Alright, now that we have the newest video card drivers (and have restarted our computer) let_s take a look at the next biggest boost. Many people will argue with my suggestions in this section, but that_s good, because depending upon your video card model, driver version, DirectX version, and whether or not you have an adobe product loaded on your system (strange isn_t it, fortunately it doesn_t matter because we are going to play with settings here anyway_) these settings will be different for everyone. So let_s start in the World of Warcraft display properties.

While Warcraft is running, run your mouse over your latency bar. Yes, that little green (though, more than likely yellow if you are on one of the damn original servers) bar that tells you your latency between you and the wow servers. Ever sense a recent patch, it also shows us our video FPS (frames per second.) So here is what I want you to do. Start changing settings in your video options menu and keep restarting wow and check this number. Smooth game play hovers at roughly 30-45fps (and of course higher on faster computers_) and will go up and down depending upon where you are (in Orgrimmar expect low FPS, and in arena you can expect a much higher FPS) so make sure you are in the same place when you take each sampling. This is quite time consuming and is irritating to do, but once you have the optimal settings for your system, your game play will be much smoother. Remember, when you hover over the video settings, Blizzard generally tells you whether or not the setting will help, or hinder performance.

 

This last setting is relevant to only Windows Vista. Here are two settings I wish to note that destroyed performance on my system.
Duel monitor setups will slow wow way down in Vista, and not running warcraft in full screen will be a huge bane to performance. Now let_s talk about Vista's settings. What I want you to do is right click on the World of Warcraft icon and go to _Properties._ In properties you will need to go to the _compatibility_ tab. Check _Disable visual themes,_ _Disable desktop composition,_ and _Disable display scaling on high DPI settings_ and click apply. This will turn off some of Vista_s special effects while World of Warcraft is running. This will help WoW_s performance. I have not noticed _Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 2)_ to make any difference.

Well, these are just three things I have done to make my system go faster, and I would love to hear any feedback as to other things you can do to make wow run smoother on Vista. Please drop me a line over on my site and I will be sure to share it with everyone I can.
For the horde! (And yes, Vista is quite an upgrade from XP and will eventually be able to game the same as XP. For those of you who haven_t yet switched, you may want to reconsider if you are an extreme WoW player.