How to Increase Performance in WoW and other Online Games

Posted on Mar 20, 2010 in World of Warcraft by dee 7 Comments

image2 How to Increase Performance in WoW and other Online Games Because I’m located in New Zealand, I got used to playing World of Warcraft with a ping of around 350-450ms. This means that there is usually around a half a second lag between when I hit a key and when the server acknowledges the key press. The performance tends to deteriorate when I’m in larger encounters such as raids.

As I’ve now got to a point where I need to raid to get better equipment, this has caused me a lot of pain. Even though I’m on ADSL2, I used to get frequent disconnects when the WoW servers thought I was not responding.

This post is to help people who:

Frequently disconnect on every large encounter.
Suffer from significant frame loss on large encounters.
Suffer from random disconnects even when doing nothing

There are various things that one can do to improve system performance. I’ll detail out the five main things I did to ensure that I remain connected and can respond in a timely fashion during my play sessions.

Suggestion 1: Use a Tunnelling Service

I started using a tunnelling service called ReduceTheLag to act as a middle man between my game sessions and the World of Warcraft servers (http://www.reducethelag.com). This creates an SSH tunnel from my machine to their servers that acts on my behalf to communicate to the World of Warcraft Servers.

While there are many similar services, I’ve found this to be the best as it has minimal set up requirements, works with Windows 7 64bit, requires no technical knowledge and has successfully cut my lag in half.

The service is a paid one (I think around $9.00 per 3 months), but offers a 30 day trial service, which i used first before buying the full service. It has made a significant difference immediately to my game experience.

You can try any of the tunnelling services available (such as SmoothPing or WoWTunnels), however, this is my preference for oceanic players.

Suggestion 2: Use a TCP fix.

If you are using a Windows operating system, note that it will try to optimize network traffic by delaying packet acknowledgements until it has two from the game servers. So, for every “packet” your machine receives from the game server, it waits until it gets another one to acknowledge both together.

This is an acceptable behaviour for most online activity. But certainly not for online games where ideally you want to acknowledge packets from the game servers as soon as possible.

There is a small change to the registry that is required to modify what is called the TCPAckFrequency that will force your machine to acknowledge each packet immediately instead of waiting. This will improve performance for most online games, including WoW, Aion and Lord of the Rings.

There is a windows “script” that is available on WoWInterface.com that can do this easily on your behalf. It is called Leatrix Latency Fix. You can find out more information by going to the above link.

Its a pretty safe change and comes with an uninstall script as well. Rest assured, it doesn’t contain any strange changes :)

Using this further increased my performance in World of Warcraft.

Suggestion 3: Chatty Add-ons

Some of the add-ons that are created for World of Warcraft continuously spam other members of the group that have the same add-ons. The major culprits are damage meters, gear score addons and healing helpers.

While healing helpers chatter is expected, I would recommend not using Gear Score add-ons. This is the main communication spammer and can bring your machine down to its knees (and also impacts performance on other members of the raid). Our guild currently has banned this add-on while we are in a raid.

Recount is one of the most popular damage meter counters in WoW. My immediate suggestion would be to turn of “lazy synch” in Recount by typing “/recount sync” when logged into WoW. This prevents Recount from spamming and receiving updates from all other players.

Suggestion 4: Combat Log Clean Up

The combat log contains a variety of filters that makes the display “pretty”. This is done by colour coding and putting timestamps and placing advanced levels of filters on what is displayed during a fight.

The CPU usage that is required to process these filters during a large encounter is huge with everyone spamming spells and attacks on the bosses.

The simplest way to increase performance here is to turn off the fancy filtering.

To do this, right click on the combat log chat pane and go to settings. Ensure that all filtering is off by disabling everything here. See the screenshot as an example. Do this for all the filters and tabs.

The major performance boost you’ll get doing this would be in the display frames per second as WoW is a CPU intensive game and freeing up the CPU from playing these filters will help immensely in the FPS you can get.

Suggestion 5: Reduce Shadow Quality

The biggest difference to WoW FPS improvement comes from turning down the Shadow Quality setting in your video effects pane.

Processing shadow requires significant CPU power and once again, if you reduce this load, that CPU can now be used for other more necessary things.

There are quite a few tweaks that can be made to this pane. However, I would suggest playing around with the settings to come up with a healthy performance without sacrificing much of the eye candy.

Conclusion

Doing the above five things were the sole reason why I can still raid at present. While there are other things that can be done, these have the most impact I believe. In addition to the above, if you still wish to continue tweaking for performance you may wish to look at:

Ensure that port 3724 is correctly routed to your machine
Continue playing with the graphic quality settings to reduce some of them until you get acceptable FPS.
Reducing the amount of Add-on’s you have, or finding alternative ones that perform the same function but are more light-weight
Ensure that you have minimal programs running in the background
When about to raid, move to Full Screen mode instead of Windowed.
If playing on a computer with multiple monitors, ensure that your WoW session doesn’t span across both windows.
If using Ventrilo, try and put that on a separate laptop next to your WoW machine (I do this, and it helps as I’m not using my WoW machine to process Ventrilo traffic/sound)

Here is a random screenshot showing my lag meter in the nice green state (its not a raid, but I rarely if ever seen anything other than green now)

If any of the above suggestions helps in any way, I would appreciate a comment :)

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