Decent System; FPS slows to 10-20 in 25 man raids

[antiscian]

Basic overview of system:

AMD 955 Black Edition overclocked moderately (Temps good)
EVGA GTS 450
Ripjaws 4GB 1333
WD Caviar 750GB
Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate

Obviously a budget box. The CPU is no i5 or i7 but this budget build should run WoW on decent settings. FPS is great (100-200+) in the world, 60-100 in 10 mans but in a 25 man LFR or raid, the FPS will slow to 10-20 FPS on Spine of Deathwing with heavy action. It tends to be heavy action - Like stacking on Zanozz or the Sleeper in Firesoul. When we are stacking and there is heavy action, the FPS drops significantly. Lowering various settings in WoW don't seem to help much. Lowering particle density or shadows does not improve the FPS noticeably. Most of my settings are set by the WoW slider at the middle "good" range and I've attempted to lower a few of them to see if it helps. Now, I don't expect to run WoW on ultra with this setup and I understand it's a budget box but I also do not think it should be slowing to such meager FPS in a 25man raid with lots of action going on.

At this point I am wondering what to do. Do I need to upgrade the GTS 450? I've read wide reports of solid FPS in 25 man raids with the AMD 955 BE.

Any ideas you have will be appreciated as I am trying to figure out what the next step is for improving performance in 25 man raids.

[Deleted]

Tryed wow and some 25man raiding on 965be, downclocked to 3.0 and undervolted, with amd 6770, had almost everything on ultra with shadows on lowest setting. Try overclocking GPU a bit if possible.

Altho havent raided much content on that AMD system, but add aoe-ing on normal Firelands Ragnaros got a bit sluggish on my current rig i5 760 @ 3.8ghz + gtx 460 and even friends i5 2500k @4.5ghz + 560ti couldnt it handle totally smoothly. Sudden drop from 60ish fps to 20ish, no mather what i do. If u don't wish to encounter any stuttering and/or lag in heavy action content make sure u kick Anti Aliasing and Antistropic Filtering to 1x. Also make sure you are using dx11, in my case (gtx 460) i got from 10%-20% during raid encounters.

Try installing 275.33 drivers.

Most helpful thing i found when i suddenly experienced FPS drops were usual stuff, cleaning of all addons/catche/wtf folders after new big patch. Also, bumping down Particle density + Shadows together prior to aoe heavy and stacking encounters should help (eg. pd down to good/fair, view distance to low, shadows on low). Also try killing vertical sync and triple buffering.

I remember there was a macro you could use to tune down color depth from 32bit to 24/16bit (not sure at this point).

Hope I didn't write things you already tried.
Got some experience with low fps and fps drops as i used to play wow for 5 years on hp nc8430 notebook (c2d 1.8, 2gb, x1600 mobile).

I wouldn't bother too much with buying new components, as biggest improvement you would receive if you would swap to intel platform which, imo, would be pointless investion.

And for the end, wow repair tool? Some files might have degraded (happened to me some time ago). I was running same instalation since wow was available in my country. Some texture files got corrupted during start of the wotlk, altho hdd was fine.

Best of luck!

[antiscian]

OK great suggestions thank you!

[Deleted]

If possible, I'd really recommend reinstalling. Seems like a lot of people got their WoW files mildly corrupted with 4.3, causing lag in certain, often ridiculously random circumstances. Happened to my GM and he now has no problems whatsoever after a clean install.