World Of Warcraft on AA1 Vista and Framerates.

Well as the topic says i would like to make this a post , where everyone posts his tweaks on how to make the WoW experience on a AA1 vista setup better.

Starting this topic id like to say that i m an owner of a AA1 150 (1 GB ram, 160 gb HDD). I setup Vista on AA1 since i found out that atleast for the VGA the driver was much more up to date . Also the mic was acting on its own will while on XP.

Till now all my tries on playing WoW ended up in 12 FPs maximum , about 8 fps all the time. (All setting to lowest). Even when i installed the new vista drivers and i have to say that even Aero was available for me on those drivers (which i immidiatelly turned off ) , even then i kept having the same framerates.

I read around and i see spreadsheet with games on AA1 and i see that they give about 30 fps in 800x600 Medium Graphics . What am i doing so wrong ?

Plz help us clueless nabs to have an enjoyable play of WoW on AA1.

P.S. last time i checked the Vista Hardware Rating changed from Game Graphics: 1 to Game Graphics: 2.4 with the new drivers, but on the game the Fps are still 8 :cry:

 

Running win xp sp3, I get the same results as you. Was hoping for a steady 20FPS but I didn't truly believe it would happen. Ah well it's still nice being able to mine/check the AH on my A1. If anyone has tips for breaking 15 fps I'd love to hear'em

 

I would say don't use Vista, but that doesn't seem to be the problem.

Before when I had WoW it ran fine on a custom, low populous server with mostly low, but some medium settings, my only thoughts for what you could do is perhaps upgrade to 1.5 memory and try to play on a lower populous server, because the high player / AI count is what slowed down my rates on the custom one.

Also, can't play on custom servers anymore, blizzard recently started taking legal action.

 

There's a lot of talk about lower FPS with WoW running on Vista. If you're serious about playing it on the AA1, try XP.

From the top of my mind, my AA1 on 800x600 (which looks horribly on widescreen) with all settings on low, gets about 20fps on WoW, under XP.

I'd love to hear some tips on how to improve this, of course

 

I'm managing 12FPS on Windows 7 at the lowest settings @ 1024x600 resolution. Perfectly playable. A lot better than I expected.

 

Under XP, whilst I'm out and about (and I'm in the old world, not any of the expansions yet) I get closer to anywhere between 15 and 20fps. This drops in Cities when there are a lot of folks about, but worse case, it tends to hover aroun 9/10fps.

What I did was go into the Control Panel, Administrative Tools and went through the Services. There's a quite a few things I don't need running which I shut down - which in turns frees up some memory and CPU time. Watch though - this can lead to all kinds of weirdness if you disable the wrong services

Other things I've done to help it a bit is grab the latest GMA950 drivers from Intel's website. Then in the 3D settings set the memory footprint to high - and disable anything that might have a hit on the framerate - like triple buffering or anisotropic filtering.

As always, it's best to make sure nothing else is running whilst playing - so close any browsers/email etc - anything that can soak up CPU time or memory.

In-game I've kept the resolution at 1024x600 - as I don't think you get that big a boost from dropping to 800x600. I do set everything to low detail though. The other thing I do is go into the sound options and drop the sound quality to low, that can garner a couple of extra fps. Changing the sound to use hardware doesn't seem to make a difference either way incidentally.

I tried setting the game to use OpenGL to see if that improved the framerate - you can cross this off your list. This resulted in a 2fps framerate!

Though weirdly on OSX the games performance is pretty much the same as it in in Windows, except it suffers far worse in cities, dropping to 5 fps when there are lots of folk about. Otherwise it's not too bad - much better than the chuggy login screen would have you believe

I've briefly tried WOW under Windows 7 - but with the stock GMA950 driver it includes - there is chugs like hell. I would expect switching to the latest Vista driver from Intel would make a big difference - and you'll likely have the same tweakable settings as you do under XP that way.

If anyone figures out any over performance gains - I'm willing to hear them though!

Sol

 

Heads-up...

Apparently there is a guy over on the MSI Wind forums who is about to release some (commercial) Win32 software that reclocks the GMA950 back up above it's current 133Mhz underclock. It's due for release on the 1st February as either a 7 day evaluation version, or a paid for full version.

Be interesting to see what that can do for Warcrafts framerate. According to him on a MSI Wind popping the GMA clock back to 400MHz doubles the 3D mark results for a given test...

Thread is here - though you'll need to scroll down as you can't quote specific posts from their forum...

http://forums.msiwind.net/internal-hard ... 82-40.html

Sol

 

Nice find S0L!