I upgraded my Video Card to the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. I'm not really seeing an increase in FPS in WoW....

I have:
AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-Core Processor
2.20 GHz, 2MB L2 + 2MB shared L3 Cache, 2000 MHz System Bus
3GB of Ram

I went from the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT to the 8800 GT and I had to upgrade the power supply. Suggestions? Would be nice to break 100 FPS and not be on low settings graphic wise.

Do you have any benchmark scores to show. "I'm not really seeing an increase in FPS in WoW...." is not exactly a technical statement.

The 8500 and 8800GT are basically the same generation cards. Generally it is recommended to make a jump of atleast 3 generations, in your case that would be a GT250 or something like that.

Unfortunately i do not know which component is key value when it comes to benchmarking WoW.

actually, according to Tom's Hardware there should be a pretty big difference between the two cards.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gami ... .html?prod[2074]=on&prod[2087]=on

It doesn't compare WoW per se, but every other benchmark shows a massive performance increase. Considering that's the card I'm running, I'd be surprised if you can't run WoW at full rez with everything turned up and not see problems (except maybe in very crowded situations that the engine isn't optimized for).

I'd recommend installing Fraps so you can get the framerate counter... or if WoW has one that's built in check that. http://www.fraps.com/ See what kind of rate you're getting normally and during slowdowns. If your performance is really poor, probably the first thing I'd do is rip and reinstall the whole graphics stack.

Go to http://nvidia.com and download the latest drivers for your graphics card.
Download your latest motherboard drivers (you'll need to post a model for more info on this if you don't know where to get them)
Download directx http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... aylang=en/

Go to add/remove programs, find the nvidia entry and uninstall it.
Reboot.
Cancel window's attempt to install drivers, then uninstall your motherboard drivers
reboot
install the latest motherboard drivers
reboot
install graphics drivers
reboot
install directx
reboot

Then see what happens. I might even throw a defrag in there to be on the safe side. If your performance still sucks you've got a problem somewhere. Did your graphics card have two power plus connectors? Are they both plugged in? Chances are yes because the drivers will throw an error if they're not.

I don't know what kind of motherboard it is. Its the HP Pavilion m8400f.

Before I was getting 12-32fps on all low settings. Now I'm getting 25-50fps. I guess I was hoping for a bit more.

I had them both professionally installed so I'm hoping it was done correct.

sorry wasn't logged in =(

And this is on what resolution? Is the AA on and how much filtering are we talking about.

for mobo drivers you can check out hp's site.

http://www.hp.com/#Support

just search for your pc model. That's probably the easiest method. What version of Vista are you running? I would expect a more significant framerate increase as well.

Ok here are screenshots.




Memory/Latency/FPS - I was not in a Highly Populated area at the Time.


Sunday I will install new drivers to see if that helps. I do run a lot of addons but I don't think that would cause me to have low FPS.

I have a 22in Wide Screen LCD.
I'm Running Windows Vista Home Prem. 32bit

Thanks for you input!!

Yea, that's really poor performance. I'm not really a WoW person so I don't know first hand what kind of performance you should be expecting... you might want to check on one of those WoW forums. That'll give you some first-hand numbers as to what you should be seeing. Maybe the game engine is just really poorly optimized... but I find that unlikely.

do you have any other games installed you can benchmark? If you get good performance in other games, you know it's something specific with WoW. On the other hand, if they all suck then it has to be a system-wide problem.

lol the only other game I have installed is SWG and u know they max out at 30. I'll try posting on the forums to see if anyone has suggestions.

I'm not hugely techy but I AM on WoW and have only a 7950GTX installed. I have all the settings on Max, run it in 1280x1024 and get ~20fps in most places (Dalaran not counted ) and only 35ms latency. My other specs for you to compare are XP Service Pack 3, 2Gb Ram, 2.4ghz cpu

Ye, theres definitely a problem here, the machine is seriously under performing. At 1050p you should be doing at least twice what you are doing now.

Check that the card sits firmly in the pciE slot. Hell id call the shop and ask for refund. But before that download the 3dmark06, run it and compare the results. If you see a huge gap between what you get and the others with similar set get then you can use that as leverage.

typically what are some cause for low FPS?

sorry I really gotta learn how to sign in!!!!

At the worst you're looking at physical problems with the card. That's fairly unlikely, though... usually you'll see crashes or graphical artifacts (random crazy crap on the screen).

Bad drivers or driver problems can cause it. You can eliminate that by finding a version of drivers reputed to be good with your game (forums are best for this) and just reinstalling them. Be sure to uninstall the older drivers, reboot, let windows install the default drivers, then reboot again before installing your chosen drivers. This makes sure there're no remnants of the old drivers left.

Other problems could be hardware conflicts between the graphics card and another device (hard to isolate) or even chipset problems. Reinstalling chipset drivers and directx is worth trying.

It could also be spyware/adware/trojans causing general performance problems, or a deeper issue in the O/S. If it comes down to this being a legitimate possibility, I usually just wipe the whole O/S and reinstall from scratch. That eliminates anything with software as being the source of the problem. However, that's time consuming and for many people is beyond their technical ability since it requires having all your drivers available. I usually download everything I need to a secondary drive before I wipe a box so I can be sure to be running the most recent drivers right out of the gate.