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  1. #1

    WoD low FPS with 2x680 SLI

    Hi guys,

    Can anyone pretty please shed some light or give advice why i get such horrific frame rates with a fairly powerful setup?

    CPU: i7 3930k non OC
    SSD: Plextor M3P 256GB
    GPU: 2x EVGA 680 GTX Classified in SLI

    This setup should crush WoW! I get great fps in games like Metro Last Light, Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite (minimum of 60 fps).
    Yet in WoW, i get measly 30-40ish frames in a heavy zone like Stormshield. I hear people get over 100 fps easy on a single 780. 2x 680 classified cards should be equivalent.

    I launch the game via Nvidia GeForce Experience with setting optimized as follows:

    Full Screen
    Anti-aliasing: Custom
    Depth Effect: High
    Environment Detail: Ultra
    Graphics API: DirectX 11
    Ground Clutter: Ultra
    Lighting Quality: High
    Liquid Detail: Ultra
    MSAA: Color 8x / Depth 8x
    Multisample Alpha Test: Enabled
    Particle Density: High
    PPAA: None
    Projected Textures: Enabled
    Render Scale: 200%
    Resample Quality: Bicubic
    Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    Shadow Quality: Ultra
    Show new Character Modes: Enabled
    SSAO: Ultra (NVIDIA HBAO+)
    Sunshafts: High
    Texture Filtering: 16x Antisotropic
    Texture Resolution: High
    View Distance: Ultra

    I have to drop to "Good" performance in order to gain some 5 frames or so.
    Any ideas?
    Many thanks!
    Last edited by moonstrocity; 2015-08-28 at 02:49 AM.

  2. #2
    Turn your shadows down to high or even low. Shadows will wreck your fps.

    Also I believe WoW doesn't work well with SLI. Some one could probably confirm this one way or the other.

    Launch WoW from the battle.net launcher. I have a single 860m and get 60fps solid on everything except large pulls like kazzak. My setting are almost identical to your except shadows.

  3. #3
    running 2 video cards doesnt mean you will get double the performance, usually only equates to about a 20-25% performance boost.

  4. #4
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by moonstrocity View Post
    Hi guys,

    Can anyone pretty please shed some light or give advice why i get such horrific frame rates with a fairly powerful setup?

    CPU: i7 3930k non OC
    SSD: Plextor M3P 256GB
    GPU: 2x EVGA 680 GTX Classified in SLI

    This setup should crush WoW! I get great fps in games like Metro Last Light, Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite (minimum of 60 fps).
    Yet in WoW, i get measly 30-40ish frames in a heavy zone like Stormshield. I hear people get over 100 fps easy on a single 780. 2x 680 classified cards should be equivalent.

    I launch the game via Nvidia GeForce Experience with setting optimized as follows:

    Full Screen
    Anti-aliasing: Custom
    Depth Effect: High
    Environment Detail: Ultra
    Graphics API: DirectX 11
    Ground Clutter: Ultra
    Lighting Quality: High
    Liquid Detail: Ultra
    MSAA: Color 8x / Depth 8x
    Multisample Alpha Test: Enabled
    Particle Density: High
    PPAA: None
    Projected Textures: Enabled
    Render Scale: 200%
    Resample Quality: Bicubic
    Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    Shadow Quality: Ultra
    Show new Character Modes: Enabled
    SSAO: Ultra (NVIDIA HBAO+)
    Sunshafts: High
    Texture Filtering: 16x Antisotropic
    Texture Resolution: High
    View Distance: Ultra

    I have to drop to "Good" performance in order to gain some 5 frames or so.
    Any ideas?
    Many thanks!
    You have rendering set to 200%. This means you're rendering at 4k and then down-sampling to 1080p. This is a method of anti aliasing know as super-sampling, it produces the best results but is fairly expensive. On top of this you have 8x MSAA which is another decent form of anti aliasing and is moderately expensive. And then on top of that you have multi-sampling on alpha textures (basically super-sampling for textures with transparent bits).

    Pick either MSAA + alpha test or 200% render scale. Having both will add virtually nothing to the visual quality but will cripple your fps.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Lightwysh View Post
    Turn your shadows down to high or even low. Shadows will wreck your fps.

    Also I believe WoW doesn't work well with SLI. Some one could probably confirm this one way or the other.

    Launch WoW from the battle.net launcher. I have a single 860m and get 60fps solid on everything except large pulls like kazzak. My setting are almost identical to your except shadows.
    Thank you! I did get a few fps with Shadow on Low AND the game itself is now noticeably smoother. I am on a 60Hz monitor so i guess that's good enough. I see videos of people posting silky smooth playback and i suppose it has something to do with 120Hz monitors? but thats off-topic, one step at a time haha.

    Quote Originally Posted by talwynn View Post
    running 2 video cards doesnt mean you will get double the performance, usually only equates to about a 20-25% performance boost.
    Yah I definitely agree, though I saw a significant boost when i turned SLI on with the same settings.

    Quote Originally Posted by OneWay View Post
    Same thing happens to me. I think there is a bug with WoW that when you play on fullscreen (and your Max FPS in Background is enabled) it will sometimes lock it down to 30fps (if that is what FPS is set to). Usually what fixes it is alt-tab and alt-tab back to the game.

    You can also play in windowed-fullscreen. There usually such thing doesn't happen.

    EDIT: You can also try just unticking Max FPS in Background thingy and move render scale to 100%
    I am hovering around 30-40 fps so I am definitely not locked to 30. In my garrison I get 50-60. I did uncheck the "Max Backgroud FPS" with no change so far, but perhaps it'll reveal itself later in a game? Thanks for the tip!

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Fibbles View Post
    You have rendering set to 200%. This means you're rendering at 4k and then down-sampling to 1080p. This is a method of anti aliasing know as super-sampling, it produces the best results but is fairly expensive. On top of this you have 8x MSAA which is another decent form of anti aliasing and is moderately expensive. And then on top of that you have multi-sampling on alpha textures (basically super-sampling for textures with transparent bits).

    Pick either MSAA + alpha test or 200% render scale. Having both will add virtually nothing to the visual quality but will cripple your fps.
    Oh, thanks a lot!
    So if I go with MSAA + alpha test, should the render scale be set to 0% ?

  6. #6
    200% render scale might be the culprit, using that on my 980ti totally wrecks my fps in any area with people in it, set it to 100% and you should see some good improvements

  7. #7
    I'm running a 4.5ghz 4670k with two GTX680 2gb cards in SLI and a 2560x1440 monitor and I see pretty similar numbers in heavily populated areas, try backing off some of the scaling/AA stuff like the previous posters said.

    In other areas I don't have much trouble with the frames bumping up against my 96hz refresh rate.

    I am playing windowed fullscreen and I usually have VLC and/or Twitch, Youtube and a host of other tabs open in chrome sucking up a bunch of resources.

  8. #8
    Void Lord Aeluron Lightsong's Avatar
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    I usually leave my shadows on low. Go higher and it's very hard on it.
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  9. #9
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by moonstrocity View Post
    Oh, thanks a lot!
    So if I go with MSAA + alpha test, should the render scale be set to 0% ?

    MSAA + Alpha is the best compromise between visual quality and performance IMO, especially considering your system spec which is very good. MSAA will anti alias the geometry in a cheaper manner than super-sampling but won't do the transparent textures. Alpha test will do super sampling on the transparent textures and only those textures.

    WoW comes with a bunch of anit-aliasing options, you're really only supposed to pick one, not all of them

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Entrophius View Post
    200% render scale might be the culprit, using that on my 980ti totally wrecks my fps in any area with people in it, set it to 100% and you should see some good improvements
    Thanks,
    Ok, seems like if I choose either of the two as suggested by Fibbles, i gain 1-2 frames. It is still an improvement however small.

    Quote Originally Posted by smokerings View Post
    I'm running a 4.5ghz 4670k with two GTX680 2gb cards in SLI and a 2560x1440 monitor and I see pretty similar numbers in heavily populated areas, try backing off some of the scaling/AA stuff like the previous posters said.

    In other areas I don't have much trouble with the frames bumping up against my 96hz refresh rate.

    I am playing windowed fullscreen and I usually have VLC and/or Twitch, Youtube and a host of other tabs open in chrome sucking up a bunch of resources.
    Strangely enough, Windowed Mode destroys my performance even further (~20 fps)

  11. #11
    Render scale at 100% should fix everything in my experience. Anti aliasing at CMAA for the best blend of performance and visual. I run everything at ultra with CMAA and very rarely go under 60, even in raiding situations with a 770 2gb

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by Aeluron Lightsong View Post
    I usually leave my shadows on low. Go higher and it's very hard on it.
    Definitely, set it to low, it makes my camera pan way smoother.

    Quote Originally Posted by Fibbles View Post
    MSAA + Alpha is the best compromise between visual quality and performance IMO, especially considering your system spec which is very good. MSAA will anti alias the geometry in a cheaper manner than super-sampling but won't do the transparent textures. Alpha test will do super sampling on the transparent textures and only those textures.

    WoW comes with a bunch of anit-aliasing options, you're really only supposed to pick one, not all of them
    Thanks, I am playing with different settings for MSAA. Going lower with that produces around 1 fps gain, which is not bad
    I tried lowering Texture Quality and Texture Filtering but that does not appear to provide much of an improvement at all

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Aezral View Post
    Render scale at 100% should fix everything in my experience. Anti aliasing at CMAA for the best blend of performance and visual. I run everything at ultra with CMAA and very rarely go under 60, even in raiding situations with a 770 2gb
    Thanks for the suggestion. Just tried setting to CMAA. The fps remains the same: hovering around 36-41 fps but it noticeably jerkier when panning camera than with MSAA: Color 8x / Depth 16x + Alpha.

    darn, it sure would be nice to get the 60fps you're getting

  13. #13
    The Lightbringer Artorius's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by talwynn View Post
    running 2 video cards doesnt mean you will get double the performance, usually only equates to about a 20-25% performance boost.
    False, SLI is worse but it should give you at least 50% more on optimized games. WoW isn't an optimized game.
    Quote Originally Posted by Lightwysh View Post
    Turn your shadows down to high or even low. Shadows will wreck your fps.
    Also I believe WoW doesn't work well with SLI. Some one could probably confirm this one way or the other.
    Yep, he might get better FPS with SLI turned off.
    Quote Originally Posted by moonstrocity View Post
    Thank you! I did get a few fps with Shadow on Low AND the game itself is now noticeably smoother. I am on a 60Hz monitor so i guess that's good enough. I see videos of people posting silky smooth playback and i suppose it has something to do with 120Hz monitors? but thats off-topic, one step at a time haha.
    Well, your 60hz monitor can't display more than 60fps. If you're seeing it super smooth at 60hz, how can it be caused by someone's else monitor? It might be a good mouse making the camera shift smoothly, or frame interpolation at the rendering. Remember that most videos were 24p until some time, seeing them now at 60 feels different.

  14. #14
    Try disabling SLI for WoW in the Nvidia control panel.

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by Artorius View Post
    False, SLI is worse but it should give you at least 50% more on optimized games. WoW isn't an optimized game.

    Yep, he might get better FPS with SLI turned off.

    Well, your 60hz monitor can't display more than 60fps. If you're seeing it super smooth at 60hz, how can it be caused by someone's else monitor? It might be a good mouse making the camera shift smoothly, or frame interpolation at the rendering. Remember that most videos were 24p until some time, seeing them now at 60 feels different.
    Would 120hz monitor make a "silkier" experience?

    Quote Originally Posted by Takure View Post
    Try disabling SLI for WoW in the Nvidia control panel.
    Well, ill be damn, disabled SLI and gained 2-3 fps. So hovering around 44. Thanks guys! I am not sure why I saw a noticeable difference before, i think it has something to do with me using both Rendering Scale at 200% and MSAA + Alpha Test, which definitely performs better with 2 GPUs.
    I also dropped Liquid Detail to Fair and that gained me a few more fps when water was around.
    Still no 60 but ill take that.
    Ill keep dropping things down till I possibly reach 60. I see streamers and their glorious 60fps and that makes me jelly.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Guys, I just wanted to express my eternal gratitude for all the help i'm getting here. it is really appreciated!

  16. #16
    Overclock your cpu.

    WoW is a cpu bound game. It likes faster cores.
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  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by moonstrocity View Post
    Would 120hz monitor make a "silkier" experience?
    Not unless your pushing >60fps. Big things to dial back in setting to get 60, turn shadows to low, sunshafts to low, water to fair, and your rendering down to whatever. You could also dial back ground clutter. I was able to get 100+fps in Org on an i7-920 and a 550ti with most things at high but the huge things were shadows, sunshafts and water. I never paid much attention to rendering.

    Also never ever trust Nvidia to set your game settings. I have never found a game where it helped at all and in every attempt it has made performance worse. Use the in-game bulk presets(like the WoW Low>Med>High>Ultra), turn it up as high as it will go until you start seeing issues, then start dialing back things individually until you get the smoothness you want.

  18. #18
    Deleted
    It has to do with either the settings as others mentioned and your cpu. I cant tell you how much it is on busy server on a city since mine isn't one anymore. The only things i havent got to max is shadows and sunshafts. My fps is pretty locked at 60fps during raids, tested all previous tier by recording them with shadowplay with unlocked fps in mythic. I would get 2-3 times in a fight a drop to 57-58fps for a sec or less and thats it. But remember in that case your cpu is keeping you back not the gpu. You have to overclock that cpu a fair bit to 4.2-4.5Ghz.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by TaintedOne View Post
    Overclock your cpu.

    WoW is a cpu bound game. It likes faster cores.
    Mine is currently at stock 3.2Ghz. going over to 4+ should help things? My mainboard is an Asus P9X79. SO many (BIOS) options to read on in order to overclock this puppy, its overwhelming. Anything for performance gain though! I did try overclocking this CPU before on this Asus mainboard but at the time I had very hard time stabilizing it. Now that a few years have past along with numerous BIOS updates, I will try again. Wasn't aware WoW was so heavy on CPU.


    Quote Originally Posted by Lightwysh View Post
    Not unless your pushing >60fps. Big things to dial back in setting to get 60, turn shadows to low, sunshafts to low, water to fair, and your rendering down to whatever. You could also dial back ground clutter. I was able to get 100+fps in Org on an i7-920 and a 550ti with most things at high but the huge things were shadows, sunshafts and water. I never paid much attention to rendering.

    Also never ever trust Nvidia to set your game settings. I have never found a game where it helped at all and in every attempt it has made performance worse. Use the in-game bulk presets(like the WoW Low>Med>High>Ultra), turn it up as high as it will go until you start seeing issues, then start dialing back things individually until you get the smoothness you want.
    Pardon my ignorance, I am just not experienced in this subject but shouldn't 120Hz trick my eye into making it smoother, just like the soap opera effect you see on 120Hz TVs.
    I switched Shadows to Low, Liquid to Fair and that made a very noticeable improvement. Can't say changing Sunshafts did anything but maybe its because I was looking for fps gain while being stationary (no camera panning), I shall experiment further.
    About trusting nvidia, you are spot on. I am not sure why I decided to trust it considering the fact I never had much success with it in other earlier mentioned games ( I always end up changing things manually in game), thanks for that.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kostattoo View Post
    It has to do with either the settings as others mentioned and your cpu. I cant tell you how much it is on busy server on a city since mine isn't one anymore. The only things i havent got to max is shadows and sunshafts. My fps is pretty locked at 60fps during raids, tested all previous tier by recording them with shadowplay with unlocked fps in mythic. I would get 2-3 times in a fight a drop to 57-58fps for a sec or less and thats it. But remember in that case your cpu is keeping you back not the gpu. You have to overclock that cpu a fair bit to 4.2-4.5Ghz.
    Thank you, seems like CPU overclock is something I must do. It will be challenging considering we are experiencing higher than normal temperatures now and I have no AC at home but what the heck heh.

    - - - Updated - - -

    OK, an update:

    I played in Ashran yesterday (Alliance Hydra group yay) and in a few BGs and I was getting mostly 60fps !!!!. In a very non-sexual way, I love you guys. It would drop to 55fps occasionally in Stormshiled with a lot of player traffic but heck, that's not 30! Also, makes my Arena experience sooo much more enjoyable! Of course, I am not stopping here, I will try a few tweaks later today and post updates.

    So far, these are my settings:
    (I am marking changes that helped me in red)

    Full Screen
    SLI: OFF (can't beat that, less power consumption = less heat = win)
    Anti-aliasing: Custom
    Depth Effect: High
    Environment Detail: Ultra
    Graphics API: DirectX 11
    Ground Clutter: Ultra
    Lighting Quality: High
    Liquid Detail: Fair
    MSAA: Color 8x / Depth 16x
    Multisample Alpha Test: Enabled
    Particle Density: High
    PPAA: None
    Projected Textures: Enabled
    Render Scale: 100%
    Resample Quality: Bicubic
    Resolution: 1920 x 1080
    Shadow Quality: Low
    Show new Character Modes: Enabled
    SSAO: Ultra (NVIDIA HBAO+)
    Sunshafts: High
    Texture Filtering: 16x Antisotropic
    Texture Resolution: High
    View Distance: Ultra
    Last edited by moonstrocity; 2015-08-28 at 07:36 PM.

  20. #20
    Scarab Lord Master Guns's Avatar
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    Am I the only person noticing the less than stellar CPU? If he upgraded and OCD I guarantee he'd be sitting pretty at 80+.

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