Why does World of Warcraft slow down when I ALT-TAB to Windows?

April 6, 2008 10:17 PM

Why does World of Warcraft slow down when I ALT-TAB to Windows?

I'm having a weird graphics problem with World of Warcraft, if you're able to help I would be eternally grateful! :)

When I ALT-TAB out of the game to go back to Windows, and I do this 10+ times over say an hour, my World of Warcraft graphics get all 'chuggy' and the game runs so slow it becomes unplayable. I have to quit and restart it before it's useable again.

I've tried patching my graphics drivers, but it makes no difference. If it's helpful I'm using an Nvideo GeForce 6600 GT.

posted by katala to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Seems like it's a common problem.
posted by Tenuki at 10:30 PM on April 6

Most (but not all) games do this if they're being played fullscreen, even when you ALT-TAB once. Valve's Source engine is notoriously sluggish when it comes to ALT-TABing, even though it's an extremely fast engine in terms of framerates on older hardware.

I don't know anything about WoW in particular, but try running it at your monitor's native resolution, but windowed. This works as a fix for some game engines.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:27 PM on April 6

It seems like the memory leak mentioned in the forum posts is the likely culprit, but Windows also tends to be a bit overzealous about swapping a program's memory out to disk when the program loses focus, which is probably exacerbating the problem quite a lot.
posted by Zach! at 11:53 PM on April 6

Seconding what's been said here. Minimizing an application can be Windows' trigger to push its memory to virtual (disk-based, slower) memory and to open up the RAM it was using, which is much faster and what's needed when actually playing.

Further, you're switching desktop rendering environments entirely. In Windows XP, your desktop is rendered in 2D by your CPU. It passes the final "what goes where" to your video card which displays it without a second thought. DirectX or OpenGL, the 3D environments games run in, are rendered in 3D mode, so Windows has to switch it up and figure that out; something it's not the fastest at doing. (Running the program in windowed mode may help the transition out considerably.)

Aside from that basic explanation about why the process of switching sucks, basic memory leaks are what will cause the problem to exacerbate over time. If you open up task manager and watch WoW's memory usage over the times you do the Alt+Tab, I'll bet you see a nasty spike.

Adding more memory would help alleviate the problem, but only to a point. (Eventually, a leak will still fill what it has available to it.)

At the very least, you should launch task manager to determine if anything else is running away with CPU cycles, Disk IO tie-ups or memory leakage.
posted by disillusioned at 2:25 AM on April 7

If you alt-tab that often I'd suggest that you go into your interface settings and select "Windowed Mode - Full Screen" which looks the same as full screen but operates a bit more like windowed mode for switching between windows (you can also pull up your taskbar, for instance, without WoW minimizing). This can be slightly more taxing on your graphics card but could be well worth it (I use it because I have a second monitor and have no problem switching between programs to the point of responding to IMs while I'm still in combat)
posted by dagnyscott at 7:22 AM on April 7

Try-using Alt-Enter to windowize the game instead of minimizing it, this is the best solution for me in many online games.
posted by whoda at 7:37 AM on April 7

Are you ALT+TAB-ing a lot to get info on quests from Thottbot or WoWHead? If so, you should strongly consider running a few mods:

Doublewide
Lightheaded
TomTom

Basically, this is what they do:
Doublewide- extended frame for your quest log, puts your quest list and the quest text side by side
Lightheaded- Shows info on quests from the WoWHead database in your quest log- this means that instead of having to alt+tab all the time, you just click on the quest in your quest log, pull Lightheaded out, and it shows you the details of the quest from the WoWHead DB (where to go, how to do it, etc)
TomTom- Shows precise coordinates, also important because it plugs into Lightheaded- whenever you see a coordinate in Lightheaded (in the format of [xx.xx,yy.yy]), you can just click on the coordinate (which Lightheaded will highlight in blue) and TomTom will place a pin on your game map/minimap. The minimap will even show an arrow to the pin! Just make sure that you're in the right zone- if you are supposed to be going to 68,45 in Terrokar Forest, but you click the coord in Lightheaded while you're in Netherstorm, it's going to put the pin at 68,45 in Netherstorm.

If you run these mods, it will speed up your grinding/questing by at least 3x if not more. You can find them at Curse, WoWInterface, ui.worldofwar.net, etc.
posted by baphomet at 8:34 AM on April 7

Oh and to clarify, in case that isn't clear enough, if you run/use these mods you'll almost never have to alt+tab out to look something up.
posted by baphomet at 9:54 AM on April 7

To expand on baphomet's comment, another mod to look at is QuestHelper. It'll actually plot a map of where to go next based on running a circuit. It's got some bugs, but it's definitely helpful.

I use my laptop for looking things up on wowhead, but, getting another computer just to stop alt-tab'ing... probably not.
posted by jeversol at 1:40 PM on April 9

Thanks heaps for taking the time to post and help me out, I really appreciate it :)!!

I was mainly having to alt-tab to get quest info from Wowhead and Thottbot so I've installed Doublewide, Lightheaded and TomTom and have been using them for the last week, they're fantastic and my alt-tabbing is now very rarely needed so I'm not experiencing the chugginess in-game any more.

Thank you again!!
posted by katala at 12:17 AM on May 5