I got the same, and no idea, but I *hope* they optimized the "Ultra" mode rendering techniques a bit, crystalsong forest brings my machine to its knees, while the rest of the game is perfectly fine at 8xAA. The engine is really showing its age... Not that upgrading it significantly is a significant value proposition to Blizzard, but a guy can hope!

I just got the same message. That sucks.

@Amonneth: I'll place bets that it's when you're in the vicinity of Dalaran that it happens. Whenever I get within spitting distance of it (even on the ground below it), my frame rates drop by nearly an order of magnitude. Blizzard's only response is advising me to get a new computer (I wasn't aware a MacBook Pro was a slouch).

Blizz seems to want you to have one computer for Dalaran, and a different one for all of the rest of WoW. And they see nothing wrong with that.

So change them back using the control panel = not hard.

Yup, it's Dalaran. Avoid the maxed Shadows setting- it forces hardware rendering of shadows you can't even SEE (people in Dalaran). They're only per-texel shadows, but it can get ugly.

I received the same message, so I clicked on the "Options" button there on the login screen...hmm...no changes that I could see. Weird.

@Joshua Ochs

Turn down your graphic settings, including the shadows setting.

No a Macbook Pro is not old nor a slouch, but its video chip isn't exactly the fastest around (not even in the newest Macbook Pro). It's quite underpowered if you're trying to play games at their highest setting.

I got the same message, but upon looking at my custom video settings I didn't see any obvious changes either....




Referencing performance tweaks:

I keep my shadow setting one tick above minimal. It gives me shapes instead of circles, and looks quite good from most distances. It gives a good impression of actual shadows without the hard number crunching needed for perfection.

I also reduce ground clutter density and radius to near minimums.

These two tweaks alone let me keep almost everything else at max levels and still hover at 30 fps in hard places like Dalran on my machine. Since humans can't readily perceive refresh rates higher than 30 fps, I'm good. :)

@Rylka

"Since humans can't readily perceive refresh rates higher than 30 fps, I'm good."

This is old, ill-informed misinformation, please don't spread it or believe it.

How about telling us what it really is then?

@Amoneth - I also use a MBP, not the most recent revision, but the one just prior - I upgraded to 4gb ram and that helped tremendously. Something I have noticed lately though is that the process: 'pubsubagent' (used by Safari, and viewable using Activity Monitor) often tends to take over 60% of my processing power and cause wow FPS to implode. Quitting Safari and pubsubagent usually fix that. Trying to figure out why pubsub causes such problems and how to fix it. If anyone has any insight i'd love to know about it.

The engine doesn't have a limit on what can be loaded on a vertical scale. That's why you may get some frame lag when you're under Dalaran.

Regarding the MacBook -- I also had issues with Dalaran until I upgraded from 2gb ram to 4gb. Now I zone in and out of it instantly.

What's weird is that my wife's iMac and my son's Mac Mini both have 2gb of ram and they don't have issues with Dalaran, so I'm guessing the issue is fringe. WoW often consumes 1800mb memory according to ps, so 2gb must be just a little bit short on the MBP.

@Dagonis:

Well, it's not really a fair question because your eyes and brain don't really perceive the world in terms of frames. Your eyes don't work like a video camera. However, for the sake of simplicity, at my job we use the following metric:

The human eye can perceive at roughly 60 frames per second. However, the brain is more limited, generally topping out at 45 frames per second.

Thus, we aim to always stay in the 45-60 FPS range. Whenever our software goes above 60 FPS, we assume we're wasting time rendering "invisible" frames that could be better spent elsewhere, and when we're below 45, we assume we're giving users a less-than-ideal experience and need to spend more time rendering. It's not a perfect metric, but it seems to keep most of our customers happy.

Of course, in practice, this all varies heavily from person to person. My wife really can't seem to perceive anything more than about 50 FPS, whereas I can tell a difference up to 65. My mother, on the other hand, has demonstrated the ability to perceive up to 75 FPS. Damn - why couldn't I have gotten those genes?!? (Actually, I kid - at that level of perception, the refresh rate of even some of the most high-refresh-rate monitors becomes headache-inducing, which is probably part of why my mom is such a luddite. It was only once I got her a CRT that could do 80Hz - albeit at low resolution - that she started to get used to PCs.)

I suspect what Rylka probably heard is that 30 FPS was long treated as the MINIMUM to trick the brain into interpreting something as fluid motion - though even that's a flawed notion since the brain is amazingly adept at interpreting motion. People can interpret motion from sources as low as a dozen frames per second or so, if they want to. And most people can tell the difference easily between motion they perceive from a 15 FPS source, a 30 FPS source, and a 45 FPS source, even if they see all of them as "moving" and not "a really fast slideshow."

Again, this is all ultimately futile, as the brain and eyes don't work this way in the first place, and we're trying to impose a human-created metric on our incredibly complex sensory network.

@Joshua Ochs

Solution: Setup a Beowulf cluster with your machine and as many other MacBook Pros as you can get your hands on. Then you MIGHT be able to go through Dalaran in Ultra mode with minimal lag.

120 fps is the human maximum visual perception. But in reality above 80/90 fps is wasted. I work in human ergonomics, and worked on a project relating to the eye. above 120 no subject could tell the difference, but most hit 80/90 fps with no change above that.

Some people are getting the "settings have changed" message due to blizz having projected textures ON by default now, instead of their previous default of OFF.

120fps is in no way any kind of hard limit of the human eye or brain.

As already stated before, it's MEANINGLESS to talk about the eye in terms of frames anyway, since the retina is made up of millions of individual cones and rods connected to their own nerve endings, which fire individually and in an unsynchronised manner.

That said, the center of vision of the human eye is much denser, to give us sharp vision. The peripheral vision sections of the retina are much less sharp, but instead percieve motion and changes in your vision very accurately. This is why it is much easier to detect flickering fluorescent lights or CRT screens at the edge of your visual field than it is by looking straight at the source. (You also have a much weaker sense of color in your peripheral vision, but that's a different matter... :))

So please, forget everything you've ever heard about eyes only seeing a certain number of frames per second. It's all bogus, mmkay? :D