Update on the Performance Issues of mine in 9.0

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Hello everyone,

you know what I hate? When you have something you get used to and it takes you a while, but then someone comes and screws it up and you have to undergo the entire “debugging” process once again. That was probably one of the reasons for my ragepost from yesterday, because something that worked for over a year suddenly got screwed. Personally, I was perfectly happy with WoT graphics before 9.0 and I think any upgrades in this department should be purely optional. Either way, the FPS dropped for me heavily.

Basically, I did want the graphics to be at least the same as they were before 9.0. Settings I used before 9.0:

- improved render, 1440*900, anti-aliasing on
- tank texture quality: high
- terrain quality: high or medium (can’t remember)
- lighting, post-processing: medium
- shadows: off
- things like trees, vegetation and other such effects turned off or low

From last night, I made following changes:

- tank texture quality: from high to medium
- terrain quality: medium
- lighting, post-processing: low

The rest remained the same (either low or off).

In the last post, I wrote that on 8.11 settings, my FPS was 30-50, while in 9.0, using the settings same settings, it dropped to 10-15 FPS, for no reason. At this point, I would like to thank you for the feedback and all the helpful advice you wrote me, there were tons of e-mails with various tips.

What I did:

- I am using a hard drive, not SDD, so I defragmented it properly
- cleaned up my computer (not physically, I keep it clean all the time and so should you – I looked for malware and such, found nothing out of the ordinary, no infection or whatever, but just to be case, I ran the cleaner and MBAM)
- I upgraded the graphic drivers to the newest version (despite some people advised that this is not a good idea, because some graphic cards bug out with them – I leave the decision to do it up to you of course)
- I deleted the %appdata%\wargaming.net folder, numerous (Russian and EU) players reported this helps (be advised, this will delete all your settings you have in World of Tanks, you will have to configure it from scratch)
- disabled the hard drive indexing service (thanks to Zarax for specifically mentioning this – to do it, right click on the drive name and disable the “Allow Indexing Service” ticker, it makes file searching slower, but makes the drive access faster)

The result of the action above was that now, the battle loading times were cut significantly and I now have 30-40 FPS. I have absolutely no idea where the issue originated, but the steps above helped. Once again, thansk to all of you for your advice.

There is one more “controversial” step that can be taken, I haven’t tried it, but you might, if you are having further FPS issues.

In 9.0, multicore load support was introduced. What it means is that where before core 1 of your CPU was always loaded to 100 percent and the rest went to core 2, now, all the cores (tested on quadcore PC) are loaded to 40-60 percent – the load is spread. This is how it looks disabled (until 9.0):

disabled

This is how it looks enabled (9.0 onwards)

enabled

This system can be manually disabled by changing the “res/engine_config.xml” file. The file is encrypted, so here is the modified version of the file with this option disabled (source: original LJ post). Some players on Russian forums reported that disabling this new feature helped them increase their FPS on certain low-end configurations. If you decide to try it, ALWAYS back your old file up.

67 thoughts on “Update on the Performance Issues of mine in 9.0”

  1. Try disabling anti-aliasing. I find it has a pretty big impact on my system.

    If it helps, then you should be able to bump up the other things to take advantage of any gains.

    • The biggest resource hog in this game is
      1) Lighting (even on minimum)
      2) FXAA
      3) Shadows
      4) Track FX / Extra FX (Volumetric smoke is a killer)

      i7 4771 (3.9ghz)
      16gb (2400Mhz 1.6v) (12gb NTFS ram disk)
      660 TI PE (fully OC)
      5760×1080 (3x 23.9″)

      I can run max GFX on 1 monitor but when I use surround (3x) if I have lighting enabled i get about 15 FPS drop that and it goes up to 40-50 FPS
      FXAA will make your game have lots of micro studdering if your GFX card is too slow or doesn’t have enough memory
      as long as you have 1/2gb video ram you shouldn’t have to mess with the texture resolutions

      PS – Use the battle tutorial (Button beside “Missions and Events”) to test if your mods are working correctly

      • Me too! I don’t have massive drops but it feels very stuttery even on 40 FPS. In the Open Test of 9.0 I had a huuuuuge Frame increase, but the release version is extremely shity.

        Dunno why!

      • No, it’s not true multi-core. Rather, WoT is no longer bound to run on CPU 0 only. It can now be spread around multiple cores but is still basically single-process. The sound does get managed in a separate core though.

        • I don’t think so. I was messing around with core affinity before 9.0 and everytime I unchecked one of two cores, game was running slower. So I think WoT uses both cores in some way for a long time now.

  2. glad you got back up to speed again….would love to hear from WG what is causing all these FPS drops for players.

    But no doubt SerB and Storm will say that it is working as intended or too bad.

    It just makes no sense that CT_1 and CT_2 were great and actually improved performance and then by release it was knackered up.

    • It just makes no sense that CT_1 and CT_2 were great and actually improved performance and then by release it was knackered up.

      I can just sign this!

  3. Also, for those with nVidia GPUs who have problems with CTDs – the 335.23 drivers seem to fix the issue, at least for me.

    Rig config (laptop):
    I7 4700mq
    8gb ddr3
    nVidia gtx760(m) 2gb, ddr5
    win8 (64)

    • did you try 337.50 – the new beta ?
      they are supposed to increase performance up to 71% in some games.
      I’ve gain about 10fps in wot.

      • Yep – I had to re-roll to 335. 337 worked fine, but the game crashed every two minutes or so. Was kinda annoying when fighting five Kitties in Panther…

        As for FPS, I have no problem with either. Not sure if there was any drop (I have not played WoT for six month, so I do not remember what FPS counter has shown at the time). Playing on new render, maximum quality models/draw distance, 1920×1080.

    • The 337.50 BETA drivers added about 10 fps for me.

      NVIDIA GeForce 430, 4 gigs of sddr3 ram

  4. Also, there is new driver for nvidia users.. 337.50
    Ths magic driver is supposed to bypass CPU bottleneck. (sort of AMDs mantle API)
    So you should see significat performance increase if you have weaker CPU/or in cases like WoT, where no matter what your HW is, CPU is always bottleneck.
    That driver is still in beta, however I’ve gain roughly ~10fps increase on my i72630qm and GTX 770M(laptop) running all maxed out on 55-60fps, dpends on map.
    it also helped for other games, on some more on others not so much.

    And one last thing… turn off V-sync. If you cannot gain more than 60fps (or 120fps on 120Hz displays), turn it OFF! Some people cant stand it out, for me, minur horizontal tearing every now and then is worth the doubled fps rate.

    • V-sync. should be use only if fps > monitor refresh rate. So u not get split image (half frame from one, half from next). But if u got only 30-40fps turn off, GPU not check if it can push frame, so work faster.

    • “If you cannot gain more than 60fps (or 120fps on 120Hz displays), turn it OFF!”

      Turning it off will actually make it worse. A 60 Hz monitor refreshes the screen 60 times per second, so having more than 60 fps doesn’t change a thing, except it creates screen tearing.

  5. Just note that changing the terrain quality will actually mean the map shows less polygons on your screen that it has on the server, which means some shots that look fine will actually hit invisible terrain which is only shown on higher terrain quality settings.

    e.g. this guy http://i.imgur.com/MPQI1.jpg thinks he can shoot that patton because the terrain is in a slightly different place on his screen due to low terrain detail. He posted the replay on the forum asking why his shots were disappearing, but when viewed with high quality terrain you can see the truth.

    • I have set my details low before, but I think I’m aware of those hidden terrain on low settings that’s why I checked the penetration chance on the reticle when pointing at enemy tanks just to make sure I’m clear of obstacles

  7. I found that best configuration for me is: tank textures: maximum (it does not affect fps for me, either max or min = same amount of fps), terrain texture = medium (but its similiar to tank text), everything else is on low/disabled; draw distance: max or high, lags a little bit at the begining, but if playing fast tanks, it won’t lag for me while entering “new area” of map.

  9. Hi SS, try disabling the Anti Aliasing. this affects the smoothness of lines specially on a distance, and it’s quite resource hungry. Also note about v.sync, this one is limiting your fps to 60 matching mostly the hertz of most monitors which is 60Hz, to avoid image tearing when your FPS goes very high above 60. With this enabled and yours already below 60 and want it’s like limiting it further. For now I can’t say anymore yet, since my old system is almost same as yours but will check the performance later after patch here on NA.

  10. What strikes me is that there is more useful information on optimizing performance in this post & comments so far than WOT devs or support have ever bothered to supply.

    • You know what, you are absolutely right and well highlighted. The comments in this thread are productive, soundly based and far superior to anything WoT have published.

  12. Please help guys
    Since I updated to 9.0 I can`t log in to the game. I get failed to connect to the server/ the server may be unavailable. I tryed deleting the appdata, I have deleted the mods installed. What can I do to make it work other than reinstalling the whole game again?
    http://i58.tinypic.com/k9w1na.jpg

  13. Well, i hate the new HD skins.. not only because all my skins i made dont work in the future anymore, few off them already stopped working. Had over 20000 downloads on curse.com ( Rsd1975 ) and i loved it to do skins. With the new skins i have no idea what to do. They not even look good. Doesnt matte if i look at it in the garage or in game. FPS, yeah, same probs here.. less then normal…

  14. New driver installation is really bad idea. Clean your graphic card driver with “Driver Sweeper” and install the orriginal driver which comes with the cd in the graphic card box.

      • Its always a rule of thumb to install the latest as the driver disc in the box only has the first release driver which typically suck and are buggy

    • No it’s not.
      Best way is to uninstall graphics driver, restart, run Driver Sweeper to clean all remains, restart, install latest beta driver.

  15. About “graphic drivers to the newest version” is not always the best, use this driver which are proposed to your card on site. Is no always newest, but optimized for your card (new may lost this, and u get worst performance)

    • If a new driver is not made for your card, you most likely won’t be able to install it at all.
      e.g. latest Nvidia driver supports 800-100 series and even some of the old 8 & 9 series.
      Same goes for AMD, they usually have legacy drivers for older models so there is no reason to stick to the stock drivers.

  16. Change improved to standard graphic setting, FPS jumped from 20 and ear-killing fan noise to 80+ “quite” fan.
    (Running on a clevo notebook w870cu )

  18. This core load split was possible to do manually also before, and at least for me it was a must because without it i had to play with around 20 fps, but doing so improved it to ~30 fps. You just had to set affinity from task manager to one core (I used 1, and disabled 0,2,3), then apply it, and then reselect affinity to all cores. After it WOT spreaded the load to all cores, and it every core was using 50% – 75% instead of Core 0=100% and the rest three <20%.

    It is the very same trick you had to do with some other poorly optimized games, i.e. Mass Effect (can't remember if it was 1 or 2) where you had terrible, 30 seconds + load time in your spaceship's elevator, and doing this it reduced to 5-10s.

  19. for me it’s much better this patch..fps is more stable and gone up a bit and i have less ping..i have amd x2 so not the best machine..but it does look ok so far!!..there is still some sttutering like in 8.11 i guesss servers are little fucked up again

  20. Seems that you don’t optimize your PC :P,if I remember correctly the indexing system uses like 20 to 40% of your CPU and and a chunk of RAM,disabling the indexing did the trick for you.

  21. About what PC spec-wise we talk?

    I have 5y old Intel 2core E8200 2,4Ghz + 560Ti and had ~25fps at 8.11.
    I did not played yesterday – “never play on patch day”.

  22. Right now, on my pc it uses 2 cores, more precisely first two.
    To make it to use all of them I uncheck core 0&1 from afinity, I hit ok & after that recheck them back and thereby will be used all. Until 9.0 I did that only with core 0.
    This solved me the fps drops, but now I have ~60 fps instead of ~80 with almost the same settings (foliage,flora & blur off).. and it uses almost 1500MB VRAM and about 1200MB ram (<1200vram <1000 ram in 8.11).
    1080p, 3570k@4.2GHz, gtx660@1137MHz

  23. “In 9.0, multicore load support was introduced. What it means is that where before core 1 of your CPU was always loaded to 100 percent and the rest went to core 2, now, all the cores (tested on quadcore PC) are loaded to 40-60 percent – the load is spread. This is how it looks disabled (until 9.0):”

    I really doubt that this is new but was introduced with patch 8.10 already, as since 8.10 the load of my cores look like in your last picture, evenly split up amongst the various cores & threads of my CPU.

  24. My fps was dropping for last few patches, but this patch it returned to normal.

    With overclocked CPU i used to have 50-60 fps just after beta.
    It used to be 35-45 fps in 8.9 . Now its back to 50-60 fps.

    (Intel E5300, ATI HD5570)

  25. Running fine for me but was always running good, The thing is people want to max the game with shitty computers i’m not boosting or anything but it’s the truth, Lower down the settings and you will have a better gaming experience trust me… Stop trying to max the game out if you know your PC cant handle it very simple logic.

    INTEL i7 3770K @4.5GHz 1.23v
    MSI z77 Mpower Big Bang
    Asus GTX780
    RipJaws- 16GB Ram 1600Mhz
    Corsair H100 Cooler
    Corsair HX850W Power supply
    Corsair 600T mid Case White Edition
    Asus VG278HE 27-inch Widescreen LED 144Hz

  27. Anti-aliasing should be the first disabled in a low end machine.

    I have a mid machine and it is always disabled!

    • Depends. If it’s FXAA then I would rather disable lightning or reduce shadows and post-processing.

  30. Always talking about the FPS drop pfff

    Old and crappy pc have better FPS when will you say this on FTR ?

    And you can better talk about the change of Chat message.
    You can’t even post anymore a battle report in the chat.Really annoying.

  31. It’s not normal that one launches a product which according to specs it’s fine but then the customer has to find ways to make it work using their own time and resources to do what the developers must do. They count on the fact that many have premium accounts and don’t want to lose their time by not being able to play. This is how real business is done, not with common sense… Also, they have the guts to say “all is fine” or just as worse not bother giving an answer to this situation to the ones that pay their salaries.

    I stopped putting money into it and will never go back to that ill habbit. Thus I will return to the game once it passes the quality checks and minimum level of decency. There is no way I’m putting money in upgrading the graphics card either.

  32. Besides the normal basic stuff like defrag, etc., When that is finished you could do the following:

    First clean up any process that kills your system resources, such as Steam, Java update launcher, Adobe update launcher, any program help launcher. Open the task manager and end the process. You don’t need those when playing WoT. And besides its annoying as heck when you get “update Adobe now?” message in the middle of a match.

    Running WoT you have two options, run it as an Administrator or as a user. As an administrator, just right click on the WoT icon and choose the “Run as Administrator” option. So the WoT process will have administrator rights. If this procedure is used you have nothing else to adjust.

    To run as a user, click to open as a normal WoT application launcher.
    Then open the Windows task manager.
    Right click on the WoT Launcher process.
    Then select process priority.
    Set priority from Normal to High (never set to real time!)
    Right click on the WoT Launcher process.
    Set Affinity on the WoT launcher process, unclick CPU#0

    Now what happen with these settings, your system will now give your WoT executable process higher CPU resources, and pushes the WoT process on all the other available CPUs. The Windows operating software dumps all of it’s processes on CPU#0. Doing this will speed the game up faster to a certain degree. You will have to do these steps with each reboot

    If anyone has an AMD board (like me), AMD now has a new software program called Raptr. It looks at your installed games and gives suggested video optimizations. I did this last night and made changes in both WoT and WoWP. Both games looked better from the Raptr suggestion

    AMD Raptr information
    http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/Pages/raptr.aspx

    Another WoT player from the NA server has a few suggestions too.
    Suggested 9.0 Optimization
    http://forum.worldoftanks.com/index.php?/topic/349743-wot-9x-guide-for-better-fpsgraphic-optimization-30/

  33. I a have a decent PC… well a little more than a decent PC and with all settings at maximum has some microfreeze, rather unpleasent.. but with one step down.. perfect play.. no errors what so ever

  35. A few day before I was playing WoT with over 30 fps with at least medium or high graphics settings. After all this graphics improvements, enhancements, optimizations, HD models etc I have to go to the very low graphics quality settings to be able to reach same fps. Thanks WG for this “improvements” :/

  37. All’s well fine and dandy in my case, FPS wise. The only dip(and annoying one at that) in performance is if I get in sniper view. Normally I run @ around 30-40 FPS but if I go sniper mode, the FPS drops to mid 15-20ish.

    Tried screwing around with extra sniper effects, scope effect and such but no discernible difference. Any ideas?

  38. I could easily tell that WoT isn’t coded properly. I run FX-8120 proc at 3.4 GHz with HD 7850, and my brother runs an i7-3600 with HD 7670. Both of us got almost the same frame/s at med settings, which is hovering 30-40. Easily I can tell that the GPU to it’s potential isn’t at all used here. However I came across a guy who runs an i3-3220 with HD 7770 and gets 50 frame/s at high. Telling you how not good the coding is.

  39. 30-40 FPS… those were the days. I maybe have played one match since the update and got disgusted by the 70-100 FPS with packet loss and all graphic details set to low/off/minimum except drawing distance. What disgusts me even more is the fact that I should buy perhaps a new graphic card for no less than 200 EUR so that I could potentially enjoy this game again on my 80 MB/s VDSL connection with perfect parameters between me and my ISP, SSD and other fancy hardware stuff. LOL, I also vacuum my case regularly and even use an air compressor to get out the dust from literally all places. What Tpaktop2_1 suggests maybe could work, but why I should do such things when there are other games out there that provide more satisfaction than frustration? The problem with most of you guys is that you are totally addicted to this game, because you have a) invested so much time into it and b) invested so much money. Good luck to all of you dropping this game like nympho girl friend ;)