Videocard settings to increase FPS
If your card supports Anamorphic Filtering make sure this is NOT set to minimum as it will reduce graphics by alot. Us the ATI control panel to set Anamorphic Filtering, what this filter does is resample all of the graphics to keep them crisp. You can set it as high as 16x, I settled on 8x, but the difference wasn't drastic.

More tips

  • The following post on the offical forums contain more tips to try if you want to further try to improve:Offical Blizzard Performance guide.
    There are some helpfull tips in there on ATI/Nvidia settings, color depths when using multiple monitors aswell as some links to other testtools and further reads.
  • Running Windows in a Linux environment should help aswell, more info here.
  • Update your Video drivers: ATI and Nvidia
  • Some Video card settings:
    ATI Try turning off Catalyst A.I. in the Catalyst Control Center. If you use an older version, try turning off Overdrive.
    NVIDIA Try turning off Transparency Antialiasing in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
  • Update your Bios
  • Disable Windows defender, read more here (Do use some other Spyware blocker then though!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Never heard that windows media player trick before. I'll have to try that.

Wow Panda said...

Yep, thanks, I will try it too.