Low FPS issues in World of Warcraft

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I have been having very poor performance in WoW, in major citys such as Dalaran, and in 10 / 25 man raids I have frame rates as poor as 7 and 8. sometimes even as low as 2-3.
I seriously do not believe my hardware to be under powered. but here are some tech specs.

OS: WinXP Pro 2600 /w SP3 and updated Drivers.
Processor: Pentium 4 650 3.4Ghz. /w HT.
Memory: 2GB DDR2 800Mhz 2x 1GB sticks.
Motherboard: Asus P5WD2 Premium.
Video: XFX Nvidia 8800GT 512MB PCIe 16x.
Sound: 128b SoundBlaster Surround. pci. "old and cheap"
HDD's: 2x 80GB Segate SATA150 paired in Raid 0.
Antech TruePower 2.0 550 Watt PSU.

I've also attached a DxDiag.

I just had to gquit my guild because of inability to even sustain a cast sequence, as the fps dip so badly, then right after my ping spikes and I am dissconnected from the game.

I play other games, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2, etc. and do not have any graphical problems or real bad in-game latency. back in the days of vanilla wow, and BC, I never had any issues really with wow. hell I even played Vanilla great on a P3 800, with 512MB Ram, 128MB Video.
 

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A low frame rate seemingly out of nowhere is usually associated with updating video drivers without removing older ones completely. Allowing nvidia to uninstall itself is not enough, reboot and run the free version of "driver cleaner pro" on the video drivers only (the nvidia name all by itself). If you did this already its also possible to accidentally remove motherboard drivers with driver cleaner if it has nvidia chipsets. There is a mobo graphics driver and a card driver and both have to work together for everything to be right.
 
I've been running all my games with an 8800GTS for about 2 years now. I kept getting terrible frame rates in Dalaran and other heavily populated areas of WoW. The problem with these new expansions is the environments and models keep getting more complex and more difficult for older systems to run. Blizzard has stated that Dalaran is much more resource intensive than they originally intended. I decided to upgrade my processor and mobo last year but keep the same video card. To my surprise, the fps issues went away and it now stays at a steady 40-60 when im in town. Seems my old setup had some bottlenecking issues on the mobo/cpu side. Hope that helps.
 
Latest nvidia drivers could be the issue

Ive heard reports of the Nvidia 196.75 drivers causing some cards to have Cooling issues in certain games World of warcraft being one so that could be your current performance problem, Also blizzards shadows are terrible so i would try turning them off and checking your GPU temperature
 
A low frame rate seemingly out of nowhere is usually associated with updating video drivers without removing older ones completely. Allowing nvidia to uninstall itself is not enough, reboot and run the free version of "driver cleaner pro" on the video drivers only (the nvidia name all by itself). If you did this already its also possible to accidentally remove motherboard drivers with driver cleaner if it has nvidia chipsets. There is a mobo graphics driver and a card driver and both have to work together for everything to be right.

I have tried reinstalling the older driver that worked after i heard about the 196.75 driver issue but still having the same issues and I think this may help (or at least I am hoping it does). You mention that both the mobo graphics card and the card driver has to work together. How can I make sure I don't delete anything off of the mobo drivers? Is it just a setting or options that you select?
 
If you run driver cleaner pro after a normal graphics driver uninstall, it will show you a drop down screen of the stuff it will search and remove including many of the ati drivers that can be installed separately. For nvidia there are also several listings but the nvida name by itself is the one for graphics only. It will also show selections of nforce chipset drivers and stereo as well as WDM drivers all nvidia. If your motherboard does not have an nvidia chipset anywhere you can't go wrong. If your system has an nvidia chipset you could uninstall it and download the latest from the mobo manufacturer but its probably not necessary unless it became corrupted.
 
With that setup, you should be able to run WoW pretty well, but your low fps issues do puzzle me.

Heres some steps you should take to improve your framerate:
1. Update your video card drivers
2. Update your motherboard drivers
3. If not fixed by steps 1 and 2, reinstall WoW
4. If still not fixed, reinstall Windows
5. If still not fixed, then it may be time to upgrade

What to upgrade:
1. RAM(2 gb is getting to a low standard these days)
2. Sound Card(as you said, old and crappy)
3. OS. Go for Windows 7, if you have at least 4 gb RAM and a decent CPU(Dual or Quad Core)
4. Video Card. That video card should be fine for now, but it may be that its bugged and thats whats causing your framerate issues I.E, the way things are rendered in WoW are not the same as L4D2 and MW2
 
I have an ASUS M2A-VM motherboard and tried dling the driver from the ASUS website but it is giving me 67 files to choose from. Which one is the file that I want to dl?
 
I have an ASUS M2A-VM motherboard and tried dling the driver from the ASUS website but it is giving me 67 files to choose from. Which one is the file that I want to dl?


If you have the Asus m2A-VM that it's most likely a GHUT8G654-AM transfer rate at 600MHz / sec with a BUS speed at 900 RPU_k you need to core the clock out of the chip set and see if your clocked for the GHUT8G654-AM or the AHYY768FKL-AM because there clocks differ by about 80 MHz / sec and bus is incompatible with the SDRAMDDR3

hope this helped
 
If you have the Asus m2A-VM that it's most likely a GHUT8G654-AM transfer rate at 600MHz / sec with a BUS speed at 900 RPU_k you need to core the clock out of the chip set and see if your clocked for the GHUT8G654-AM or the AHYY768FKL-AM because there clocks differ by about 80 MHz / sec and bus is incompatible with the SDRAMDDR3

hope this helped

how do I core the clock out of my chip set and whats the SDRAMDDR3 that my mobo might not be compatible with?
 
how do I core the clock out of my chip set and whats the SDRAMDDR3 that my mobo might not be compatible with?


SDRAMDDR3 is your memory, and the one you described is a 240 pin; which differs from your motherboard compatibility greatly.
 
When you update your motherboards chipset drivers you'll most likely need the Realtek Gb LAN driver and diagnostic update as well if you don't already have them.
Which version board do you have M2A-VM or M2A-VM HDMI ?
If the first one then from this download link page you will most likely need:
Chipset > AMD Chipset Driver Program for WinXP (+ 64bit) WHQL (180.76Mb, release date 2008/01/18)
Audio > Version V51005804_V6015904 (72.6Mb, release date 2009/10/10)
LAN > Realtek RTL8111B Version 5.658.814.2006 (4.9Mb, release date 2007/03/22 -fairly old so you already have this version installed)
From the utilities tab select the late build for each utility -there are multiple builds for some utilies. Some utilities are also optional software which you may, or may not use.
SDRAMDDR3 is your memory, and the one you described is a 240 pin; which differs from your motherboard compatibility greatly.
The OP's motherboard supports DDR2 RAM only.
 
I have tried reinstalling the older driver that worked after i heard about the 196.75 driver issue but still having the same issues and I think this may help (or at least I am hoping it does). You mention that both the mobo graphics card and the card driver has to work together. How can I make sure I don't delete anything off of the mobo drivers? Is it just a setting or options that you select?

I'm sorry I haven't been back for a while,

When you start Driver Cleaner Pro it will list in its drop down several nvida drivers that you can add to the right pane to do a multi remove, but if you only want the Graphics driver choose the name "nvida" all by itself and your mobo drivers will will be left alone. For some odd reason they do not add the word graphics to the nvida but the chipset mobo drivers are listed as such.

ATI is a little harder since its graphics drivers are all split up with the actual driver the CCC and the WMA drivers listed separate and its a little harder to choose what to remove. But it can't hurt to remove it all and reinstall your mobo drivers with new ones from the manufacturers site as well as your graphics card.

Often new mobo drivers fix issues the board has as well as new a new bios. I know they warn you about updating the bios but its a piece of cake as long as you don't have a storm that can shut off the power going on outside and you take the right bios for your board. Bios failures are caused by power off before it can finish, and putting the wrong bios on your machine can prevent you from easily putting the right one on afterwords.
 
Yup, my old 8800 GTX & Core2Quad Q6600 @ 3Ghz would occassionally drop fps below 10 in Dalaran with max details and full shadows. The shadows really hit it hard, disabling or setting them to the lowest level helped a lot. Didn't really notice frame rates that low in 25 man raid environments, but I do think your hardware is a bit dated now. As others have pointed out an old P4 processor is pretty slow in todays terms. They moved the focus away from trying to boost processor frequencies to other methods of improving performance. So even though your 3.4Ghz seems good compared to lower frequency dual/quad/hexa core processors it isn't.

Also how are you connected to your internet connection? I had some awful problems when using wireless connection, particularly USB N adaptor. The game would frequently pause and lockup. Sometimes accompanied by a disconnect.
 
You need a better processor, you can still run the game maxed out with your 8800 but WoW is mainly processor heavy for performance, I would suggest setting the processing priority for WoW to real time so it gets full usage out of your CPU.
 
With that setup, you should be able to run WoW pretty well, but your low fps issues do puzzle me.

Well his resolution would depict how good his fps should be with that card. Anything larger than a 17" monitor I can see low fps occuring in high populated areas.
 
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