How to improve FPS at 2560x1600 resolution?

[Xofa]

My question is..

How can I improve my FPS in WoW? I have everything on ultra and in 2560x1600 resolution. I know this is quite extreme but I want to know how can I improve my fps? Would a new GPU do the trick or a new CPU? Is WoW more CPU or GPU dependant?

Lowest FPS I have gotten is 20 in Stormwind. Would like to run at least +40 in Stormwind.

My specs
Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1

CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 4.20GHz (oc'ed) 70 °C (temp in wow)
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology

RAM
16,0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz (9-9-9-27)

Motherboard
MSI Z68A-GD65 (G3) (MS-7681) (SOCKET 0) 28 °C

Graphics
Philips FTV (1920x1080@60Hz)
DELL U3014 (2560x1600@60Hz)
3072MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7900 Series (Gigabyte) 76 °C ( In game WoW temp)

Storage
3726GB Hitachi HGST HDS724040ALE640 ATA Device (SATA) 41 °C
111GB KINGSTON SH100S3120G ATA Device (SSD) 32 °C
931GB SAMSUNG HD103UJ ATA Device (SATA) 35 °C

[Deleted]

reduce your res
reduce shadows and ground clutter

wow is CPU bound. The higher the res, the more it will ask of your processor, A better processor might help, but I am not sure what is the best I5 at the moment, Forget I7 as wow is not multi threaded so would be a waste.

[Xofa]

Sigma: That's not an option. I want to stay at 2560x1600 with everything on ultra.
I forgot to add that I of course have oc'ed my CPU to 4.2GHz

[Ishayu]

reduce your res
reduce shadows and ground clutter

Reducing resolution is not needed at all here. His GPU is more than fast enough to run WoW at this resolution. There is no ground clutter in the middle of Stormwind. Reducing this setting will make no difference.

Try to reduce shadow quality. If that doesn't do it, water quality. If that doesn't do it, reduce anti-aliasing.

- - - Updated - - -

Sigma: That's not an option. I want to stay at 2560x1600 with everything on ultra.

You can't play with it all on ultra if you're not getting the FPS you need.

By the way, your memory is really slow. I'd probably invest there if anywhere.

[Deleted]

Reducing resolution is not needed at all here. His GPU is more than fast enough to run WoW at this resolution. There is no ground clutter in the middle of Stormwind. Reducing this setting will make no difference.

can have the greatest GFX card in the world, wont make a difference if his CPU is bottlenecked due to the amount of stuff on screen that needs to be rendered. WOW is and always has been CPU bound. Having such a high res is the cause of the bottleneck.

[Tucci]

Overclock your CPU to around 4.5ghz or so if you have good cooling for it. Bout all you can do. I'm not sure if your gpu is being maxed at that rez or not. I feel like it would be fine for WoW. Make sure you're on 64 bit, DX11, fullscreen mode (not fullscreen-windowed or windowed), put shadows on high instead of ultra. Draw distance and detail distance are big fps killers as well. Could also try high water instead of ultra but it's usually not a big deal except for maybe in a couple spots. Just play with the settings to find out what the biggest fps killers are and then find a good balance.

[Lightwysh]

I would say MB and Ram upgrade at a minimum. Some good 1600+ ram. Maybe a new gfx card, a 270 or 280.

[Xofa]

Tucci: I forgot to add that I of course have oc'ed my CPU to 4.2GHz

- 64 bit: Check
- DX11: Check

[Hyve]

Sigma: That's not an option. I want to stay at 2560x1600 with everything on ultra.
I forgot to add that I of course have oc'ed my CPU to 4.2GHz

Saying it's not an option, and then asking for the hardware to perform at a level it can't at the resolution you want, is not the right way to go about this.

Sigma is right, you could lower your resolution a little and while you'll notice it at first, you'll get over it quickly enough and notice no difference in the long run. 2560 x 1600 is far, far larger then most people have ever played on, hell I used to play on a 27" monitor and I wouldn't mind going below the optimal resolution to make the game run nicer.

It's mentioned here a lot, but i'll add it again; World of Warcraft basically runs off your CPU. Of course, that's a big generalisation, but you could have the best PC in the world, with an alright CPU and it'd still struggle. You could have 45 gigabytes of RAM and it'd still struggle because of the CPU. You're asking it to do a whole lot of rendering on a very large screen.

[Xofa]

Saying it's not an option, and then asking for the hardware to perform at a level it can't at the resolution you want, is not the right way to go about this.

Sigma is right, you could lower your resolution a little and while you'll notice it at first, you'll get over it quickly enough and notice no difference in the long run. 2560 x 1600 is far, far larger then most people have ever played on, hell I used to play on a 27" monitor and I wouldn't mind going below the optimal resolution to make the game run nicer.

Hyve: If I really wanted more FPS I know the keyword would be to lower my resolution / lower shadow or distance settings but I don't want go down that road. I am a sucker for all the eye-candy in game and therefor I ask what I have to do in order to improve my fps at these settings. A new CPU ? GPU or RAM? I guess my ram are kinda old now that I think about it. Money is not an issue here so if a new GPU like 780 Ti would do the trick then so be it.

But if a single component, like my CPU was the bottleneck it would be a clear choice what I would/should do at my givin position.
Anyway thanks so far for the advices. I appreciate it.

EDIT:
In LFR my FPS is overall +40 which is quite decent I think. Higher would be awesome. Dual new video cards would help increase my fps or what are we looking at here?

I play in Full Window mode(Can't remember the proper name of it) because I'm alt-tabbing out a lot doing different kind of things while playing. Fullscreen mode would be terrible for me.

[Hyve]

In LFR my FPS is overall +40 which is quite decent I think. Higher would be awesome.

If you're playing at that resolution, with everything on Ultra you're getting a very good deal out of your hardware, trust me. Upgrade the CPU though if you really want to push it, but that's literally the only thing I can recommend.

16GB of RAM, or 78GB of RAM, 89TB of RAM, doesn't matter. CPU > RAM, especially for World of Warcraft.

Though, I can't stress enough for you to just be happy with what you've got. Hell, I know a few people who play with everything on the lowest settings and are using a toaster for a keyboard, the fact you're running at the FPS with that resolution and set up is quite good.

[Deleted]

1. Check you internet connexion. If it isn't fast enough you need to reduce the details per distance.
2. Use a utility most probably available with your graphic card to monitor % gpu usage. If you are often above 90% then you need to reduce graphics quality, one step at a time

FYI I am on a 2560x1440 + 1920x1200 setup on NVIDIA 680 + old core i7 920 + cable internet and I have mostly extremely high fps with everything ultra. Sometimes it goes as low as 20-25 fps but it's mostly in transition/whatever short phase that you don't even have time to register before you are back in the 40-200fps range.

You can monitor your CPU but I would be astonished that an i5 isn't enough. Core i5 and even Core i3 processors are more than enough for most games.

Also on my Dell laptop (2 GB 750 GTS?) I play @ 3200x1800 at fixed 60 FPS. Not on ultra but with high textures and a few other options it looks amazingly good.

[Tucci]

I would switch to your 1080p monitor to see the difference or just drop the rez and compare. That way you know if it's the resolution killing it. If it is, there's just not much you can do. I wouldn't think you would see 20 fps though unless you were in a crowded stormwind, in which case I could definitely see that happening at that rez. I've never owned a monitor with a resolution higher than 1080p but I know resolution is one of the biggest killers of fps in games.

You wouldn't see that much of an fps jump with different hardware currently I don't think. Some maybe, but not enough.

[Xofa]

I see..

The 1080p monitor is my TV monitor hehe Well I actually did try change the resolution to 1080p on my 30'' and of course I was getting impressive FPS in Stormwind - The crowded areas. Like 70-100. Lowest I saw was .. hmm I think 60?

Just to clear it out.. WoW is actually the only game I have problems with at this resolution. BF4, Bioshock Infinite, Diablo 3 and Skyrim etc all run awesome with all on max.


Silmarieni: I use MSI afterburner. In game display says GPU is at 61% usage and CPU is at 37%

For me it seems like WoW is somewhat the bottleneck? Perhaps not optimized properly at this resolution since the majority plays at 1080p.

[Deleted]

In LFR my FPS is overall +40 which is quite decent I think. Higher would be awesome. Dual new video cards would help increase my fps or what are we looking at here?

Again, you can have the greatest GFX cards in the world. you can have 4 of them in Quad SLI / Crossfire, watercooled and overclocked, it would not make a difference. WOW is CPU bound. What that means is that pretty much everything you see on screen is rendered on your CPU. This is due to the age of the games engine.

There are two ways your going to see an improvement in your FPS.

1 - Sacrifice your resolution and GFX settings, There really is very little difference to be seen.
2 - Invest in a new processor. As I said earlier on I am not that knowledgeable on Intel processors at the moment, so I will leave that to someone else to advise you on.

[Xofa]

Thanks Sigma ! I'll try see what the market has to offer . Thanks again

[cFortyfive]

Money is not an issue here so if a new GPU like 780 Ti would do the trick then so be it.

If that's not the issue in the first place definitely go pick one up, add a 4790K and overclock it with a nice cooling system and it will be definitely better.

[Kalmarin]

You guys are living in the past still, WoW has not been "CPU bound" since Cata came out and offered DX11 optimizations for the graphics engine. This reduced the workload on the CPU and transferred some of it to the GPU. You keep telling him to reduce his graphics settings yet tell him that his GPU isn't the limiting factor, are you even thinking about what you are saying? IMO your GPU is your limiting factor, I was running a nearly identical setup at 2560x1440 but I have a Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 and was getting between 40-50 fps in Stormwind and in 25man raids it would not dip below 50 fps very often. The only time my system struggled was with 40+ people on world bosses, especially Ordos with all the fire effects when I was on one of my tanks or melee dps. More RAM won't help, faster CPU won't make much difference, better GPU definately will.

[Xofa]

Kalmarin: Thanks for your advice! Really appreciate it

[Biggles Worth]

reduce your res

That comment makes zero sense. The point of this is to improve FPS at said resolution.