Ultra budget WoW graphics at 1920x1080?

[flexy]

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able to run around Dalaran without lagging out, ideally.
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WoW is game which should run on lower/mid-end system pretty well.

I myself have a pretty high-end PC (unlike wife who plays WoW on a medium range notebook)- i even have some dalaran lag if its really busy. So i am afraid i dont think you can EVER get rid of dalaran lag 100%.

 

[Russwinters]

I am currently using a Q6600@3GHZ and a 9800GTX+ OC'ed, and I am running WoW at 1920x1080 max settings with no AA, and I still get 12FPS in dalaran.

You will need more then $500 to run smooth in dalaran.


I will let you know if I have any improvement when my EVGA 460 1GB arrives today.

 

[Anubis]

I am currently using a Q6600@3GHZ and a 9800GTX+ OC'ed, and I am running WoW at 1920x1080 max settings with no AA, and I still get 12FPS in dalaran.

You will need more then $500 to run smooth in dalaran.


I will let you know if I have any improvement when my EVGA 460 1GB arrives today.

Id be very interested to see the numbers of improvement you get on that as well, hopefully itll be more then i think it will be

 

[Russwinters]

Because I get overall acceptable performance in WoW already (I just got the 24inch monitor, so i haven't raided with it yet)

I wouldn't mind if it was a mild increase, I bought the new card mostly just to make sure I had enough graphics power to run some of the other games releasing in the next year or so at 1920x1080.

I typically don't play games like Crysis, etc so I don't need as much power as some. The only games I consistently play besides WoW will be Heroes of newerth, league of legends, SC2, and Dragon age 2 whenever that releases. I'll be looking into Guild wars 2, and The old republic, but neither of those will be highly intensive it seems.



Anyways, I will give an update on the performance increase tomorrow, I should receive my card today and will install it when I get home.

 

[bryanW1995]

dragon age isn't that graphically demanding, I have the highest settings possible at 1680x1050 on a gtx 260 with good framerates. however, I noticed a big jump when oc'ing my i7 920 from stock to 3.6.

 

[maniac5999]

I play WoW on my 40" 1080p TV. and on my 12" Wind U230 netbook with a 1.6ghz Athlon x2 proc. and an ATi 3200 which is the same as the 4200/4290. On the netbook I can get 20-30fps in Dal on a hybrid of fair/good settings in 1366/768rez. It would look pretty bad trying to force a 4200 to run wow at 1080. My desktop has a Kuma 7750 (dual core Phenom 1) @ 3ghz and a 512mb 4870. On it I routinely get 60fps+ in Dal with everything at Ultra except shadows, which are one notch below ultra. (suprisingly this one change took me from 20 to 60+ FPS, try it if you play WoW at ultra, you'll be shocked at how much it will boost framerates)

Personally, I wouldn't reccomend anything less than a 4850 or 8800/9800 for WoW today. On the CPU side, I think that a good dual core is more than enough. WoW used to only run on 2 cores, but they changed that so that it CAN use more, however it doesn't handle them very well. Even with my dual, when I play I peg one core and have the other chugging around at about 66%. That Triple core Athlon 2 is still a great processor when it comes to bang for your buck tho.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Everyone has lag in Dalaran. I don't think anyone reasonably expect it to be smooth with the billions of textures and hundreds of characters that need to be drawn.

 

[Russwinters]

Alright, overall I got about a ~5-10FPS boost in all areas EXCEPT dalaran and Org.


I run the shadow slider at max, I messed around with it and found that one or two notches down gives you a 10-20FPS gain depending on where you are at.

Going any lower the one or two notches down gives you no more noticeable gain.


So with the shadow slider 1 notch down, I can get ~20-30FPS in dalaran. I believe this isn't the fault of the videocard.

 

[maniac5999]

Alright, overall I got about a ~5-10FPS boost in all areas EXCEPT dalaran and Org.


I run the shadow slider at max, I messed around with it and found that one or two notches down gives you a 10-20FPS gain depending on where you are at.

Going any lower the one or two notches down gives you no more noticeable gain.


So with the shadow slider 1 notch down, I can get ~20-30FPS in dalaran. I believe this isn't the fault of the videocard.

Well, what card and resolution are you running? what CPU? It's possible that you might already be CPU limited, or it's possible that I'm running out of video ram on my 512mb card.

 

[Russwinters]

Up a few post I mention it:

Q6600@3GHZ (I know i'm limited in WoW with this, may crank it up higher)

Messing with the affinity mask helped some, setting to 15 made a little difference (even though it is supposed to be uncapped now)

 

[darkewaffle]

I used to run WoW just fine on my inspiron e1500, which has a mid range intel C2D, 2GB of value ram, and a mobile radeon x1400 I think, at 1680 x 1050 with most settings at low - mid.

It's not a very difficult game to run.

Were it me, go with something like an athlon ii x3 445, which will run you about 85$. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...rana%20445

for the mobo, id say whatever brand you like with a 770 chipset. that'll run you about 80, tops. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...e=&srchInDesc=

4 GB of ram will be about another $100. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...CE&PageSize=50 Actually $100 is a bit much from the looks of it, some of those value kits are closer to 80-90.

400w corsair psu for about $32 after rebate. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...corsair%20400w

whatever disc drive you want for like $30 (again, overestimating).

case, i just searched a little and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119161 seems functional enough for $30 AR/Coupon/FS.

That takes you to about $360, which once again is an overestimate - use some combos or buy open box/second hand to knock a bit more off, and I'd say drop $30 on a Win7 license through the student program (I'm sure you know somebody) leaving you with $110 for a video card, which is probably just enough to find a used 5770 on the forum. Hell you can get a BNIB sapphire 5770 for $135 on TD currently (AR) which you can knock about another 20 off with BCB making it about $120 shipped I'd guess.

Edit: Forgot a hard drive, do you have a spare around or do you need one of those too? Not a huge change either way.

 

[Anubis]

Alright, overall I got about a ~5-10FPS boost in all areas EXCEPT dalaran and Org.


I run the shadow slider at max, I messed around with it and found that one or two notches down gives you a 10-20FPS gain depending on where you are at.

Going any lower the one or two notches down gives you no more noticeable gain.


So with the shadow slider 1 notch down, I can get ~20-30FPS in dalaran. I believe this isn't the fault of the videocard.

yea the seems about right, i was hoping you would see more of a boost
and yes they did fix it so it will nativily access all 4 cores if you have a quad core. it wont run on the HT cores on an I7 however

 

[Seero]

Up a few post I mention it:

Q6600@3GHZ (I know i'm limited in WoW with this, may crank it up higher)

Messing with the affinity mask helped some, setting to 15 made a little difference (even though it is supposed to be uncapped now)

Go to Nvidia Control and change the "maximum pre-render frame" from 3 to 1(or even 0) for wow. It is reversible, simply by changing it back to 3.

 

[Russwinters]

yea the seems about right, i was hoping you would see more of a boost
and yes they did fix it so it will nativily access all 4 cores if you have a quad core. it wont run on the HT cores on an I7 however

I found a thread on the wow support forums where people are still messing with their affinity settings and seeing benefits.

I could definitely see wow distributing the load across all 4 cores much better once I tweaked the affinity. Before it would just put like ~60-70% on the first two cores and maybe 10-15% on the other 2 , now it's ~45% on all 4.



I saw that pre-rendered frame setting, but wasn't sure what to think of it, typically I would think the prerendering frames would be better? Did you see a noticeable increase by setting it to a lower number like 1 or 0? I will give it a try tonight and let you know what happens.

 

[Anubis]

i didnt change anything, not even the affinity mask, on my I7 @ 4GHz it runs pretty equal across the 4 real cores, i logged into dal to see and its running 50,25,25,50 just doing laps around the place with random spikes on any random core depending on what it has to load, highest it spiked is around 80, standing here not moving its 25,17,12,20, FPS from 38 (Horde bank)-86 (back by entrance to VH area)