World of Warcraft Lag?

[hysteria]

When I play World of Warcraft on my Macbook Pro 17in I get what I can only describe as lag. My connection is good, and usually under 300ms, but when riding a gryphon or just walking it get very choppy. My RAM usage says I only have 10mb free, but like 300-500 inactive and my CPU usage isn't usually toped out.

This is a recent problem and I haven't had this happen to me ever nice I got my computer. This computer runs COD2 in decent res very well along with Quake 4. WoW doesn't require a great video card and I don't even run it in full screen mode since the problem began occuring (which didn't help).

I've run disk utility thing, but I don't think that helps.

Any ideas?

 

[hysteria]

Okay, if no one knows why this happens, then could someone answer this: is it normal to only have say 10 mb of free RAM when running a game or something? If more RAM was alloted to free RAM would it make it run more smoothly?

 

[Swarmlord]

10MB of RAM free sounds far too small to me. I get lag when flying though even on my high end game computer. Also, their fps display is a joke. I will sometimes studder step while getting 65 fps and in other situations fight smoothly in a 40 man raid with only 10 fps. Go figure!

I'll have to see how much free RAM I have when I run WoW on my Powerbook, but I suspect that you have things running in the background. I run nothing in the background when I play the game except Ventrillo when I raid.

 

[hysteria]

I have nothing else actually open, all the little arrow guys below the icons are not there. =/

 

[gammamonk]

how much ram do you actually have tho? It sounds crazy but wow doesn't run perfectly unless you have 2gigs or more. 1gig is often not enough.

My friend has a really nice dual-core PC with a high end gaming videocard, and a few weeks ago one of his sets of 512 sticks died. So he went from 2 gigs to 1 gig. Wow got all crappy and slow. Then he bought 2x 1gig sticks and has 3gigs total. It runs great again.

 

[CubeHacker]

how much ram do you actually have tho? It sounds crazy but wow doesn't run perfectly unless you have 2gigs or more. 1gig is often not enough.

My friend has a really nice dual-core PC with a high end gaming videocard, and a few weeks ago one of his sets of 512 sticks died. So he went from 2 gigs to 1 gig. Wow got all crappy and slow. Then he bought 2x 1gig sticks and has 3gigs total. It runs great again.

No offense, but your friend must either be running a ton of crap in the background along with WoW or his system is loaded with viruses and spyware, because WoW does NOT need 2gb of RAM, especially under windows. I've done extensive tests with WoW and ram, and even after several hours of playing, both WoW and all of Windows never used up more than 700mb of ram. For his system to become choppy with only 1GB means that something other than WoW is sucking up all his free RAM.

As for the original poster, "inactive" ram simply means its parts of memory that is currently filled with stuff, but that stuff isn't required by anything at the moment. In other words, inactive ram can quickly be emptied and used towards any other app, including WoW, if more ram is needed.

If you are still experiencing choppy gameplay, you can try turning off options such as antialiasing, view distance, or disabling excessive UI mods if you're using any. You might also try asking for help on the WoW Mac forums - the developers there can be very helpful.

 

[LucasLand]

I play wow on my imac G5. For 3 months the game played flawlessly, but now the game freezes all the time. even when i haven't logged into the game yet.

How do i know if my ram is going bad or needs to be replaced?