World of Warcraft freezes and stutters periodically

potatan · Post by **potatan** » Tue Apr 08, 2008 10:30 am

Hi,

When I load World of Warcraft the CPU jumps from an average of 10-15% up to 100% and stays there pretty constantly whilst playing. This doesn't seem to affect gameplay most of the time (and I understand it may be relatively normal behaviour for running games under Wine), but occasionally I get a complete lock up of the game for about 3 seconds. The game screen freezes completely and the sound stutters during this time.

These stutters very often follow a mouse-click (for instance when selecting items, or speaking to NPCs), but not exclusively - the game also sometimes locks up while just running around. Also no difference between left or right click for the frequency of the problem.

My frame rate is fine, maybe 50-70fps on average, and my network lag is also fine, about 40-60ms.

I'm running 32 bit Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on an AMD 64 3500+ with 2GB RAM, using an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS, using Wine 0.9.58

I have disabled all my Addons to see if that helps, and it doesn't. I have also added the Wine registry edits and config.wtf amendments suggested elsewhere (particularly in the WoW Wine Wiki).

Any ideas? Or any other info I can provide?

Many thanks in advance.

potatan · Post by **potatan** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 2:31 am

Does anyone have any ideas?

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Thu Apr 10, 2008 9:59 am

potatan wrote:

Does anyone have any ideas?

Did you play with the same set up before the 2.4 patch, and if so did
you have this same trouble then? I have noticed that 2.4 seems to be
hitting my machine harder than the game did pre-patch although I don't
see any obvious game changes to explain why. If you can lower your video
settings in game and get the problem to go away then the fix may be a
newer video card, or to play with the lower video settings. The pauses
on clicking NPCs, etc. can also be server side lag that doesn't show up
in your FPS or network, but still pauses game play.

Tricia

potatan · Post by **potatan** » Sat Apr 12, 2008 3:39 am

Thanks for the suggestions - the video card was new at Christmas (I treated myself!), and the problem existed before the latest patch.

I've been playing around a bit with video settings and so far the problem only seems to occur when I run the game in Windowed Mode. If I run it full-screen, the lock-ups seem to go away (so far) - but then I lose sound when I alt-tab out of the game and back into it. I have read other reports of that problem with sound so will investigate, but I'd prefer to run in Windowed mode, obviously without the lock-ups.

I can't think of an obvious reason why running it in a window would cause this problem - I do use Compiz though, so maybe I'll try disabling that and see how I get on.

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Mon Apr 14, 2008 10:21 am

I'm not sure if you have tried this but if you are still getting the
stuttering/pausing every few seconds:

edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add:

Option "UseFastTLS" "2"

to the Video card "Device" Section.

That was taken from the WOW troubleshooting at help.ubuntu.com but I
have seen it on several forums for other distros also, for both Nvidia
and ATI cards.

Tricia

Jim Hall · Post by **Jim Hall** » Mon Apr 14, 2008 7:19 pm

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 10:21 AM, tparker <[email protected]> wrote:

I'm not sure if you have tried this but if you are still getting the
stuttering/pausing every few seconds:

edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add:

Option "UseFastTLS" "2"

to the Video card "Device" Section.

That was taken from the WOW troubleshooting at help.ubuntu.com but I have
seen it on several forums for other distros also, for both Nvidia and ATI
cards.

Tricia

I have a friend who had to disable Compiz to play WOW. In the in-game
settings in the sound section check the one that plays in the background if
you switch focus (I think thats how its phrased). Also, on my Debian Etch
with Gnome desktop I switch workspaces with "Ctrl+Alt+[arrow key of choice]
- MUST be an arrow key. Don't know if that helps, but it works for me.

Jim
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potatan · Post by **potatan** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 5:33 am

Thanks for the suggestions.
I added UseFastTls 2, didn't help the stuttering/lock ups

Setting the option to play sound in the background did help with the sound disappearing, but now I have another couple of problems.

When running WoW in full screen mode, I can alt-tab back to my browser,email etc. just fine. But when I switch back to WoW, it doesn't go full screen, instead it fills the screen between the top and bottom panels (i.e. I can still see the panels). Not a huge problem, but as I think running the game full screen has sorted out the lock ups, I'd like it to switch back to full screen when I alt-tab back to it.

If I use rotate desktop cube (ctrl-alt-left/right arrow), I can switch out of Warcraft to the next desktop, but when I try and switch back, the game has disappeared! I can still hear the in-game sounds in the background so I know it's running somewhere, but it's not on any of the desktops.

I'm tempted to just wait for the next Ubuntu release, sometime in June I believe, to see if that will help. I will probably be rebuilding from scratch as my install choices of disks/partitions etc. were not ideal initially.

But I wouldn't mind getting to the bottom of this problem in the meantime.

Thanks.

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 12:11 pm

potatan wrote:

I'm tempted to just wait for the next Ubuntu release, sometime in June I believe

I'll post again if I find anything else to try that might help. Also,
the next Ubuntu release is next week, on April 24.

Tricia

ulberon · Post by **ulberon** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 12:56 pm

If you haven't yet, try the game in crossover games. I wasn't going to buy it but it's really a great product. As far as I can tell, the bulk of what it offers is all the default regedit settings and .ini tweaking, etc, for supported games is done for you (which honestly, if you assume you have to spend 1 hour per game finding a wiki listing all the tweaks, times X games you play, it adds up pretty quick. One hour is being generous). So if there is some tweak you have to do to eliminate that, it may already be there for you (since I think warcraft 3 is supported). It's free for 7 days.

bradley newton haug · Post by **bradley newton haug** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 6:03 pm

you may wish to run wow fullscreen in its own instance of X, I usually gain
a good 10fps doing so, but this may not fix the problem you are having.
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DARKGuy · Post by **DARKGuy** » Fri Apr 18, 2008 7:12 pm

It may not be WINE itself.

What about background processes? tracker? updatedb running randomly?
WoW is very CPU intensive, I'd assume that the other processes get cut
on CPU when WoW is running and that's why it stutters.

Try cleaning your system up, kill any extra processes and stop any
extra services before you run WoW in a separate X instance. Try
killing GDM (sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop) in a terminal (ctrl+alt+f1-f6)
and running WoW in its own X instance.

See if it helps

.

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:30 AM, potatan <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi,

When I load World of Warcraft the CPU jumps from an average of 10-15% up to 100% and stays there pretty constantly whilst playing. This doesn't seem to affect gameplay most of the time (and I understand it may be relatively normal behaviour for running games under Wine), but occasionally I get a complete lock up of the game for about 3 seconds. The game screen freezes completely and the sound stutters during this time.

These stutters very often follow a mouse-click (for instance when selecting items, or speaking to NPCs), but not exclusively - the game also sometimes locks up while just running around. Also no difference between left or right click for the frequency of the problem.

My frame rate is fine, maybe 50-70fps on average, and my network lag is also fine, about 40-60ms.

I'm running 32 bit Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on an AMD 64 3500+ with 2GB RAM, using an Nvidia GeForce 7600 GS.

I have disabled all my Addons to see if that helps, and it doesn't. I have also added the Wine registry edits and config.wtf amendments suggested elsewhere (particularly in the WoW Wine Wiki).

Any ideas? Or any other info I can provide?

Many thanks in advance.

tparker · Post by **tparker** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 7:53 pm

Thanks to everyone that suggested running WoW in it's own X instance
with nothing in the background. I tried it and there was a slight game
speed difference, but it didn't fix the disappearing graphics or pauses.
I did re-download and re-install wine 0.9.58 and that did away with both
of those problems, so I guess it was something flakey in the first
install/update. For regular gameplay I don't think I will mess with the
separate X instance, but for raids that bit of extra few FPS might be
nice. Thank you!

Tricia