Frame rates drops on my laptop since a few days ago (BGs with lots of casts)

EDIT: I am now extremely confident that this has something to do with the effect Deathwing and Ragnaros update 3 days ago has had on skill graphics, not sure how or why though.

Since a few days ago, I have totally unplayable frame rates in big fights in bgs on my laptop... this has NEVER happened before.

I believe this has something to do with spell effects since I see them WAY past farclip distance and with far more detail than I used to.

E.G. In EoTS i clearly see: Chain lightning, arcane missiles, recklessness, boneshield, shadowmourne swirls etc which happen on the other side of the map, they are all WAY more visible from WAY further away now.

In battlegrounds there appears to be (almost) no limit to how far I can see them from... I also see players from a crazy distance in BGs... unlike in world. I no longer get the "disappearing" channel effects... infact I see them from totally stupid distances away despite everything being on ultra low.

No problems on my PC.
There is no random **** running in the background on my system, I have total control over anything running on it. I am not overheating. Addons are not to blame.

Laptop is an i7-2640M with HD3000 onboard graphics. (yea, old and crap, but never had any issues before.)

I can hardly fall under 60fps (vsync cap) in SW/Elwynn etc, but the moment a lot of casts start flying I get my frame rate nuked, I'm seeing drops to 2-3fps in AV when everyone is casting, (short jerky drops before recovering to 40-50fps only to drop again, seemingly depending on amount of casts flying around) I only had the game feel like this on my laptop in 120vs120 orgrimar raid before!

I have everything on low (I actually like the clarity, I even play low graphics, except view distance, on a beast of a pc)

I have tried to set farclip to minimum, but it has no meaningful effect in bgs, so i raised it a little. I can still see all spells as if I have near infinite farclip regardless of farclip setting.

Edited some cvars ingame and my Config.wtf is below (some stuff removed due to irrelevance).

SET hwDetect "0"
SET gxRefresh "60"
SET gxMultisampleQuality "0.000000"
SET videoOptionsVersion "3"
SET Gamma "1.000000"
SET showToolsUI "1"
SET Sound_OutputDriverName "System Default"
SET farclip "397"
SET gxResolution "1600x900"
SET Sound_EnableAmbience "0"
SET Sound_EnableMusic "0"
SET Sound_EnableDSPEffects "0"
SET particleDensity "0.10000000149012"
SET environmentDetail "0.75"
SET weatherDensity "0"
SET ffxGlow "0"
SET ffxDeath "0"
SET groundEffectDist "1"
SET ffxSpecial "0"
SET SkyCloudLOD "1"
SET textureFilteringMode "0"
SET Sound_MasterVolume "1"
SET Sound_SFXVolume "1"
SET baseMip "1"
SET Sound_EnableErrorSpeech "0"
SET timingTestError "0"
SET Sound_EnableSFX "0"
SET Sound_EnableEmoteSounds "0"
SET Sound_EnablePetSounds "0"
SET gxFixLag "0"
SET lastCharacterIndex "1"
SET spellEffectLevel "1"
SET timingMethod "2"
SET showfootprints "0"
SET projectedTextures "1"
SET shadowLOD "0"
SET ffx "0"
SET showfootprintparticles "0"

Note: I have tried projected textures off, it makes no meaningful difference, besides I always played with it on before without issues.

Any help appreciated, but if you are telling me to install any program, please explain how it supposedly achieves an improvement, I am interested in driver level DX modifications but not in these "all in one speed up all your games" things, unless there is a technical explanation to back up why it should actually help me.

I think the key to this is nerfing the hell out of distance at which spells are visible, and the quality of the visible spells which seem to be too high.

To be honest, I would be happy to REMOVE chain lightning/sm swirls/etc etc visibility completely via some driver level hack, I do not care about seeing all that crap, I know what is going on without it, it just gets in the way.

Have you tried disabling all addons? Addons can cause fps drop if something is wrong with their settings.

Edit: edited in stuff about addons while you replied suggesting addons, but still I went and tried again just to be double sure:

Turned off every single addon. Felt smoother in SW and Elwynn because without addons I got flat 60fps capped all the time, no drops to 57fps.

Went in a bg. BOOOOM REKT 10fps moment the fight at LM started.

Is there any way some change on THEIR side could have resulted in this crazy screwed up fps which I never had problems with before? I notice I do not see channeled casts disappear anymore, so something appears to have affected my graphics... something not my side.

I used to be able to RECORD while playing and still have more playable frame rates even in huge mid fight in AV...

Sure I could play on my PC anyway, but wow is a just a casual chillout game, if I have time to sit at my PC I usually play a real game instead.

Are you doing anything specific when fps drop happens? I tried to do batthegrounds on laptop a few days ago and fps went very low while I had map open in sota but I didn't try to find out what causes it.

Closing other programs may help - some FPS drops are caused by lack of memory. (join BG, if it starts to lag go to your desktop, right click and select Start task manager or simply CTRL + Del and select Task manager, select performance and check memory and CPU usage)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Serlatoilet

Closing other programs may help - some FPS drops are caused by lack of memory. (join BG, if it starts to lag go to your desktop, right click and select Start task manager or simply CTRL + Del and select Task manager, select performance and check memory and CPU usage)

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I have this issue even when I only have comodo firewall, winpatrol, greenshot and F.lux running, I know almost everything going on on my computer almost all the time.

Nothing strange happening in procmon, nothing unwanted is evident when looking at what is running in daphne, diskmark tests are same as ever, all my other benchmarks are the same as the same as ever, nothing strange happening in event viewer, I have 8Gb of ram on the laptop, I do not even get close to 50% ram being used being used while running WoW ever (usually considerably less).

My entire commodo is manually configured exactly how I want, there is nothing in the configuration that could be affecting WoW. Nothing whatsoever in my laptop setup has even changed in the last month and a half apart from an update to the graphics drivers after I start experiencing this issue 3 days ago.

Open hardware monitor showed 78degree peak temperatures on my cores, the drive WoW is on is 0.02% fragmented. I'm running WoW as a high priority process.

The only difference i notice visually is ALL effects look like they are really bright and really detailed and I see them like my view distance is maxed out even though I am running everything as low as possible and turning up view distance two notches. Everything is fine running up to LM 60fps, fight starts and screen full of 30 people casting the hell out of everything (30 because I can see those effects going on ANYWHERE in the whole bg as far as I can see!) THAT is when the problems start and this started happening 3 days ago with absolutely 0 changes to anything whatsoever on my laptop.

Only change that happened is some update to deathwing which has clearly affected skill visual effects...

Deathwing Server.

Other people I know also complaining about similar stuff but not quite as extreme as the problem on my laptop, since they actually have dedicated cards and play on their computers.

Checked it out on my PC too, although I still never fall under 144fps vsynced to monitor refresh rate there, when I uncap I see I am under 200fps most of the time, a week ago I was getting almost 300fps in similar situations. WTF has happened? Even on the off chance that I missed some change on the laptop, what chance is there that BOTH laptop and PC have suffered in performance... both right after the deathwing update, when I am 99.999% sure no software or hardware has changed on either.

UPDATE: opened new thread about /console spelleffectlevel instead, now I have figured out that is the issue for me; /console spelleffectlevel 1 and 1000 the same look.

Close this please.

Spells just seem to be visible at higher quality and from farther away than before regardless of farclip settings.

Had to google a fair bit to get a hint at what I can do about spell animations, after finally finding info that pointed me in the right direction, I got hold of mpqedit and dbc editor, extracted spell.dbc from patch-enUS-3.mpq, edited it to remove the visual effect of all healing spells, aoe buffs, shadowmourne swirls and a few other spells which give me no particularly valuable information, repacked the modified file into my own patch-4.mpq. Implementing all this tripled has my frame rates in large fights on the laptop and only took about 30mins to understand and edit... after an hour of googling :3