Sick of performance issues in World of Warcraft? You may have a friend in one of the most unlikely places -- Windows Media Player. World of Raids reported today that a player from Russia has discovered a trick with Windows Media Player, which boosts performance of the application currently in focus, by freeing up the CPU usage from things running in the background.
WoR user Tokiko says that this is a fairly old trick, and has worked in games like Counter-Strike in the past, among others. While it's not working for everyone, according to Csulok and players in Dolk's thread, it has for them! Dolk reports that this seems to primarily work for players using single-core CPUs under Windows XP SP2, though, so your results may vary.
All you have to do is log out of World of Warcraft -- closing it completely, and then start up Windows Media Player. From there just run World of Warcraft as usual, and Raze says you will see the results instantly.
Has anyone tried this yet? If so, has it worked for you?
Comments
im always running WMP, so i wouldent notice! hmm... ill have to try closing it and seeing if there is a difference :)
l2usecomputers. windows itselfs reserve some resources you wouldnt get, but MS learnt that their media player needs a lot of cpu power so when you start wmp windows release reserved power for most consuming process. wmp does not generate any need (if theres no music or video played), so wow gets all the released resourced, its seriously decrease loding time and improve fps rate. for most of people it works.
I works for me for every program, media player, firefox, etc. Its because the processor works better opening smaller applications run in background and then run the larger, more complicated ones later.
Although if I run WoW and then Media Player afterwords, it will retain previous performance after 15+min
Im running Windows Vista
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
nVidia 7950 Gt
with 6mbs IP
Please post a link to this file (srcdsfpsbooster.exe) as I have searched the internet extensively and I'm unable to find it for download.
Thanks.
This worked for me, and I didn't expect it to. I went from a steady 17fps in silvermoon/shatt to about 95 fps. Interestingly though I get strange loot/mail lag while it is on in the background.
My system is pretty obsolete at this point, so the FPS gain makes it worth dealing with.
ok i think this is not true, windows media player itself is a program that runs besides wow, and so also consumes CPU usage and Memory usage, and quite alot of memory usage.
if i want more performane for my games i even close windows media player, and that does the trick.
Yes there is, there is a program that is about 20kb and uses none of the extra resources, it mimic the effects that WMP gives you
unfortunately i've forgotten the name, but it does exist, a quick search on the internet should pick it up
ill try to get it myself
EDIT: ah got the name, srcdsfpsbooster.exe used in counter strike servers to replace the WMP thing, till works for other online games i guess
i think there are other ways to do this without having to spend the extra resources on WMP. there's gotta be some sort of lightweight program (or built in functionality maybe) that allows you to give certain tasks priority. i just don't know what that would be in window$, as i use linux.
To be honest i don't it has anything to do with WoW, more likely a DirectX issue where WMP pre-loads most of it and you'll expirience that your machine doesn't use power to load this later on, common caching.
I'm pretty sure that any boost in loading times is due to the fact that you have just previously loaded wow anyway, therefore Windows has cached that information and can access it faster. As for in game frame rates and pings, I didn't notice any difference, and I can't see any good reason for it happening either.
Seems to have worked for some people though.
Nothing to sneeze at? If the computer i spent alot of money on gets improved performance, ill sneeze on it all day. ;)
it's indeed an old thing, and most likely some bug in WMP, just remember it works by giving realtime prio to the threads being executed, thus a possibility to suck try any background applications.
lol @ Dolk
I discovered this weekend that defragging my hard drive and moving the swap file to a drive different from the one WoW is on drastically improves load times. Cut mine to a quarter of where it was.
if you go from 40 fps to 45-50 (let's say 48 for ease of calculations), that's a 20% increase. Nothing to sneeze at.