what % of my CPU capability should be taken up by WoW?

[nosoup4crr]

I feel like it used to only use between 33%-35%. For some reason, it's now hovering around 50%, and I'm not sure if it's normal. I only checked because my screen has frozen twice now in the past few days.

anyone help out?

[Evilmaniac]

It'll be easier to help you out if you tell us a little more about your computer. Processor speed, RAM, Graphics card, where are you freezeing up at, when are you checking your performance, what patch did you get 33-35% as they have added more memory eating things to the game since previous times. Oh and also addons. Those can take up anywhere from very little to a lot depending on what you have enabled to run at once.

[Sidonis]

Also knowing your video settings, especially resolution, would help as well. Your video card can only handle so much, with some things then being parceled over to your CPU. For example, having a resolution larger than your video card is intended for will put additional additional strain on your CPU as well. I used to lag horribly in Wintergrasp when the fight moved into the main keep area, but after lowering my resolution down a notch I only lag there now if there's so many people that it causes the server to lag -everyone-.

[vitalic]

Your config file is most likely set to use only half of your computing cores. Wow.exe will only make use of two cores. I'm going to guess that you're running on a quad core system? This means that at 50%, wow.exe is actually topping out and has nowhere else to go. Obviously this is an error and not due to any intended extra demand for computing power.

This is a common problem and the cause is not easy to track down. Making more cores available via altering the "setprocessaffinity" variable does not solve the problem. One thing that I have personally seen work is to set the wow.exe process to a high priority task. ctl-alt-del > task manager > processes tab > right click wow.exe > set priority > high. There is a good explanation for why this avoids the problem... but it's been awhile and forget.

Try this and see if it solves the problem. If it doesn't, take your problem to the tech support forums at worldofwarcraft.com, but be sure to look through the other threads along those lines. This happens a lot.

[Ulrac]

The percentage displayed in task manager isn't exactly a worthy figure to make a judgement of. It is quite simple to "max out" a single core processor with just an microscopic program with an infinite loop which I'm sure even a non programmer can understand is infinately smaller in complexity than World of Warcraft.

[nosoup4crr]

It's an Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+ with 4 GB ram and it's using an NVidia Geforce 9400 GT. I replaced the PSU a while back...i'm fairly certain it's not causing the problem.

3.3 caused some latency and stuttering issues. Then, coincidentally or not, I've gotten these 2 freezes over the past 5 days. The effects are set relatively low. They shouldn't be a problem.

I'll try setting the priority to high to see if it can head off a future freeze. The computer doesn't freeze...just the screen. Music that I'm playing in the background will keep going, so it seems like it might be a graphics card problem.

[chaud]

This is a common problem and the cause is not easy to track down. Making more cores available via altering the "setprocessaffinity" variable does not solve the problem. One thing that I have personally seen work is to set the wow.exe process to a high priority task. ctl-alt-del > task manager > processes tab > right click wow.exe > set priority > high. There is a good explanation for why this avoids the problem... but it's been awhile and forget.

As far as I know, this is bad advice, do not follow it.

[nwo]

As far as I know, this is bad advice, do not follow it.

I don't think that even works... I think I tried it once and failed miserably either because it screwed everything up, or it did nothing to change (improve) my performance, or it just didn't let me... Don't remember which one it was but yeah... That's definitely not going to solve your problem.

[Deleted]

As far as I know, this is bad advice, do not follow it.

I do the same, but mainly because I do other stuff in the background, and I don't want FPS loss. for me it works fine

[Cilraaz]

As far as I know, this is bad advice, do not follow it.

In general, I agree with this. Randomly increasing process priority provides little if any performance gain and, if done incorrectly, can cause system instability (ie, the system wants WoW to have priority over important system processes, or even the kernel).