Delete interfaces, W.TF (remove .) and WDB folders under your WOW folder.

Turn down your in-game video settings.

You need spell detail on relatively high to do some encounters, so turn everything else down.
Turn shadows off, and death effect off.

Since I reformatted my computer I had to reinstall Wow so my folders are empty. I lowered my settings and still didn't help. I downloaded the driver for the video card last night and when I first logged on today I got 60 fps for the first time ever I believe. It slowly went back to 0 fps and then to unplayable. Any other help please?

I'm in the same boat with my XPS M1730. I haven't been able to determine if its due to the impending failure of my videocards which Dell seems to deny is happening, or WoW. this problem is happening all over the Blizzard forums though with no common link between systems. Most users seem to have an Nvidia card, but not all. This is happening w/ XP, Vista, Mac, etc.

 

Personally, I can usually play for about 5 minutes before my frames drop to .5 or so, but when I was on the phone w/ customer service my framerate stayed at 60 for a whole 10. I've disabled services, tried various video and sound drivers, nothing works.

 

The only solution that seems to work is stop playing WoW. If this is happening in other games it's probably hardware related, though. 

My screen doesn't blink or freeze, and I've never had a BSOD on this system. It did that occasionally a few months after getting the system, and the video drivers would crash, but it hasn't done it since, and after blinking things would return to normal. What I get is a decreasing framerate with a spike in CPU usage. After I finally exit the game CPU usage will spike to 100% no matter what I try to do. Only rebooting will resolve this. If you have a fix to suggest, I'm all ears.

 

Is it some sort of video-card underclocking by the system? There doesn't seem to be a way to force the m1730 to run videocard and processor fans at full speed from the bios or from within Vista, just max CPU load.

Well, bstar4k,

I don't know about the OP since he's using an ATI, but I think I know what your problem is but I'm not sure.

Does your screen "freeze" or "blink" before it drops it's FPS?  2 - 5 second freeze?

After this slow down, do you get a BSOD WINDOWS STOP error?

Have you tested with other games?

 

My screen blinks or freezes for a short time before it starts to decrease the framerate.

I've tested this in other games and it occurs in other games.

I've concluded that it's the nVidia G86 issue (heat related and thus random).

Your issue may or may not be the same.

I know that the m1730 has either a 8700 (G86 overclocked) or 8800 (G92) chip in it.

So 50% chance that you are affected by the bad chip thing.

 

Read around in other threads.  Fix is to call warranty service. 

 

I was afraid you would say that, lol. I specifically asked them about my gpu (dual/SLI 8700m) or underclocking from power issues, and they denied it. I guess they probably want me to reinstall my OS and games though before admitting that Nvidia sold them a bad stack of graphics cards. Thanks for your help, once I get home form work tonight I'll call them again.

Finally someone feels my pain. This is so frustrating. If you happen to find a solution could you let me know.

Bump

I did a full reinstall of Vista off my Dell DVDs and installed all their drivers. I think I have fixed the sustained super low FPS issue, but now I'm getting repeated black screen / flickering using the official Dell approved drivers, which may or may not be imminent hardware failure, yay.

 

Try looking at the following for your problems:

 

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx - this is a post regarding windows DMA assignments. I've seen this pop up a few times in Warcraft issues. Basically, DMA channel communications errors causes XP (and I assume Vista) to downgrade the channel DMA4 -> 3> 2>1> PIO. This slows data transfer. From what I hear this could indicate a serious hardware issue, but then again w/ the size of WoW now, it could just be too big and bulky for their increasingly bad coding.

 

There is also this page from Blizzard:

 

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=174615578&sid=1 - It covers their system performance guide. It might help you go over thigns you may have overlooked. I'm not sure what the ATi Catalyst AI system is, but it has been a cause of concern for some users. 

 

The problem with this bug is that there isn't any clear cut one problem that seems to lead to the same end result. Its frustrating as heck. You and I have the same issue, but vastly different hardware. It might be anything, up to and including a plugin that someone else in your guild is using to try to synch up with you (gatherer, raid mods, etc).

 

One thing that might help is to install process explorer and run it while you play WoW. This is a lot better than task manager and can show threads inside processes. 

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

 

Also, this is an odd one / old one too- I know guys who can't get good frame rates UNLESS they're also running media player. It doesn't have to be doing anything necessarily, just open.

 

Let me know if anything works for you. There are a number of potential issues here that are pretty difficult to comprehend. There are potential hardware failures, OS patches that could be a problem, Blizzard seems like they're having programming issues, I've even found evidence of routers causing problems as well.