Frame rates and tweaking

[Roland]

Well, I get something little over 35 fps when I'm looking aroud without many players on my screen. It might be my personal chopiness resolution, which begins only when I get less than 20 fps - maybe I'm too used for lower framerate, since I played Doom at 386, Unreal at K6/200, etc. In general, WoW should not need 30+ fps, but I agree 8 fps is too low.

I have pretty similar computer as you do: AthlonXP 1800+, 1 GB RAM, Radeon 9600 256 MB (recently upgraded from 512 MB RAM and nVidia Ti4200 128 MB - graphics card was fine, btw) and I do fine.

Here's the diagnostics:
1. If your hard-drive is working all the time and your fps drops, you need more RAM. 512 MB is so-so for WoW, but most of the time you should not have this problem, except when you're running to new area. 1 GB should be enough even in more demanding situations, but I am still getting lot of HDD lag during larger scale PvP even with it (probably game is loading new player textures all the time). Then the upgrade would be to 2 GB RAM and RAID and that's as good as it can get with 32-bit CPUs

2. If you can (significantly) increase your framerate by lowering resolution (I'm not sure if WoW offers 640x480) or if your framereate significantly decreases when you increase resolution one step (say to 1280x1024 in your case), your system is limited by graphics card or more precisely it's fillrate and pixel shader capabilities (not many of them in WoW except water, so let's keep it at fillrate). You need new graphics card - Roland has written enough about it.

3. If none of the above works, it's either CPU, graphics card geometry capability or combination of both. If this is applicable - then first check all graphics options, because some of them actually increase performance, most notably Vertex Shaders. I'm not sure how much nVidia 5x00 line has it gimped, but my Ti4200 worked just fine. You can try somewhat overclock your gfx card chip, if you like, and see if it helps. If this does not help, look for faster CPU.
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You don't quite understand. The only ADVANTAGE a 5200 has over the old generation 4200 (even the 64MB, 4x AGP version, like I had!) is DirectX 9 handling. Outside of that, it will perform WORSE in EVERY game compared to a 4x AGP 64MB Ti4200. Compared to a 4x or 8x 128MB 4200, the situation is even more dire, and we're talking low-end, two generation old video cards! DirectX 9 games will be "runnable" with a 5200 (or any FX card and above; Ti series only supports up to 8), but not at all "playable". That's the problem he's having. His card is worse than the lowest of the low 2-generation old video cards (Ti = 2 generations ago, FX = 1 generation ago, 6x00 = current generation, just for clarity's sake).

Unfortunately, this means there's VERY little he can do aside from what he's done. There is no alternative except overclocking the video card or replacing it, and even replacing it may find him CPU limited (although that is liveable). I gave him all the solutions I could, but without at least a moderate monetary investment ($40 for upgrading / overclocking components), he's dead in the water. You can't race a go-kart in Formula 1 and expect to get anywhere, and sadly that's exactly the situation he's in.