3 Things You Can Do to Make World of Warcraft Run Faster on Vista

So, if you like, I jumped on Vista thinking it would make everything better and faster. I’m sure you’re just as disappointed. So, without giving you any technical reasons why it’s running slower (on the same computer I was using with Windows XP just a week ago…), let’s jump right into speeding things up.

First things first, let’s make sure we have the latest video card drivers. So far, every time a new driver has come out for my video card, it’s been the biggest single boost to WoW performance ever! So update your drivers often! If you can’t tell which video card is in your system, right-click on your desktop and click customize (remember, you were on Vista now). Next, click on “Display Settings” and in the drop down box you should see the make and model of your video card. Mine is an NVIDIA card so you would have to go to nvidia to retrieve the newest drivers. If your card is an ATI card, go ahead and browse to ati.amd for the latest drivers.

Alright, now that we have the newest video card drivers (and have rebooted our computer), let’s take a look at the next big push. Many people will discuss my suggestions in this section, but that’s a good thing, because depending on your video card model, driver version, DirectX version, and whether or not you have an Adobe product loaded on your system (strange, what? isn’t it, luckily (it doesn’t matter because we’re going to play with the settings here anyway…) these settings will be different for everyone. So, let’s start with the display properties of World of Warcraft.

While Warcraft is running, hover your mouse over the latency bar. Yeah, that little green bar (although probably yellow if you’re on one of the original damn servers) that tells you the latency between you and the wow servers. Ever detected a recent patch, it also shows us our video FPS (frames per second). So this is what I want it to do. Start changing the settings in the video options menu and keep restarting wow and check this number. Smooth gameplay ranges from 30-45fps (and of course higher on faster computers…) and will go up or down depending on where you are (in Orgrimmar expect low FPS, and in arena you can expect low FPS much higher) so make sure you are in the same place when you take each sample. This is time consuming and irritating, but once you have the optimal settings for your system, your game will be much smoother. Remember, when you hover over the video settings, Blizzard usually tells you if the settings will help or hinder performance.

This last setting is relevant only for Windows Vista. Here are two settings I want to point out that destroyed the performance of my system. Duel monitor setups will slow down a lot on Vista, and not running Warcraft in full screen will be a huge performance blight. Now let’s talk about Vista settings. What I want you to do is right click on the World of Warcraft icon and go to “Properties”. In properties you will have to go to the “compatibility” tab. Check “Disable visual themes”, “Disable desktop compositing” and “Disable display scaling at high DPI settings” and click apply. This will disable some of Vista’s special effects while World of Warcraft is running. This will help WoW performance. I haven’t noticed “Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” to make any difference.

Well, these are just three things I’ve done to make my system run faster, and I’d love to hear your feedback on other things you can do to make wow run better on Vista. Please drop me a line on my site and I’ll be sure to share it with everyone I can.

For the horde! (And yes, Vista is a huge upgrade from XP and will eventually be able to play the same as XP. For those of you who haven’t switched yet, you might want to reconsider if you’re an extreme WoW player.