Strangely low FPS

[Memawmango]

The other day i reformatted my computer and re-installed WoW by itself on a 500gb HDD. My computer has a GeForce 9800GTX Plus, 3.0GHZ Pentium 4 Processor, 1.5gb of Ram, and 2 HDD's (One's 250gb, one's 500gb). With this current setup and clean computer after being formatted I was expecting a very high FPS because I had talked to other people who were running WoW on a worse setup, but with WoW on it's on HDD and getting ~100fps. I rarely get above 30fps, and in 25 mans i get a painful 5-12fps.

Can anyone help me figure out why my FPS is so low and what I can do to improve it?

Thank's in advance.

[Memawmango]

bump

[Meeki]

Maybe it's your settings in game?

[wlfbck]

newest drivers?...

[Memawmango]

@Meeki, even when i turn my settings down all the way I still only get ~12fps in 25 mans.

@Wlfbck, yes all my drivers are up to date.

@Chronalis, do you mean just having a combat log open in another tab at all? or do you mean a combat log showing?

[Oou]

Hey what multishading setting are you on? i find for some reason when on x8 its just horrible cant fly any where with out it being all choppy. But the second i bump it down to 4x its totally fine and i go back up to max fps.

[Selphious]

Dunno if this would be the problem, the GFX card may just not work in this case, but do you have an at least 450watt Power Source? If not, it's probably running your GFX card at minimal settings.

[Strijder]

i have the same graphic card as you, and i get sometimes ~25 fps for no reason. This card works very good with games like crysis but seems to have trouble with WoW sometimes.

Your processor cooler could be covered in dust? Keeping that clean could also improve performance.

[Meeki]

It could be possible that your Graphic Card is bottle necking...but that probably isn't the problem.

[Cilraaz]

My computer has a GeForce 9800GTX Plus, 3.0GHZ Pentium 4 Processor, 1.5gb of Ram, and 2 HDD's (One's 250gb, one's 500gb).

The CPU would be my guess. I was running a Pentium D 2.8GHz with a GeForce 8800 GTS 512 and was receiving similar framerates. I borrowed a friend's Core2Duo 2.33GHz and my framerates in raids jumped up to around 20fps (even in Wintergrasp).

[skrump]

Here is a few things that could cause it

You have less than 2gb of ram
You might be running Vista which is consuming not only most of your ram but most of your cpu as well (Vista really needs a dual core or better)
You did not run Disk defragmenter after installing windows/wow (yes i know its a big drive but installations never place things at the start of the drive)

Also since you have 2 hard drives you should disable the paging file on the main drive and give the secondary drive a unlimited amount.

Considering the age of your computer I am willing to bet that the hard drives are still using the Pata interface (Big ribbon cables) if you have both drives attached the the same cable this can slow down your computer I would suggest taking the drive that does not have the windows installation and moving it to the same ribbon cable as your Cd drive just be sure to set the jumpers correctly.

[Barkskin]

Try shutting off shadows completely and see how that affects your performance. That is usually the number one factor in destroying framerate.

[Merckx]

It could be possible that your Graphic Card is bottle necking...but that probably isn't the problem.

my fps is pretty awful and I have been looking for a fix for a while and often I see people saying that the CPU is bottle necking or the GPU is bottle necking and I just don't know what that means. I know what bottle necking in general means, but I don't really know how it applies to my computer and I don't know how to find out if that is actually what happening in my box and if so, how to fix it.

[Cilraaz]

my fps is pretty awful and I have been looking for a fix for a while and often I see people saying that the CPU is bottle necking or the GPU is bottle necking and I just don't know what that means. I know what bottle necking in general means, but I don't really know how it applies to my computer and I don't know how to find out if that is actually what happening in my box and if so, how to fix it.

Bottlenecking for computers means pretty much the same thing as it does anywhere else. For instance, take a 4-lane highway that merges down to 2 lanes. That will create a "bottleneck" and slow everything down.

Now if you have a top of the line motherboard, top of the line video card, top of the line RAM, and a crappy CPU, then the CPU is your bottleneck. In general, a computer will only run as well as its worst part, especially in a lot of MMOs where there is a lot of processing needed (for a fair number of single player games, the game's coding is skewed toward the GPU, allowing a computer with a strong GPU but fairly weak CPU to still perform well).

I used my computer setup as an example earlier in the thread. Pentium D 2.8GHz, 4GB DDR2 800 RAM, GeForce 8800 GTS 512. Fairly powerful video card, good RAM, and a crappy CPU. A friend lends me a Core2Duo 2.33GHz CPU and I've gotten nearly a 100% framerate gain (and that's an older 65nm chip). The Pentium D in my system was my bottleneck.