Performance guide for everybody!

[Speedlance]

A small guide which may help gamers stabilize and optimize their computer for gaming. It was originally designed for FPS games but performance matters in all games.
This guide is also on official forums and is created by me there as well.

GUIDE START:

I mostly trialed and errored this myself and I believe I've come down to whatever was causing issues for me.
While I've never had any critical issues with wow, I do feel it's never any bad to smooth out my game experience.

Windows 8.1 users:

Follow this guide to optimizing your windows, don't have to reinstall, so skip that part.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1433882/g...#post_23338511

For windows pro/ultimate users:
Use gpedit to disable bandwidth limits which are there by default, windows reserves upto 20% of your bandwidth for the system, but you will get full power while gaming regardless but might be worth a shot.

You can do this with home versions as well but it requires you to mess with registry yourself which I don't recommend unless you got a step by step guide on how to do it and making sure you don't mess up the wrong things.

More general tweaks for everybody:

follow this guide to disable/enable stuff that cause performance drops in your games.

http://www.overclock.net/t/1433882/g...rn-pc-hardware

If you don't want to mess around in BIOS you shouldn't either but I do recommend it as it's a lot of stuff there you can turn off which affect performance.

Priorities:

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
1. Put wow on high priority, don't use realtime. (or CS:GO if you play that for example)
2. start wow (or the game you play)
3. Put Agent (or any file related to battle net) on low priority. (or if you play cs:go put every steam related item on low priority)
4: I use xonar and I put it on below normal priority,but you can probably do this for onboard sound as well.
This helped me greatly for my game performance.

Other things that will help but is not CRUCIAL.

DO AT YOUR OWN RISK
Disabling antivirus, malware/spyware programs while playing. Do not use any web browsers when you don't got antivirus active.

Using CCleaner to fix registry.
Restart your pc before playing wow.


Probably not 1 magical thing you can do to fix wow but a combined effort to eliminate as much interference as possible in your games.

It's not required to do everything to get a smooth game but this is the path I had to go to get my wow as smooth and responsive as I got it today and what I recommend doing.

Other tweaks which might help fix your connection is following this video which I recommend following.
RECOMMENDED!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3GS7S6Vtqs

Credits:

Roach who wrote the gaming and mouse responsivnes guide and windows 8.1 tweak guide.

DontPaNiiC - who made the video about fixing internet speeds.

Rest is information I've gathered and tested myself.

[fixx]

Should've added that going all-out with those guides is recommended only if you're playing on very low spec computer and know what you're doing, or are playing at world championship level and really need to get out everything possible from your hardware. In a modern gaming computer doing all those tweaks will give you less than 5% benefit in framerate with high chance of messing up something if you don't know what you're changing in BIOS or regedit.


Also turning off antivirus at any time, even while gaming is really stupid. Same applies to automatic updates.
You can set windows update to notify you but not download or install anything on your own.

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Why do these guides never come with benchmarks to show efficacy?

Because the benchmark results would all be well within margin of error

[Alantor]

How do we know this stuff isn't voodoo witchcraft

Look at it go!

[Speedlance]

Why do these guides never come with benchmarks to show efficacy?

How do we know this stuff isn't voodoo witchcraft without tests demonstrating an improvement after each step and then a cumulative measure that compares a normal "just install windows and your game" to "install windows, spend an afternoon fiddling with settings, and then install your game"?

Problem with showing proof in this case is that it's meant to boost responsiveness in games which is more of how the game feels.
Most people think higher fps = better performance which isn't untrue but there is a lot of other factors involved as well which this guide will help with.

[Djinni]

Disabling antivirus, malware/spyware programs while playing. Do not use any web browsers when you don't got antivirus active.

Using CCleaner to fix registry.

Turn of router at night if you don't need to use it for DL or whatever.
Restart your pc before playing wow.
Restart your router every 3-4 hours.

Not that I want to "rain on your parade" but:
Using CCleaner to "fix the registry" doesn't fix anything, for the most part it just removes old registry keys that it thinks are from un-installed programs, shortcuts and other applications which may or may not always be the case.

For the majority of broadband users this will actually hurt their connection even more.
Rebooting / Turning off your router regularly causes the ISP to think there is something wrong with your connection. Since they have no other data, they start to increase the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) The overall effect of this being a massively reduced bandwidth capacity for your line.
Basically, what happens is that in an effort to maintain a more stable connection the ISP reduces the speed of your connection so that it can get a lower error rate. (Errors are bad.)

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Disabling antivirus, malware/spyware programs while playing. Do not use any web browsers when you don't got antivirus active.

This used to be a thing wayy back in the days of windows 98 and early days of XP. Since then however most decent AV programs are much smarter and less intrusive.
The reason we used to disable them because they ran on a schedule, one that usually coincided with raid nights. This men't that they would start running very resource intensive scans while we were playing. These days this is no longer an issue as scans are only done while the system is idle.

Also just because you are not browsing the web, does not mean that nothing is being download to your computer. If you want proof of this, just run wireshark for about 10 minutes while you think your machine is otherwise idle. You would be surprised at the amount of traffic used/generated.

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For windows pro/ultimate users:
Use gpedit to disable bandwidth limits which are there by default, windows reserves upto 20% of your bandwidth for the system, but you will get full power while gaming regardless but might be worth a shot.

This is actually sometimes more harmful than helpful. See quote below:

The claim that Windows always reserves a percentage of the available bandwidth for QoS is incorrect. One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs, unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth. This “reserved” bandwidth is still available to other programs unless the requesting program is sending data. If the program that reserved the bandwidth is not sending sufficient data to use it, the unused part of the reserved bandwidth is available for other data flows on the same host, says KB316666.

So what will happen if you change the limit of the reservable bandwidth to zero?

Here is what Microsoft has to say:

The Windows Operating System reserves a fixed percentage of the total Internet bandwidth for the QOS or Quality of Service usage like Windows update, license renewal, etc. Thus, when you limit the Reservable Bandwidth of the operating system to 0, this will definitely affect the operating system activities like Automatic Windows Updates. If a QoS-aware application reserves more bandwidth than it uses, then the unused, reserved bandwidth is available for use by other applications. The reservation does not ensure that the bandwidth will be available to the QoS-aware application because applications that are not QoS-aware might consume too much bandwidth.

[fixx]

This is actually sometimes more harmful than helpful. See quote below:

But it's totally fine because the guide starts from turning off Windows updates :P

[Deleted]

Why do these guides never come with benchmarks to show efficacy?

How do we know this stuff isn't voodoo witchcraft without tests demonstrating an improvement after each step and then a cumulative measure that compares a normal "just install windows and your game" to "install windows, spend an afternoon fiddling with settings, and then install your game"?

Because it's all bullshit! None of those things work. Especially that 20% network bandwidth.

[Speedlance]

I was perhaps a bit eager when I wrote performance matters in every game, wow might not the most demanding game out there and people might not have a need for a more responsive mouse, less input lag and generally smoother gameplay, however these are things I value above anything else in my games to maximize my performances.
I took all steps myself 1 month ago and I've not had any issues so far and my games run significantly better.

Each and everyone will decide for themself if they try it or not, I won't argue against anything and will try my best to help people who need it.

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I changed a few things about my tweaks.

I called my ISP earlier today and they didn't recommend restarting the router too often, turning it off at night was fine but it was recommended to leave it running.
Decided to take away based on a recommendation from my ISP.

Put a red warning text for disabling antivirus and malware etc, to be perfectly clear it's not needed and will only net you a minor performance gain.

Green text on what I think everybody should do because it's magic.
I will continue to restart my router and disable everything because it gives me enough of a boost to be worth the risk.

[Djinni]

Speedlance, Glad you took the feedback as constructive criticism. Also glad you did the research with the ISP to confirm.

Unfortunately, since most of the guide centres around turning off all the things that help keep you and your account(s) safe, invariably the kinds of people who would follow it, are the kinds of people who would be most likely to be exposed to the very threats that Anti-Malware, Anti-Virus and various windows updates try and protect you from.

[fixx]

Also, foreground fullscreen programs are already considered to be running at high priority afaik.

Optimizing process priorities is the kind of black magic that less than 100 people in the world understand completely (counting coders working on all OS kernels together) and all of them recommend people who don't know wtf they're doing should even try because they can fuck up critical system tasks by depriving CPU time.

[Speedlance]

Speedlance, Glad you took the feedback as constructive criticism. Also glad you did the research with the ISP to confirm.

Unfortunately, since most of the guide centres around turning off all the things that help keep you and your account(s) safe, invariably the kinds of people who would follow it, are the kinds of people who would be most likely to be exposed to the very threats that Anti-Malware, Anti-Virus and various windows updates try and protect you from.

You can choose whatever you're comfortable with, my guide is about performance above all else, which it will help you with, however I won't push anyone into turning off stuff they don't feel safe disabling or enabling.
If you're a MMo player you can pick and choose a bit more, but if you're a med/high skilled fps player you will bow down to this guide because your recoil will be much better, bullet spread more accurate, bullet speed improved and less input lag, keep peekers advantage more consistently and you won't get dinged in the head long after you've run past a peek point.

But as I said, I post this here so people got a chance, whether or not they choose to follow this is upto each and everyone to decide for themself

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Also, foreground fullscreen programs are already considered to be running at high priority afaik.

Optimizing process priorities is the kind of black magic that less than 100 people in the world understand completely (counting coders working on all OS kernels together) and all of them recommend people who don't know wtf they're doing should even try because they can fuck up critical system tasks by depriving CPU time.

Wow and CS:GO at least does not run in high priority unless you force them. Sound is the number 1 issue for games performance loss and it doesn't even need that much resources as it's given by default to perform what it's suppose to so therefor I recommend putting it on below normal priority, removing a huge load from the CPU which will then give it more power for games like wow and cs.
I've done this on multiple computer from start of time and never had any problems myself, therefore I feel pretty confident in recommending it.

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I didn't make a statement one way or the other about what counted as performance nor whether I think this guide will help.

How do we know it does anything if the authors of the guides didn't bother to make any measurements nor offer any other evidence to ensure their advice was useful? I don't care if they suggest having a witch-doctor cast a magic spell on my computer to realign it's auras. I want to see evidence that the magic spell actually does does align auras—whatever that would mean—and that it somehow changed the way my computer worked.

Microsoft has thousands of very smart people who are paid to make sane default settings: you and I probably know a lot less about how the OS works than they do. If a few trivial changes to settings are such obvious improvements to how a computer performs, why didn't Microsoft's engineers, programmers, and designers choose them instead? Without good evidence that we're helping things, why shouldn't we assume we're making it worse?

Example. You're asserting this helps:



Assume that I just assert that this makes everything worse. What evidence do you have that would prove me wrong? What reason do you think that increasing warcraft's scheduling priority helps (but apparently not enough to go 'all in' with real-time)? Why would you diddle with sound settings which are almost certainly not competing for cycles with what most of us call warcrafts "main thread"? Why would fiddling with the priority of two processes out of the several hundred that Windows runs by default matter?

Where's your evidence that this greatly improved game performance? Before and after video? a Simple lua benchmark? /timetest flightpath? A DX event capture? Dtrace log of the processes? If this greatly improved your game performance it should be trivially easy to demonstrate it so why not do it?

They do know more then me about the OS but this is not something they care about, they don't worry about me getting optimal performance in random games, they worry about having a safe, fast, stable and good os for general usage.
Of course they could perfectly optimize it for gamers who's after performance but let's face it majority only care about graphics and colours in games or apps and stuff like that.
Then it's upto to people like me who is after performance at all costs to tweak and twist til i get what I want. Windows was not made for gamers, so games is not going to run optimally or as smooth as they can be.

[Lathais]

You're still not answering the question.

Maybe you've made everything worse but in your zeal to "improve" Windows you've convinced yourself that whatever change your seeing is actually an improvement. Alternatively, maybe you've done nothing at all but you've managed to convince yourself that a difference actually exists. It's also possible that this stuff actually does help in some important way, but how would you know unless you've measured the difference?

So once again: how do you know any of this does anything helpful?

I think this is the case with a lot of guides I have seen over the years. Aside from the basics of getting less things running at start-up so you have less going on in the background, the majority of these changes would have so little affect on performance(if any at all) it would not be noticeable, even all added together. However, when you spend a lot of time trying to get results you want to see results and therefore do.

The only way I would be convinced any of this stuff has any real effect would be if there was a before and after fraps(or something) video of something consistent(like say a flight path) displayed side by side and you could actually see some sort of difference. None of the guides of this type that I have seen do that though. They just say do this and you will see results. I have personally never seen any results nor have any of my friends.

Please, feel free to prove me wrong with a side by side before and after comparison. I would actually love to see it.

[Speedlance]

You're still not answering the question.

Maybe you've made everything worse but in your zeal to "improve" Windows you've convinced yourself that whatever change your seeing is actually an improvement. Alternatively, maybe you've done nothing at all but you've managed to convince yourself that a difference actually exists. It's also possible that this stuff actually does help in some important way, but how would you know unless you've measured the difference?

So once again: how do you know any of this does anything helpful?

I'm not here to argue with you, sorry, I know this is the mentality of this community but I just post a guide and it's up to each and everyone if they want to use this. You may continue to blast on with negativity but it's pointless, try it out or don't try it.

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I think this is the case with a lot of guides I have seen over the years. Aside from the basics of getting less things running at start-up so you have less going on in the background, the majority of these changes would have so little affect on performance(if any at all) it would not be noticeable, even all added together. However, when you spend a lot of time trying to get results you want to see results and therefore do.

The only way I would be convinced any of this stuff has any real effect would be if there was a before and after fraps(or something) video of something consistent(like say a flight path) displayed side by side and you could actually see some sort of difference. None of the guides of this type that I have seen do that though. They just say do this and you will see results. I have personally never seen any results nor have any of my friends.

Please, feel free to prove me wrong with a side by side before and after comparison. I would actually love to see it.

Try it out yourself and you will feel the difference, you can always turn everything back to default after.

[Lathais]

I'm not here to argue with you, sorry, I know this is the mentality of this community but I just post a guide and it's up to each and everyone if they want to use this. You may continue to blast on with negativity but it's pointless, try it out or don't try it.

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Try it out yourself and you will feel the difference, you can always turn everything back to default after.

Did you not read the part where I said

None of the guides of this type that I have seen do that though. They just say do this and you will see results. I have personally never seen any results nor have any of my friends.

I have. It makes no difference.

[Speedlance]

Did you not read the part where I said



I have. It makes no difference.

It did not say you tried my guide, it said you've tried guides of this type and that is not a correct comparison because 99% of all other guides are about increasing FPS, which this guide is not about.
Using CS:GO as an example again, since this guide was aimed towards FPS games, I already got 300+ FPS in 5vs5, but my game was not that smooth as you'd think, I had to do go through and remove hinders (this mean I went through each thing in this guide 1 by 1 and watched the difference each did to my game) While some changes where minor and barely noticable, they would in combination with others work wonders and some simple boosted my performance greatly.

[Lathais]

It did not say you tried my guide, it said you've tried guides of this type and that is not a correct comparison because 99% of all other guides are about increasing FPS, which this guide is not about.
Using CS:GO as an example again, since this guide was aimed towards FPS games, I already got 300+ FPS in 5vs5, but my game was not that smooth as you'd think, I had to do go through and remove hinders (this mean I went through each thing in this guide 1 by 1 and watched the difference each did to my game) While some changes where minor and barely noticable, they would in combination with others work wonders and some simple boosted my performance greatly.

It's the same steps I have seen in guides about increasing performance forever. Whether or not the goal was to increase FPS or not, the steps were the same and had no effect. I know from experience, some of these steps can actually cause problems. I am getting ready to buy SSDs for my PCs soon enough so will require windows re-installs anyway. Before I install them I will take before and after videos and try your guide(since you are a special snowflake somehow better then everyone else) and show you, it makes no difference. Then I'll format my drives an install Windows on the SSD to undo these potentially harmful procedures for non-existent gains.

[Speedlance]

It's the same steps I have seen in guides about increasing performance forever. Whether or not the goal was to increase FPS or not, the steps were the same and had no effect. I know from experience, some of these steps can actually cause problems. I am getting ready to buy SSDs for my PCs soon enough so will require windows re-installs anyway. Before I install them I will take before and after videos and try your guide(since you are a special snowflake somehow better then everyone else) and show you, it makes no difference. Then I'll format my drives an install Windows on the SSD to undo these potentially harmful procedures for non-existent gains.

calm down now my friend, no need to bring the mmo-c standard hostile negativity towards me, I didn't expect everyone to agree with me, I posted a guide and if people want a way to improve their pc they can now and if not that is also cool with me.