the answer is ram on your card. But you can have 512 ram on a 8300 and 256 on a 8800 and it's worlds difference. Right now. i'm running an 8600 on a 23 inch monitor, full screen, and half view distance with everything at max settings. (dont really need to see ALL the way across the zone)...and average 20-40 frames a second (drops to 20 in heavily populated areas). on a vista machine it access's some of your ram as virtual ram. I usually drop the view distances in cities to minimum..

Take out ram and put in memory. I read ram too much in the post. lol.

I'm actually having zero problems anywhere - I'm using 4 gigs of ram, Vista x64 and a 9800 GX2.

Further than just RAM (PC memory) and Video RAM (Graphics Card memory), you also have to consider that Dalaran is a significantly smaller place than Shattrath, with a significantly higher poly-count (more complex models and textures) with a higher concentration of complex textures and models, along with dozens to hundreds of users, you end up giving your system (and the servers themselves) quite a workout. Even if Blizz was to implement some Occlusion (line of sight) based loading and model-reporting method, it would still incur a heavy load on that city's particular servers.

Methinks that while Dalaran is beautiful, it was poorly designed from a technological standpoint. I'm on a beefy system (QuadCore @3Ghz, DDR3 1800 RAM, SLI'd 2x GX280) and I still get lag and disconnects while in Dalaran as well on occassion.

I'm convinced that RAM is NOT the issue, I'm running a new imac, 2gb of RAM and when i hearth to dalaran (from another Northrend zone) its sometimes as much as a minute before the screen unfreezes and i appear in the inn. I then have to suffer a short period of my pet running back and forth in the spot and where i am unable to move but if i try to i am presented running on the spot.

There is something amiss with zoning to dalaran at the moment that is far more than just the clients machine specs

it may also be your connection if you have good memory and a good video card, if you're using DSL, satellite, or(heaven forbid) Dial-up the those areas may run more slowly then if you had say, cable with a strong signal. there are many reasons that it may run slow but also look at your connection

don't know that ram isn't the issue here, i run 2gigs on an old latitude laptop, and i get 40fps in dalaran, and my server is pretty high population. course i also get wowerrors every couple hours, so i'm not perfect