Flux

You can significantly speed up WoW on Windows with a simple setting. Awhile ago a number of people figured out that if you run windows media player at the same time, the game runs faster! Unbelievable as this sounds, it’s true. And it is because media player tells Windows to use different timings which can be better for WoW. This works especially well on older or multicore computers but seems to help just about anyone if only just a little. You may see your load times go down and your frames per second go up.

Media Player essentially changes your thread scheduler timings using a windows API. This effects every program running on your computer. This tweak is fairly well known in other games and among server admins, but it was just discovered or rediscovered to work for WoW.

If you don’t care to run media player, or want to have all your computer resources available for WoW. You can directly configure WoW to act similarly using a special command.

Go to your chatline in the game and type either of these commands. Then, restart your game.
/console timingmethod 1
/console timingmethod 2

Blizzard hasn’t been specific on how they work. But setting the timing to 1 seems to help older computers and setting it to 2 seems to be better for multicore computers. Setting it to 1 is similar to running windows media player. Try both to see which works best. The official word is,

They’re different timing modes for the game that will do different things depending on how your mutlicore processor behaves. This command was first introduced in 2.0.3. timingmethod 1 is generally for systems where the cores do not synchronize. You might run into issues like your framerate caps at 64 instead of your vsync value. timingmethod 2 is a higher resolution timing method and you won’t hit the cap with that.

From what I understand, 2 can do that if your computer spends too much time thinking. It basically tells the game that it can think more often than being constrained by a time limit. You might experience similar behaviors with timingmethod 1 with a media program up, such as Windows Media Player. Those programs change the timing systemwide while they’re running.

There is also an equivalent way to set the timings if you don’t want to start your game twice. Go to your WTF folder and edit your Config.wtf file with a text editor like Notepad. The default location is C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Config.wtf. Add the following line at the bottom.

set timingMethod "1"
set timingMethod "2"

Give it a try and let us know if it helps. If neither makes much of a difference or even worse causes problems, you can set it back to 0 on the chatline or delete the line from your config file.

Tags: tip
Author: aos

This entry was posted by aos on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Games, WoW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.