I'm currrently on a AMD Phenom II 940 oc'ed at 3.4GHz, 6GB of RAM, Vista 64 Ultimate, Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and 1920x1200 24" LCD.

In Dalaran I get under 20fps, and down to 11fps under heavy AE in 25man raids. Another issue I have and find very annoying is when I rotate the camera or my toon, I'd sometimes get pauses caused by severe fps drops. Pretty sure the bottleneck is caused by video card b/c when I turned the resolution down to 1680x1050 and lower Shadow Detail I get better fps.

I'm trying now to decide if NVIDIA or ATI is better for WoW.

The major differences I can see from the specs at http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3539&p=1
1. Texture Address/Filtering: GTX275 - 80, HD4890 - 40
2. ROPS: GTX275 - 28, HD4890 - 16
3. Core Clock: GTX275 - 633MHz, HD4890 - 850MHz
4. Memory Bus Width: GTX275 - 448bit, HD4890 - 256bit

Does anyone know which specs WoW stresses more and which card should yield better performances with WoW?

As much as I like ATI cards, for WoW the higher end NVidia's seem to be performing alot better out of the box then the same level of ATI card. I have a 4830 oc'd and tried alot of different things and I still cant get it to perform like my old pc's ATI 2600xt with shadows set to the same notch as the 4830.

Other games it gets great fps and its alot better then the 2600xt which is the way it should be in WoW too but its not.

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Q u o t e:
Hi Deatheria,

WoW can't use a HD 4870 or GTX 260 (original, not even the 216) completely so those two cards won't give you any type of noticeable boosts. The Phenom II 940 should score better numbers than that on 1920x1200 with shadows on the first notch, ground clutters on low but everything else up. Have you tried turning off AMD Cool and Quiet, and make sure the HD 4870 is running with the full PCI Express 16x lanes?
As for the turning, you may want to try the PTR 3.1.0 build. There's some improvement there on that and high population areas.

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Cool N Quiet is definitely off since I'm oc'ing the CPU. As for PCI-E 16x, I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure it's at max since I scored 15,000+ on 3DMark06 and that would not have been possible at less than 16x. I will double check on this when I get home.

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Q u o t e:


Not really. They tend to cap out a lot. :)
These are the types of things that we see
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2335395,00.asp

The shadow setting tends to kill a lot of things, even the best high-end stuff. Setting it to the first notch gives you the best results and maintain decent performance.

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I believe it already is on the first notch, by first notch you mean i notch from none correct? Also will this issue be fixed in 3.1 as the game looks much better with Shadow Details maxed and it's hard to imagine with my fairly high-end system it can't handle maxed details.

May go for a 1gb 4870 then. At 1920x1200 I need the extra memory.

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Q u o t e:


If you're only playing World of Warcraft, I recommend against that. The 1 GB helps with heavyweight DirectX 9 and 10 titles on high resolutions. 512 MB -> 1 GB won't net you much of a FPS in WoW. I didn't really see any difference moving from a 512 MB 4850 -> 1 GB 4870 at 1920x1080

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I do play other games, but nowhere near the frequency of WoW so I may hold off. I guess I'll at least wait til after the patch to decide on upgrading. The rotating camera lag issue is also much less rampant when I lower res to 1680x1050 in windowed mode, but things become too small to see.

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Q u o t e:


I do play other games, but nowhere near the frequency of WoW so I may hold off. I guess I'll at least wait til after the patch to decide on upgrading. The rotating camera lag issue is also much less rampant when I lower res to 1680x1050 in windowed mode, but things become too small to see.

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Just a notice, I love my GTX 260 Core 216 and I recommend it completely... So much that I bought an aftermarket cooler for it.

A GTX 275 is essentially a GTX 260 with 2 shader clusters enabled.

Yeah that's why the choice between the two is rather hard to make. I had some issues with NVIDIA cards glitching when watching videos. This happened on several different type of NVIDIA cards and on different drivers. I've since changed my motherboard and CPU tho so don't know if the problem will still occur. ATI cards frequently give me the "Your video driver has crashed and recovered" message but doesn't glitch up and crash the system.

I recently noticed that my computer was outputting terrible fps for what the card should be able to do. I run an ATI 3870 512 mb OC on Windows Home Premium 64 bit with a Phenom 9550, and was having pretty much the same fps issues you seem to be having. I spent this whole last week trying different tweaks, from stuff on the tech forums to switching out PSU's and other components. What I finally found to make the difference was the Fusion program offered by AMD. What it does is temporarily (as long as it is running) turn off NUMEROUS background services/programs that you shouldn't need while playing a video game. I don't have a link to it on hand, but the good news is, I went from doing 15 fps in Dalaran to a steady 45-50, and jumping as high as 105 fps in unpopulated areas like the landing pad. I have yet to try it out in a raid or heroic dungeon setting, but if I can get that in Dalaran, I should at least be able to do so in other settings (this was with all settings on max except shadows and full screen glow effect on 1900x1200 resolution). Good luck!

PS. Be sure to have vertical sync turned off and ATI catalyst ai disabled.

More to report on this, I was able to test out a Radeon HD 4890 1GB and it made a world of difference for me. I think if you try a 1GB card either 4870 or 4890 you will see the same gains minus Fusion. The rotate stutters are completely gone with the 4890 and I saw about 5 to 10fps throughout and about 5 or so in Dalaran, which still puts me at low 20s in fps but with the stutter gone it's not a big deal. It's a steady low 20s rather than dropping to 8 or so every several seconds when I'm moving.

I think for those playing at 1920x1200 1GB video memory is highly recommended.

How do you make sure your graphics card is using all 16 lanes?

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Q u o t e:
How do you make sure your graphics card is using all 16 lanes?

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gpuz
http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

I'm running a 9950BE oc'd to 2.9 and a buddie let me tinker with his 4870 and I have to say the difference between the 4870 and my 4850 was a matter of 5-10 fps.

I have that program GPU-Z but am a bit computer challenged (am learning tho smiles)

which setting shows whether your video card is x16 or where can you change that setting please?

I have an ati card now

ty

i upgraded to a 4890 from a 8800gt, i have a e8400 clocked to 3.75 in a cool case and a low latency 4g of ram....

i notice no upgrade from the 4890, in addition, even on lowest settings i dont pull 60 fps anymore...

what gives?

**edit --- Should have mentioned running 1680x1050

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Q u o t e:
I'm currrently on a AMD Phenom II 940 oc'ed at 3.4GHz, 6GB of RAM, Vista 64 Ultimate, Radeon HD 4870 512MB, and 1920x1200 24" LCD.

In Dalaran I get under 20fps, and down to 11fps under heavy AE in 25man raids. Another issue I have and find very annoying is when I rotate the camera or my toon, I'd sometimes get pauses caused by severe fps drops. Pretty sure the bottleneck is caused by video card b/c when I turned the resolution down to 1680x1050 and lower Shadow Detail I get better fps.

I'm trying now to decide if NVIDIA or ATI is better for WoW.

The major differences I can see from the specs at http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3539&p=1
1. Texture Address/Filtering: GTX275 - 80, HD4890 - 40
2. ROPS: GTX275 - 28, HD4890 - 16
3. Core Clock: GTX275 - 633MHz, HD4890 - 850MHz
4. Memory Bus Width: GTX275 - 448bit, HD4890 - 256bit

Does anyone know which specs WoW stresses more and which card should yield better performances with WoW?

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I have the exact same problem. I just spent a lot of money building a new machine and did not really think that a top of the line video card would cause wow to be this terrible.

I am running:
AMD Phenom II x4 940
8gig of ram (4x2gb)
windows vista 64
MSI Radeon 4890 HD
WD Black HDD 650gig 7,200rpm 32mb cache


I get around 22fps in dalran.

My windows vista experience scored a 5.9 on all categories. Other games such as COD4 + 5 run like a champ. I just don't get it.

I just got a MSI 4890 and it runs great for me, never go below 40 fps in dalaran on ultra settings except shadows at 1980x1080 res. Cpu is a phenom II triple core overclocked to 3.7Ghz stable and 4 gigs of ddr3 memory. One more thing is i am running it on the latest 7100 windows 7 build.