Stormwind AH / Bank area (Ultra), Overclocking, and VSync.

[Kymei]

Hello there, I was just wondering what frame rates others are getting, highest graphics in 1900x1080, in the stormwind auction house / bank area (Sorry if you're on the horde, I can't relate to you). My server is littered with people there, and it proves to be one of the challenging areas (performance wise) for my computer. If you were kind enough to reply can you please leave what your computers core components are?

My next question is can the i5 3570k 3.4 default clock speed bottleneck a EVGA GTX 670 Superclocked, or any GTX 670 in that matter.

Third, is it worth overclocking the 3570k. Kind of a noob question, but how big of a performance boost is going from default clock to 4.0 4.2 4.5 5.0 ect.

Lastly I would like to know if Vsync is a requirement in WoW, I have ran in areas of WoW where the 670 puts out 150-300 FPS and heats up more than it does playing BF3 on max.


Thank you!!!!!!

[Deleted]

It's quite easy to see if you're CPU is actually limiting your FPS : just open the task manager and you'll see the CPU activity. I don't think that overclocking your CPU would be useful in this situation, even if 3570k can easily be pushed to 4.0ghz.
When talking about Vsync, it also depends of your screen (60hz, 100hz ?) but if it's just a regular screen I would enable it, because there will be many situations when your card will be able to generate tons on FPS whereas you won't notice any difference. Vsync will provide you the right FPS for you not to see any difference and that will prevent your graphic card from burning, and your pc will also be more silent !

[Kymei]

Talking 60hz refresh rate in this case, and yeah, the 3570k at stock speed ran at 60 C max at 100% load with the cooling set up that I have.

[Milkshake86]

It's quite easy to see if you're CPU is actually limiting your FPS : just open the task manager and you'll see the CPU activity. I don't think that overclocking your CPU would be useful in this situation, even if 3570k can easily be pushed to 4.0ghz.
When talking about Vsync, it also depends of your screen (60hz, 100hz ?) but if it's just a regular screen I would enable it, because there will be many situations when your card will be able to generate tons on FPS whereas you won't notice any difference. Vsync will provide you the right FPS for you not to see any difference and that will prevent your graphic card from burning, and your pc will also be more silent !

You would be incorrect completely. #1 in wow you will notice a performance increase from overclocking, your minimal FPS will increase. #2 Vsync locks your frames to your screens refresh rate 60Hz = 60 Fps 120Hz = 120fps. It is not a requirement but it is quite useful to not go above your refresh rate for no apparent reason adding heat and stress to your gpu, so your screen type has 0 reasoning to enable or to not enable vsync.

[Deleted]

#1 in wow you will notice a performance increase from overclocking, your minimal FPS will increase.

What if his minimal FPS is always beyond 60 ?

#2 Vsync locks your frames to your screens refresh rate 60Hz = 60 Fps 120Hz = 120fps.

Actually, if he had a 120hz screen the graphic card might not always be able to reach 120fps so he would be locked to 60fps with Vsync instead of 100 for example.

[vesseblah]

What if his minimal FPS is always beyond 60 ?

It's not in Stormwind/Origrmmar or in 25man raids.

Nobody has yet to this date posted a video of WoW running at 1920x1080 with everything on ultra including shadows and keeping FPS over 60. Feel free to take up on the challenge if you want. Even current 6-core i7-3960X overclocked dips to 50's from time to time, 25-man Ultraxion for example.

[Kymei]

It's not in Stormwind/Origrmmar or in 25man raids.

Nobody has yet to this date posted a video of WoW running at 1920x1080 with everything on ultra including shadows and keeping FPS over 60. Feel free to take up on the challenge if you want. Even current 6-core i7-3960X overclocked dips to 50's from time to time, 25-man Ultraxion for example.

The reason I made this post is because I am curious what people dip to in stormwind/orgrimmar, and if overclocking will help the dip. 25 man raids are a bad example I think for fps dips, because I ran raid finder and I simply could not get as few frames as I do during peek hours in stormwind auctionhouse. 25m DS was noticeably smoother then what happens when you go into that stormwind area. I hope you understand my post.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Question: When people talk about ultra/highest settings, are they including 16x AA and 8x multi-sampling?

[Kymei]

Question: When people talk about ultra/highest settings, are they including 16x AA and 8x multi-sampling?

High definition resolution, everything turned on/or highest possible, with x16 AA x8 Multi sampling.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Yeah, you'll be lucky to get to the VSync cap with a 4.5 GHz 3930K and two overclocked 690s with 16xAA and 8xMS.

[Kymei]

Yeah, you'll be lucky to get to the VSync cap with a 4.5 GHz 3930K and two overclocked 690s with 16xAA and 8xMS.

You are referring to vsync cap as constant FPS?

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Nah, more that you'll be lucky to reach it in a busy area with those settings. Multisampling murders your frame-rate.

[vesseblah]

The reason I made this post is because I am curious what people dip to in stormwind/orgrimmar, and if overclocking will help the dip. 25 man raids are a bad example I think for fps dips, because I ran raid finder and I simply could not get as few frames as I do during peek hours in stormwind auctionhouse. 25m DS was noticeably smoother then what happens when you go into that stormwind area. I hope you understand my post.

Exactly that way. Overclocking and the CPU performance overall will affect the minimum framerates in WoW. If you up the clockspeed by 30% your minimum fps goes up by 30% in cities and in 25man raids evening out the low fps spikes. Better graphics card affects the maximum framerate, which is mostly irrelevant since it's capped by vsync.

People who incorrectly claim the CPU makes no difference tests that while sitting in the middle of nowhere (Barrens, Elwynn Forest) with no other players in sight and vsync capped.

[Kymei]

Exactly that way. Overclocking and the CPU performance overall will affect the minimum framerates in WoW. If you up the clockspeed by 30% your minimum fps goes up by 30% in cities and in 25man raids evening out the low fps spikes. Better graphics card affects the maximum framerate, which is mostly irrelevant since it's capped by vsync.

People who incorrectly claim the CPU makes no difference tests that while sitting in the middle of nowhere (Barrens, Elwynn Forest) with no other players in sight and vsync capped.

What clock speed for a air cooled 3570k do you recommend, I have a coolermaster v6 right now.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Getting one to 4.5GHz is pretty easy. Shouldn't need more than 1.25 to 1.3V

[vesseblah]

What clock speed for a air cooled 3570k do you recommend, I have a coolermaster v6 right now.

Can't really recommend anything certain. Between 4.3 and 4.7GHz is what people are usually getting with i5-3570K fully stress tested.

[BicycleMafioso]

It's not in Stormwind/Origrmmar or in 25man raids.

Nobody has yet to this date posted a video of WoW running at 1920x1080 with everything on ultra including shadows and keeping FPS over 60. Feel free to take up on the challenge if you want. Even current 6-core i7-3960X overclocked dips to 50's from time to time, 25-man Ultraxion for example.

I can do that on a super-populated server in Orgrimmar. Raids? I haven't run those since TBC, as there's no point.
I'm unsure whether I can actually video-capture it and stay above 60 at all times, but I have no trouble riding around the main districts keeping it >70.
If I removed some of the console modifications (to improve visual quality), I'm sure I could run it smoothe enough.

[Wries]

It's quite easy to see if you're CPU is actually limiting your FPS : just open the task manager and you'll see the CPU activity.

That's an awful way of testing it out. The scheduler is likely to make threads jump around between different cores making the activity graph not show any core hitting 100% even if a thread is running equal to 100% of a core's capability. It comes down to that each point in the graph shows % of CPU cycles used on a particular core during the last second (or something around that timeframe) and that during this time a single thread might've had 70% executed on one core while 30% was done on another.

There's one way to truly test this, and that is to launch the game on two separate occasions with two different clock speeds.

[BicycleMafioso]

There's one way to truly test this, and that is to launch the game on two separate occasions with two different clock speeds.

I did this.
I got less FPS in Orgrimmar with an i5-760 @ 4.2 GHz and a HD6970 at 922/1475
Than I do now with an i5-760 @ 3.2 GHz and a HD6970 at 890/1375 and a HD6950 at 800/1250.

This surprised the bejesus out of me, but since I got crossfire to work (and I did some tinkering), I don't dip below 60 FPS in the most crowded parts of Org.
I'm not saying that a stronger GPU is what you need to run the game, but it was interested to know that getting a secondary GPU gave me improvements. At all. (in full-screen mode and renaming the wow-file to "BF3" for crossfire-profiles at least!)

[glo]

Heavily depends on server population. My rig in my sig dips around 40 on US-Tichondrius. But that's in the top 5 most populated servers in the world. If one was to play on a considerably less populated server, the performance difference would be staggering.

Either way, the true test is raiding / large scale PvP. I can safely say that there isn't a single person running WoW in the world that can keep 60+ FPS in LFR with their settings maxed. It's just not possible yet with our current CPU generation. Maybe when Haswell releases.