nUI+ Framerate Issue

Pbennie · 03-01-10, 11:27 AM

Good Morning All,

I'll start off by saying I love the nUI+ interface, its neat, clean and leaves a great deal of my screen 'real estate' wide open!! However, my frame rates are atrocious.

I followed the directions for a "clean" install, renamed my interface and wtf folders to ".saved" and went from there. On initial install, everything seemed fine, frame rates were a little low but I didn't worry about it. After installing my add-ons (one at a time as instructed) the frame rates continued to drop until they were between 1-5 fps consistently. I reset my video settings to "low" and that seemed to help; but then I would go into a 5-man dungeon and the frame rates would go out the door again. I uninstalled/disabled more add-ons until I the frame rates got better, but they were still below 10-20fps.

By Sunday, I was a bit miffed, because all of the add-ons I have come to depend on or feel like I can't live without had either been disabled or removed just so I could use the nUI+ interface. I wasn't sure if it was a 'good enough' trade-off but I decided to give it a few more days to see if came across something else. The real deal-breaker was Sunday night; I got into a 25-man ICC run, clearing trash before the boss I couldn't move. I changed my video settings down to the bare minimum, (wasn't ready to abandon the ui yet) disabled all but recount and healbot, logged out and then back in again. It didn't improve frame rates like I hoped it would. In the end I went back to my other addons/mods and left the nUI+ interface/set up in the ".saved" folders.

System Information:
Windows XP 64bit
AMD Phenom 9600, quad core CPU
6GB DDR2 Memory (1066/533MHz)
1GB ATI Radeon Video Card-4650

The system is not set up for over clocking, I thought about it, but that just seemed like overkill. I have another machine, almost identical except its running an Nvidia graphic's card w/512 mb on-board and only 4GB of memory. A friend had me change some settings for wow in the wtf folder but those only seemed to make things worse instead of better...I'm at the end of any options I can think of, any help from you guys will be greatly appreciated. Like I said, I like the interface, it just seems to consume/tie up/compete with more resources than I have available...

Thanks

Xrystal · 03-01-10, 12:02 PM

Wow, my system at the time was a hell of a lot worse than yours and I sure as hell didn't need to turn off all my addons to raid.

I used to do Ulduar 25 on a weekly basis as a healer. That meant decursive, grid, skada, boss mods and many more useful even if not important addons running at the same time. Outside of actual fights the fps didn't drop much below 15fps and I could move. Admittedly once the big fights were underway I had problems but not to the extent you are.

What helped me though was switching to party or single player mode. I don't need the frames on display as I use grid to heal. I also had to have my shadows turned off and most intensive graphics turned to medium to get by. At times it would drop to 3fps but most of the time 5fps was the lowest.

Granted I haven't been raiding since before ICC came out so I cannot comment on that but I did spend some time in the Tournament Ground instances with little problems.

Ah here we go. Here's a screen shot of a mid fight 25 man Naxxramas fight. Not a great example but still I am over 10fps with all that stuff on the screen. Oh, and a 25 man Ulduar run as well. Just under 10fps but I am guessing the harder the instance the more complex data is being transferred. I am sure that is why ICC affected you so bad but sitting in the middle of nowhere should not have. Nor should a 5 man or even a 10 man effect you that badly.

What are you doing and where and what are the fps values while you are doing it? What other addons are you using. Perhaps some are competing with nUI to access data and that is affecting things.

This was my set up when I last raided, if I remember rightly that is:
Windows Vista 32bit
AMD Athlon II , dual core CPU, 2.4Mhz
4GB DDR2 Memory (800)
512MB or less Nvidia 7600 GT

Decidely a lot worse than your set up:

My current set up is thus, due to my current main game of Star Trek Online, which is very intensive visually.

Windows 7 64bit
AMD Phenom II 720, triple core CPU, 2.8Mhz
4GB DDR2 Memory (800)
512MB or more Nvidia GTX280

So, give me a location where you're fps is really low and I will either see if I have an old screenshot back then with the old set up or try it again with the new setup. Unfortunately ICC and other raid and instance testing is out of the picture as I don't play at present but simply log in to test and update my addons.
Also, try testing the same thing with just party/solo mode on display instead of the raid and see what the difference is. It may not solve your problem if you need that all displayed but if you don't it may help you alot.

Pbennie · 03-01-10, 12:59 PM

WOW

I didn't have nearly that much on my screen!

Add-ons (from memory):
DBM- core and ICC only
Titan
Healbot
QuestGuru --but I disabled it (didn't need it in a raid)
GearScore --but I disabled it
Recount
Postal --disabled (didn't need it in a raid)
XLoot Monitor
-probably a few more but I don’t remember them all right now
__________________________
Locations where frame rates were the worst:
Dalaran (expected-always pretty low 20-25fps)
ICC 25-man (expected low but not as bad as I got)
Any 5-man instance after about 5 min in
___________________________
with all the system resources available (tons of memory & cpu) I'm wondering if there's something else that could be chomping in the background that I don't see. The problem is, I don't seem to have the same issues when I switch to the other 50+ nit-noid add-ons that report crap and keep databases all over the place. I'll try a fresh setup again tonight and keep track of which add-ons seem to be wrecking havoc and try changing the interface to party when in the raid; because if I'm not healing, I really don't care about the other players "health/status"...well not really, really care

Thanks

Diagnostics · 03-01-10, 01:05 PM

Is 'reduce input lag' box checked? If so, it can greatly reduce your FPS.

Petrah · 03-01-10, 01:16 PM

Keep in mind that just because you disable an addon doesn't mean it still isn't loading into memory. The only way to truly test things is to completely remove any addons from the WoW directory (and their lua/lua.bak files from any/all SavedVariables folders). Also remember to delete the Cache folder after each test if you will be running more tests.

nightcracker · 03-01-10, 01:21 PM

Originally Posted by Petrah

Keep in mind that just because you disable an addon doesn't mean it still isn't loading into memory.

Unless an other addon loads it, it is.

AsheruWolf · 03-01-10, 02:53 PM

I run at about 5 FPS in a raid but thats cause my machine is over 6 years old and has a bad on board video card. Kind of odd to see your machine doing that. You might want to consider testing nUI and other addons one at a time to see if you can find out if something is causing this or if it might just be your PC.

Xrystal · 03-01-10, 03:07 PM

Rofl and thats just the ones you can see

I always have the full DBM but I think they activately automatically so not sure if they are all active at the same time. I used to also have healbot and grid installed at the same time as I was transitioning between healbot and grid and they work quite differently so took some time before I could just use grid. I stopped really playing I think about October but here's my addon list at December 09. Scratch that, there's too many to list rofl .. I have 175 Items in my addon folder at that time. Assuming that 75 were plugins for the actual addons that still makes 100 physical addons running rofl.
Hopefully being in party and solo mode will help things but yes, it may well be worth finding out which addon is throttling things. Oh, try hovering over the fps value and start your search with the highest ones on the list. Perhaps having so many data driven informative addons is getting too much for your system when things get interesting

Originally Posted by Pbennie

WOW

I didn't have nearly that much on my screen!

Add-ons (from memory):
DBM- core and ICC only
Titan
Healbot
QuestGuru --but I disabled it (didn't need it in a raid)
GearScore --but I disabled it
Recount
Postal --disabled (didn't need it in a raid)
XLoot Monitor
-probably a few more but I don’t remember them all right now
__________________________
Locations where frame rates were the worst:
Dalaran (expected-always pretty low 20-25fps)
ICC 25-man (expected low but not as bad as I got)
Any 5-man instance after about 5 min in
___________________________
with all the system resources available (tons of memory & cpu) I'm wondering if there's something else that could be chomping in the background that I don't see. The problem is, I don't seem to have the same issues when I switch to the other 50+ nit-noid add-ons that report crap and keep databases all over the place. I'll try a fresh setup again tonight and keep track of which add-ons seem to be wrecking havoc and try changing the interface to party when in the raid; because if I'm not healing, I really don't care about the other players "health/status"...well not really, really care

Thanks

Pbennie · 03-01-10, 07:57 PM

Ok, at the risk of sounding like a total N00B, I'm posting the results of my experiment of starting from scratch...the second time

Steps:
Renamed my Interface and WTF folders and logged into the game, from there I proceeded to install one add-on at a time until I reached what was installed previously

nUI+
Titan Panel
Titan-Dual Spec
DBM
Recount
Auctioneer Suite
Healbot
GearScore
SellJunk
x-Loot & Monitor
Postal
AckisRecipeList

in that order, each time logging in, checking frame rates, taking screen shots...Well at the end of my list I was still showing a whopping 45fps and was beside myself with joy; then thought oh yeah, I'm hovering above Storm Peaks where the only other soul is another priest farming eternal fire...

So it was off to Dalaran, not too bad, still better than usual but I thought I'd give it some time because the area was still relatively deserted, folks hadn't gotten home from work/school etc. After about an hour the frame rates started to drop but not to the point of halting the interface so...I logged out and loaded a few more of my favorites:

QuestGuru, Dr. Damage, and finally Altoholic...then it breaks...crap, crap, and double crap!

I log out, I remove all of the folders that belong to Altoholic and get ready to log back in...that's when it hit me! I'm staring at the Blizzard Launcher screen and I know there's something else I should check...had problems with it in the past...but I fixed that, there's no way it's enabled again...hmmm

Open up the "Downloader Preferences" menu, wouldn't you know it:
--------------------------------------
-Unchecked "Download while Playing World of Warcraft"
-Checked "Download after Exiting"

-Unchecked "Don't throttle background download, will decrease system performance" --yeah no crap Sherlock!

-Unchecked "Peer-to-Peer Transfer"
---------------------------------------
The N00B part is that I didn't check these before, didn't even think about it. After those were disabled and Altoholic reinstalled I decided to take the interface and all of my add-ons for a test drive in a 5-man....

Frame rates started around 10-15fps, not intolerable, but I remembered someone posting about changing it from raid to party and tried that. After I changed it from party to solo they jumped to almost 30fps. WOOHOO

The graphics are still not "fully engaged" but not exactly low end either

I set it to high then lowered Shadows and Weather intensity then disabled spectacular lighting, death effect, full-screen glow effect, and projected textures. The rest I left alone and it still seems to work pretty well.

I posted this "long read" in the hopes that maybe someone else having a similar problem might be able to 'fix' their issue

Thanks All!

Xrystal · 03-01-10, 09:48 PM

Grats, glad you got it sorted. And don't worry, we all get noobish now and then

Jordro · 03-09-10, 11:02 AM

I was having horrible lag also and it wasnt NUI doing it. I looked in my WOW folderand i had over 85 downloader and patch files. While researching how to improve lag/latency I found this site that said these files would slow you down. That every one of them was an .exe file and loaded each time you started WOW. I moved these files (example Wow-1.12.0.5595 to 1.12.1.5875-enUS-downloader as well as the patch of the same name) to another folder and it worked. In ICC 25 I have very little FPS drop and we did for the alliance last night with a full 40 man raid (got the bear mount!) and at the heaviest of the fighting I lagged a little bit, like down to 16 fps vs normal 60.

Others in my guild tried this and it helped them also. For those of us who remember lvl 40 as the first obtainable mount, this trick would help more than a noob player.

ONLY and I stress this, cut and move the wow downloader and patch files from the C;/program Files/ World of Warcraft root directory. Paste them into a new floder on your desktop in case you goof and cut too many files and your wow wont work. That way you can restore them if you need to.

It worked for me and others, maybe it can help some here who are having FPS problems.

BTW, was able to turn my video settings up after doing this and it holds the frame rate fine. Might drop to 40 during some raiding but usually un-noticable.

Telepavarion · 03-18-10, 06:43 AM

So there I have to write my experiences with nUI+ and Framerates.

I running a
AMD Phenom II 945 (quad core with 3,2GHz each on)
4 GB DDR3 CL9 Kit in DualChannel Mode
Sapphire ATI Radeon 4860 (I think so, forget the number right now)

If I look now on your System it isn't as much different as mine. The important Think is the Graphic Card I think. Mine running sometimes in a Raid with nUI+ with 25 Man Raidframes at 75°C. With only the group showing it is about 62°C.
So what I think is the Problem, is the updating of the Frames. WoW seems do do it at the graphic Card and I know the 4600 Series and I have to say there is a really big different to the 4800 Series. Then I look to my temperature and see that my graphic card running nearly the maximum of power. The card need's two 6-pin PCIe Power connectors and sometimes I think the card pull the 150W they can do.

So now stop that technical thing. My solutions at the moment is that I have Grid running and let me show the Raid from Grid and only see from nUI the 5 man group. I also disable any animation in nUI Frames and so I have in a fight about 30 to 35 fps, also with many casters (I like to have the Ultra Graphic Settings).

Another Solutions is maybe the partical density and the shadow clearness. As I know from my old machine that I hove to turn both out to get a got framerate with and without nUI.

At least I want to say that I haven't a TFT. I running a old 19" monitor with 1280x1024 resolution. So I think you should have a look on your Graphiccards Ram whats happening I you running nUI with a 22" or 24" wide screen. Maybe the grahic card has to do so much that the RAM isn't enought and hat to use the other Ram and then, yeah latency goes down.

So hopefully that the people have that Problem can find a fix for themselves and maybe post it, so that other people can try it out. As the time Scott has nUI6 ready I think we have to life with that problem. For me it wasn't a Problem and it isn't a Problem. I have my way.

Petrah · 03-18-10, 09:24 AM

Originally Posted by Telepavarion

Sapphire ATI Radeon 4860 (I think so, forget the number right now)

Mine running sometimes in a Raid with nUI+ with 25 Man Raidframes at 75°C.

That would be much much too hot for me.

Are you running RivaTuner to set your fan speed to 60%? Not a lot of people are aware that most video card manufacturers sell their cards with the fan speed set at 30%. They do this because that speed is "quiet". Obviously, the faster the fans RPM the louder it's going to be, and they want to boast that their video cards are quiet. Some say that video cards are made to withstand excessive heat, but my feeling is the cooler you keep your card the longer it's going to last (especially the vid cards memory, which tends to be the culprit that overheats and over time ruins the card) and the better performance you're going to get.

You can set up RivaTuner two ways. One way is to set the fan at a fixed speed (I have my fan speed set to 60%. A little bit loud but after a bit you get use to it). Another way (I never learned how to do this part) is to set it up to automatically adjust the fan speed based on temperature.

In case you or anyone else wants it, here's both the download link for RivaTuner and a link to the guide showing you how to set the fan speed.
http://downloads.guru3d.com/RivaTune...nload-163.html
http://www.guru3d.com/article/rivatu...verclock-guide

I'm one of those odd people that like to run several pieces of software at once that tells me my computer temps. Out of the three I use, only Everest will show you both the video cards CPU and memory temps (if your video card has thermistors to support it. Most of today's high end gaming cards do)... Everest is not free software, but it is very much worth the cash!

Everest: http://www.lavalys.com/
HWMonitor: http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php
Speccy (from the people who make CCleaner): http://www.piriform.com/speccy

Seer · 03-18-10, 11:49 AM

Originally Posted by Petrah

That would be much much too hot for me.

The 4800 series are just hotheads, my 4870 can hit 90 (Core temp IIRC) and is designed to cope with that anyway, otherwise Ati would not sell them with such a cooler, way to risky.

The biggest boost I could give my Sapphire 4870 was with a new Bios. Tho that's not something I think everybody should attempt, esp if you cannot afford a replacement..

Telepavarion · 03-18-10, 01:10 PM

Yeah it is really no Problem. At 60°C my 4870 starts to set the fan speed to 60%. And I know many people who plays Far Cry they running nearly at 80°C with fan speed at 80°C. I think this temperature are the Core temperature not the RAM temperature. (As I look at the CPU and RAM temperature and the temperatur I can get on the top of the GPU and RAM). It has only something to do with architecture of that cards, and the 4800 Series has a really good one. The 5700 series is at the moment for WoW more worse than the older 4800 Series
As I see it on my Sapphire, they are well placed so that they have some space between.

Never mind, at running WoW the card runs at 62°C so how can this be too hot if the tower temperature is about 30°C. (at the moment the cooler temp of my video card is 38°C)

Petrah · 03-18-10, 05:01 PM

Originally Posted by Seer

The 4800 series are just hotheads, my 4870 can hit 90 (Core temp IIRC) and is designed to cope with that anyway, otherwise Ati would not sell them with such a cooler, way to risky.

The biggest boost I could give my Sapphire 4870 was with a new Bios. Tho that's not something I think everybody should attempt, esp if you cannot afford a replacement..

Saphire made mine (Saphire Radeon 1GB GDDR5 4870.. I did a lot of research before buying from this company to ensure they put out quality cooling along with a good warranty). It just has the ATI chip. My card gets no where near that temp on the CPU in a 25 man raid. Not all companies that make video cards put the same cooling on them. There are actually three different things on this particular card to watch the temps on, but the main temp that shows up on most guages is the one for the CPU on the card. The one you have to watch for is the temp on the cards memory, which will always run hotter. The memory is normally the first thing that causes a video card to go belly up due to overheating issues.

I choose to keep my temps at their lowest so that I can obtain the best possible performance and help my hardware last longer.

Petrah · 03-18-10, 05:07 PM

Originally Posted by Telepavarion

Never mind, at running WoW the card runs at 62°C so how can this be too hot if the tower temperature is about 30°C. (at the moment the cooler temp of my video card is 38°C)

You said in a 25 man raid your cards temp is at 75C. For me, my own personal taste, even though the card can withstand hotter temps, it's still too hot for me.

I was merely commenting for conversation and stating my own personal tastes as to what temps I am comfortable with.

Telepavarion · 03-18-10, 06:32 PM

Originally Posted by Petrah

You said in a 25 man raid your cards temp is at 75C. For me, my own personal taste, even though the card can withstand hotter temps, it's still too hot for me.

I was merely commenting for conversation and stating my own personal tastes as to what temps I am comfortable with.

Yeah ofcourse you are right, it is really hot, but I really has checked on the old Win7 installation before it goes crashed (because of such programs) that the RAM isn't as hot as suspected (in connection to the CPU of the graphic card). So I really think this is okay.

Seer · 03-19-10, 05:46 PM

Originally Posted by Petrah

Saphire made mine (Saphire Radeon 1GB GDDR5 4870.. I did a lot of research before buying from this company to ensure they put out quality cooling along with a good warranty). It just has the ATI chip. My card gets no where near that temp on the CPU in a 25 man raid. Not all companies that make video cards put the same cooling on them. There are actually three different things on this particular card to watch the temps on, but the main temp that shows up on most guages is the one for the CPU on the card. The one you have to watch for is the temp on the cards memory, which will always run hotter. The memory is normally the first thing that causes a video card to go belly up due to overheating issues.

I choose to keep my temps at their lowest so that I can obtain the best possible performance and help my hardware last longer.

Funny enough, so is mine (And the soon to arrive 5870 :-p).

I'll admit that core temps did drop tho after the bios update (a non sapphire IIRC) and well, I never said I got these temps with WoW :-p

WoW doesn't seem to use the card to it's fullest apparently either. Sure enough the monitors may show it's running at 750mhz but according to some it only uses 50% of the shaders available. (Tried overclocking it to the max that ATI Overdrive allows (850mhz) and hardly got 2 fps more) or, since WoW is an DX9 (and think it started development when dx8 was mainstream) and CPU depended (and not that optimised when using more then 1 core either) game.

Regarding mem overheating, the stock cooler is sometimes way better then replacement coolers that seem to focus on cooling the GPU, and people tend not to look at that when they decide to replace the cooler.

Andoneous · 03-25-10, 06:46 AM

Most of the newer ATI cards do not need RIVATUNER to tweak the fan settings. Just Use Catalyst Control Center, unlock ATI Overdrive, Then check the manual fan control box. Now this worked with my Old 4870s and now it works with my 5770s (both cards in crossfire) But some may still not have a fan control. Check before you quote me on which cards is does and does not work on. Im just going by what i use.