Tweaking for Warcraft

In my time playing WoW, I’m come across several forum posts, blogs, adverts, you name it talking about way to improve your WoW experience as it is affected by your computer.  I haven’t seen one recently (I feel sure someone will link a better list as soon as I post this) and figured that the time during maintenance was as good a time as any.  I’ve pieced and pulled this from several folks (like Muqq) and as always modify your system at your own risk. It’s assumed you are running Win7 64bit.  If you have something else, this may not necessarily be fore you.  Ok let’s just dive right in.

 

General Stuff:

– Defragmentation: Keep your hard drive in order by running a defrag tool weekly.  I usually do this on Sunday nights after I’ve cleaned out the case. Defragmenting can  reduce the time it takes to load programs and open files. The outer tracks of a hard disk have a higher transfer rate than the inner tracks, therefore placing files on the outer tracks increases performance. I use  but there are many good tools out there.  If you have an SSD, do NOT defrag that with a standard tool. Your SSD manufacturer should have a tool for this.

– Core parking: Disable core parking in windows 7. Basically, it parks the cores that aren’t being utilized very much in order to save power consumption. While it shouldn’t theoretically impact your performance to a big degree, since the cores activate instantly, some users have reported less stuttering in games by disabling it. Read here how to do it.

– Multimedia Class Scheduler: When multimedia tasks are active, MCS will throttle down the global network bandwidth to around 10,000 packets per second. On high speed links like 100Mbps full duplex and 1000Mbps LAN connections that doesn’t use Jumbo Packets, the throttling may be significant drop network throughput. Multimedia Class Scheduler service (MMCSS) gives multimedia applications higher priority. This ensures that music and video playback will not be disturbed by other background services like antivirus and content indexing (or network file transfers). However, for some people that have shit like a music or movie player running in the background while playing WoW, some performance might be lost. Here’s how you disable it. Doing this might however resulting crackling sound if your computer is shit, so if you experience that, revert this change. I’d recommend at least a dual-core processor for this change.

Search indexing: Disable search indexing on your hard drives. Rightclick each hard drive in explorer and choose properties. You can uncheck search indexing there, it’s not too useful in win 7 anyway.

Enhanced SATA speed: Go to the device manger, disk drives > rightclick all your hard drives and go to properties>policies.  Make sure ” Writing caching on the disk ” box and ” advanced performance ” box are checked, and check them if they aren’t.

Windows Aero: Disable Aero in Windows 7 if you can. If anything, at least disable Aero transparency.

Computer upgrade: You might just have a too old computer and need to upgrade.  every couple of month of various levels of kit and their average price.  This is a great resource if you are looking to make some upgrades to your machine.  The linked list is from Feb 2011, but it’s a good start.

Drivers: Keep all your current drivers updated. This is goes especially for your graphic card, as well as windows 7 through windows update. However, there’s times when new graphic card drivers might not function all too well on your computer, so don’t hesitate to downgrade to the previous version and wait for a new release, if the current one didn’t work out for you.

 

Ping related fixes:

Leatrix Latency Fix (TcpAckFrequency): Basically the old classic TcpAckFrequency baked into a script for easy use. Should definitely get this for a big improvement. You can get it here. Other multiplayer games might see gains as well.

TCP autotuning: You should probably disable this if you’re on a broadband connection of 512kbit/s or higher. This includes all the hobos with adsl. This will help network throughput in most cases, and sometimes improve ping. Read more about TCP autoturning here. To disable TCP/IP autotunning, in the Command Prompt type:

“netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=disabled”

To verify that it is disabled: “netsh interface tcp show global”

 

World of Warcraft specific tweaks

-Video settings: The three biggest things that impact your performance is clip distance, shadow quality and anti-aliasing. You should turn shadow quality to lowest, and clipping distance down a bit, it doesn’t have to be on max. As for anti-aliasing, it’s generally fine to have it enabled in 10mans and lower, but for 25 man raids, you should really have it at 1x.

– Direct X 11 support: While Blizzard has said that the game should automatically detect that your video card supports DX 11, it doesn’t always do it.  Add the following line in your \World of Warcraft\WTF\Config.wtf  file

SET gxApi “d3d11”

-Addons: Combat logs such as recount eat a bit of performance, so you should consider disabling it if you’re having performance issues. Raid frames are usually also a big culprit. Basically, look over all your addons and either remove or disable the ones you don’t need when you’re raiding. Auctioneer/cartographer/quest helper might be nice to have, but make sure they are all disabled when you’re raiding. You can save sets by using the nice nifty addon ACP, which also lets you enable/disable addons without relogging. Make use of it!

-ProcessAffinityMask: This was changed as of 3.3.2, and basically tells your wow client which cores are available for use. You can still set it manually if you like by editing your config.wtf in your world of warcraftWTF directory. Read more about it here which also tells you what settings to use depending on your processor.

 

About Zosima