FPS and Smoothness more telling than CPU use?
 

My pc is 5 years old and not top of the line, so when I first started playing, my cpu use was high, and my frames per second were low, and sometimes the screen would get jerky or stutter on frames.

I tried analyzing various addons using cpu and memory meters, but that never really seemed very productive.

I found the most productive thing to focus on is simply frames per second and how smooth action looks on screen. Total frames per second seems most limited by high graphic options. I run high graphic options when playing solo and exploring, but always go minimum graphic options when running dungeons etc.

In my experience lags, short pauses, and generally jerky game play shows up when I have addons running that load up the cpu and memory.

What determines the best performance on your PC?

What things have you done to keep good frame rate and smoothness?

I found in the past that shadow quality would drastically effect frame rate, high quality, low FPS. I would think ground density would also be in that categpoy.

Here I do this for good fps:
- Switch off healing and dmg displayed on screen and on your player unitframe.
- Replace standard buttons with dominos or bartender.
- Reduce the logging in your combatlog to important stuff.
- Dont use Recount/Skada or stuff.

Both CPU and Memory(circumstance) I have found play a role in smooth gameplay. Anything outright eating your CPU usage and anything creating large expansive tables being iterated over on every frame(or once every second) are usually bad. These two things are found commonly in shaders and texture quality for game settings; in terms of addons this is often inventory tracking, logging, and nameplate scanning.

As stated by others I too turn shadows, shaders, and textures to a reasonable setting for my hardware. For addons I avoid, or customize, ones that log far too much or scan inefficiently.

If you happen to be using Tidy Plates, or most common nameplate addons, do not continue use. My computer is 8 years old so I know your struggle more than you might think.

What is a good if any nameplate addon? I don't like the default one much.

Rnameplates2 is pretty good for cpu efficiency

Allows aura tracking, pretty "hackable" to modify for your specific needs as zork does aa good job commenting his code and using practically plain text variable names.

I've noticed exactly one encounter of slight fps lag and it was when I managed to get over 200 nameplates stacked on my screen.

I moused over that area, simultaneously firing 200 aura updates and dropped to 70 fps. Can't recommend this addon enough

KuiNameplates on Curse, the code was well written and does not(as I recall, I could also be wrong) use overly convoluted tables on frame updates. In fact it is one of the addons I took inspiration from when writing my own nameplate addons.

I second KuiNameplates.
Maybe other nameplate addons "got with the program" but Kesava paved the way for performant nameplate updates.

I think this thread is interesting:
http://www.wowinterface.com/forums/s...ad.php?t=46740

The single handedly biggest FPS murderer are shadows.
This is due to the technique most likely used to render them (Shadow Mapping).

Shadow mapping works by writing to a texture (depth buffer) based on the view direction of the light.
It is then compared to the camera view and you can determine by reading of the depth buffer and some fancy math if the object is shadowed or not.

This has technique effects 2 parts of the system your CPU and GPU.


1. CPU: The fastest rendered polygon is the one that isn't rendered at all =).
As there is no point in rendering scene objects that the camera can no see the CPU is tasked with sorting the models that are outside of the camera view. This is generally a good idea as it reduced the amount of data that needs to be transfered from RAM to VRAM every frame.

As we have to render the scene twice with shadow mapping you have to test against not one camera but at least two. This is generally not an issue for modern CPUs with a modern game engine but it does add overhead.

2. GPU: Rendering is "slow"
Standard 3d APIs for rendering are usually slow. Specially when you switch shader.
Since you now have to render the scene twice, it means that you instead of once now have to send the objects that you're interested in for processing twice... (not really true, you get one object list per view frustum). The CPU then has to spoon feed the GPU with triangles for every model and this is what really kills your performance.

There are neat optimisations for this.
The most obvious you can think of is that there is usually only one primary light source (that casts shadow) and only render certain objects with dynamic shadows but it doesn't matter. It usually doesn't matter. As soon as you enable shadow mapping (dynamic shadows) you add this overhead to the rendering.