Re: whaich Hardware to speed up WOW

chocolatemalt <chocolatemalt@dim=dot=com.invalid> wrote:
> In article <20050725122537.297$UT@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Rene <invalid@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > maxnews01@xxxxxx wrote:
> > > decreasing the drawing distance is the most important thing to get
> > > better FPS.. i know that...But where u found those information to
> > > edit the config.wtf?
> > > i won't remove my VirScanner but that should be ok cause i have 1GB
> > > Ram...
> >
> > 1GB Ram is not excessive in this game. If you can, upgrade to two.
>
> This has already been asked by a couple of other posters, but... Can it
> be shown that going beyond 1GB helps WoW even a tiny bit? After a few
> hours playing, and with a few RAM-hog daemons and drivers loaded
> (McAfee, Creative, Roxio) on my Win2k, I've never seen the memory commit
> exceed 750 MB... leaving 250 MB of my 1 GB useless.

I play with 1GB Ram. I had 1GB since about 3years ago and WoW is the first
game in a loooong time that can't just drop back to windows immediately. It
uses lots of Ram and it does force a swap out of explorer etc.

A friend of mine plays on Macintosh. Macintosh performance is a bit behind
the windows performance and he increased his Ram to 2.5GB. Now he doesn't
have IF lag, he doesn't have any lag at all. I've seen it.

There's simply too much textures on all the possible items people are
wearing. This is why it lags and/or stops when you run into that other
faction's Raid group. The system is busy loading the textures into Ram. If
you haven't got enough, "older" textures are swapped out. This is what
happens in IF. Loading of all the peoples' item-textures of the stuff they
are wearing. Your HD light flashes continously while you lag. Just take a
look the next time you are stuck and know you'll be in the pit of Ironforge
again :)

If you however have enough RAM, then only the initial lag will occur and
that will be less severe since there is enough RAM so nothing needs to be
thrown out. Remember that the game has its data in compressed archives
where it fetches them. This process requires additional RAM _and_ CPU time.
So the worst case is, and this is most likely always happen when you are
stuck for > 10 seconds in load lag, that the game is loading textures from
disk, simultaneously swapping out (which decreases performance of reading
from disk) and simply waiting for data to arrive.

Thus the order I proposed: First RAM, so you don't lose the data that is
already loaded. Then disk IO in order to speed up initial loading of that
data and any data that needs to be reloaded, and then CPU and GPU which is
moderately anyway.

Note that intense graphic effects are also loaded only on use, so when a
fight starts, you could also get some lag effects if you haven't seen any
spells so far. These effects also have textures which are loaded when they
first appear. One effect is no problem, but several are again IO bound. If
you have the memory, they stay there. If not, then you'll lose them
somewhen. So if it lags due to heavy effects, that does not necessarily
mean that the graphic card cannot keep up. It might also be RAM and / or
disk subsystem. You'd need to watch your HDD led again, to be sure of that.

My next PC, which will probably be bought within the next two months will
have 2GB of Ram. Not only because of this game but also because it is
really cheap nowadays to do so. And WoW really profits from it.

Cheap test: Have full size background picture in windows. Start WoW, play
an hour. Exit WoW. If the background picture does not appear immediately
once the WoW frame disappears, then it was swapped out. If anything gets
swapped out, you would profit from more RAM.

I can start UT2K4 (loading time comparable to WoW), play two hours, exit it
and I am _instantly_ back at the desktop. No HD activity at all, all there.
That game would not profit from more RAM.

So yes, although I only have 1GB Ram, I do notice intense HD activity and
swapping and I could use more. I will have more, soon. If this is your only
game currently and probably in some time to come, as it is for me, then the
few coins for a 1GB RAM should be well invested (providing your mainboard
can handle it by having enough slots).

Then again I always build my systems myself and I know that not everybody
can just open the case and install RAM. Which means either to find someone
who knows how to install it or to pay someone to do it which costs extra.

> I *wish* the game were more memory aggressive, if it's available. I
> think it's a bit stupid of the coders to leave all the new zone texture
> loads, or even the items in my damn bags, till the last second... and
> let the performance of the game suddenly get dragged into the cesspool
> of disk I/O, the slowest part of any modern computer. I'd gladly buy
> another gig of RAM if I thought it would help.

There is actually quite some sophisticated caching involved. If you want to
experiment with that, just delete your WTF and WDB sub-folders (or better,
rename them so you don't lose all the data therein). Are you sure it is the
game that is not using more memory or the OS that is not giving it more?
All I can say is that I've seen it on a MAC with 2.5GB RAM and although
I've never seen it anywhere on a machine with 512MB or less, that was like
day and night compared to my 1GB system.

HTH.

CU

René

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