World of Warcraft Performance Help

[schaffinosx]

I took a look at the World of Warcraft guide, but didn't find anything that would help me with my particular issue. So, let me give you some context:

About a year ago, I purchased World of Warcraft. It quickly came to my attention that, if I wanted to get more out of the experience, I would need to upgrade my RAM. So, I replaced the default 1 GB of RAM with two 2 GB sticks of RAM.

Afterwards, World of Warcraft ran great and I enjoyed the game tremendously. Ever since I've downloaded Lion, however, WoW has been running very slow. I tried a couple of things, from deleting the WTF, interface, and cache files, and even did a clean install to insure that there wasn't something wrong with the application.

Still, World of Warcraft is running slowly, even when I put the graphics at low. I've made sure not to have many applications running when I play; usually iTunes is the only one open.

What stuns me is that, like I mentioned, WoW used to play great on my computer, so it's clearly not a case of my computer not being powerful enough to handle it.

Can anyone point me in the right direction or give me some advice?

 

[macking104]

Lion uses more memory. Other forum posts say 2gb is minimum for Lion, So Memory and graphics intensive games would need more. Time to get more memory.

 

[schaffinosx]

Lion uses more memory. Other forum posts say 2gb is minimum for Lion, So Memory and graphics intensive games would need more. Time to get more memory.

I have 4 GB of memory total. Plus, I know that's not the case granted a friend of mine who has the same computer as I (but with a larger monitor) is running World of Warcraft flawlessly with 4 GB of memory.

[EDIT] I came back to this post as I realized that you're actually completely right. I'd forgotten that my buddy I referred to actually hadn't upgraded to Lion yet, granted he had heard there were plenty of bugs and the like. He decided to wait until some of them were resolved until making the upgrade. After some more research on the matter, I think you're completely right about what the problem is. The real issue is that my model of iMac doesn't support any more RAM than 4 GB. Looks like I might need to a.) buy a new computer or b.) go back to Snow Leopard.

 

[QuantumLo0p]

IMO you don't have enough ram. I have 8GB mainly because I run a bunch of different apps as well as WoW. There are also 6 user accounts on my Mini and often there is switching going on, not always logging out. So, at any given time, there are 1-4 users logged in, running Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, Wow; you name it. I remember when I upgraded to 8GB and swapped the hdd for a Momentus XT because it transformed my Mini into what it should have been sold by Apple. The standard configuration is totally under-equipped for typical everyday use.

Anyway, back to your issue. Start up Activity Monitor and look at your page outs. IMO you should have none if you have ample ram.

My pages ins are plenty but I have no page outs. Sometimes the memory used is reporting as high as almost 7GB but the system stays snappy and responsive. At today's ram prices you could upgrade quite cheaply. Adding a single 4GB stick is a very cheap way to go but if you like to push your system then I recommend buying two 4GB sticks which should hold you over for quite a while. IMO if anyone is getting a lot of page outs with 8GB of ram then they really need to get a Mac Pro, LOL.

BTW, you may want to check your graphics settings in WoW and post back here. There are a couple of settings that can really choke the Mini.