[Turnpike]

Hey all,

I've been experiencing fairly low framerates in WoW (generally 14-24 FPS) and am looking for ways to boost that up. I already run with many settings low (full-screen glow has always been off, but now I'm running with no shaders at all... world appearance bars mostly set to low settings, including the terrain distance, 1280x1024 resolution).

I do run with a fair number of add-ons, and these increase my loading time drastically, but they don't seem to have any noticeable effect on my framerate.

If anyone has any ideas as to things I could do for free (settings, driver tweaks, etc) to increase performance or allow me the same performance on higher settings, I would be much appreciative. Otherwise, I will be looking into upgrading hardware.


I currently have a Rev A dual 1.8 GHz G5 with 1GB RAM and an ATI 9600 Pro. RAM seems to be the easiest/cheapest upgrade path, but I'm not certain if 1GB is too little or not. I generally don't run with many other programs open, generally Adium, Ventrilo, and possibly Safari. I experience lag in pretty much all situations, although obviously heavily populated areas (e.g. shattrath) are the worst (Rob, if you're reading, could you pass on my wish for portal and flight points in Dalaran to not have dozens of NPCs congregating for noisy military drilling or sermons on the greatness of the Naaru? Old-world cities generally didn't have tons of NPCs around these areas, and they were generally well-removed from the high-traffic areas of the cities.)

I have two hard drives, one of which has a lower rotation speed. I currently run both my OS X install (10.4.10) and WoW off of the faster drive.

AGP upgrades for my 9600 Pro seem few and far between, and they seem to be priced such that I could get a PC graphics card, motherboard, and CPU for the same price. Am I missing some good, cheap upgrades? I've searched dealmac (for the keyword "agp") and the results it returned were all PC cards.

The performance on my machine is outstanding for everything else, so I really have no need to upgrade my tower as a whole. While I would love to upgrade to a newer Mac Pro, I don't have the excess cash to justify upgrading for the sake of WoW.



Executive Summary:
My performance in WoW is moderately bad even in ideal situations (in an instance in a small room with nobody doing anything and me staring at a wall), despite having graphic settings low.

System specs:
Dual 1.8 G5 (Rev A)
1 GB RAM
ATI 9600 Pro
OS X 10.4.10

[Chuckit]

I just found three Radeon x800 Mac Editions on eBay for under $200.

[Randman]

Get more ram, it will help.

Turn most of the audio settings off. It helps considerably. Make sure any mods you have are updated. Repair permissions. Make sure Safari isn't eating up resources. Any open browser can be a drain when playing (especially in a raid). Dashboard too. There's a widget you can install that temporarily deactivates Dashboard.

[Turnpike]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

I just found three Radeon x800 Mac Editions on eBay for under $200.

Thanks, I'll look into this. Two questions: Do used cards have a good reputation (as far as reliability), and would an upgrade in this area have any significant effect, especially considering the card upgrades are older cards (old in the sense of PC gaming)

Originally Posted by Randman 

Get more ram, it will help.

Turn most of the audio settings off. It helps considerably. Make sure any mods you have are updated. Repair permissions. Make sure Safari isn't eating up resources. Any open browser can be a drain when playing (especially in a raid). Dashboard too. There's a widget you can install that temporarily deactivates Dashboard.

I'll definitely look into RAM prices and such. I remember when I got this machine, 1 gig was a "decent" amount, not excessive but not too little. Over the years it's probably just time to get more.

Good tip on the audio, come to think of it I think my framerate did drop 3-4 fps when I turned background music and ambiance back on.

I update my mods pretty obsessively.. I run WoW UI Updater generally every two days or so, and JWoWUpdater (only handles mods on the Wowace SVN) twice a day. I'll be better about closing Safari (currently I just navigate away from pages with animations as those seem to be the worst), and I'll look into this Dashboard widget.


Thanks for the help so far, both of you!
Tunpike