Many players have experienced faster WoW loading times with Windows Media Player (WMP) running in the background. Some players are also reporting lower latency and higher frames per second.
This tip surfaced in the Europe forums late November and was picked up by the US forums two weeks ago. Many players are reporting shortened loading times, some by more than 50%.
I did a quick test and found that by running WMP in the background, minimized and not playing anything, the login screen popped up about 20 seconds quicker than usual. The world loading time (time between clicking Enter World button and character appearing on screen) was also faster by about 15 seconds. However I did not see any significant improvements in latency or framerate. To eliminate performance boosts due to caching or preloading, I rebooted my machine between each set of timings.
Some players have also suggested adding:
SET timingMethod "1" or SET timingMethod "2"
to the config.wtf file to achieve the same effect without running WMP. For me, this shortened the time for the login screen to appear by 20 seconds as well, but only shortened world loading time by 5 seconds. Combining WMP and the config.wtf tweak resulted in the same timings with just running WMP alone.
There's been no official Blizzard response to this yet, although a likely explanation is that WMP modifies how your computer handles background applications. With WMP open, all available CPU resources apparently become allocated to WoW, leading to better performance.
Does this quirk work for you? Do you see any improvements in framerate and latency?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
12-19-2007 @ 11:13AM
Dugrigen said...
Just tried this and it does make a very noticeable difference on both initial loading times and world loading times for this machine.
Very bizarre, but that won't stop me using it!
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12-19-2007 @ 11:14AM
Avi said...
That absolutely worked. My loading time was down to just a couple seconds. Wow. -avi
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12-19-2007 @ 11:17AM
Satarus said...
I think its having media player's background internet connection going that does it. I can notice a huge difference with just BitTorrent going.
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1-02-2008 @ 5:29PM
Fred O frog said...
Perhaps WMP changes the way windows accesses the hard drive. For media files, read ahead would be very beneficial. I would guess that WMP enables a large read ahead buffer which is also useful for loading large files for WoW.
12-19-2007 @ 11:17AM
CommOri said...
I haven't seen any real evidence that latency and framerate are improved. The reduced loading time is easily explained by common code libraries already being loaded by WMP.
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12-19-2007 @ 11:23AM
Dugrigen said...
Well, I originally thought that. However, you'd have thought that'd mean that WMP would also launch slowly initially, but in fact it loads almost instantly for me. So I'm not sure why it would take WoW any longer to loads the same resources?
12-19-2007 @ 11:38AM
nav said...
Dugrigen - are you sure that all of WMP loads instantly? Many applications will show an interface before loading is complete, so I don't think you can rule out CommOri's explanation so easily.
12-19-2007 @ 12:09PM
William said...
"you'd have thought that'd mean that WMP would also launch slowly initially, but in fact it loads almost instantly for me."
Windows is notorious for starting up parts of applications at startup/login. You'd be surprised how many things are running on your PC that don't show up, and make your programs start faster. (while sucking the memory away from all the other programs you run). I don't know why the Media Player helps, but i suspect a few of the other posts are on to something with the idea that it has common code libraries. Ah well, sweet tool for you PC users... I have a Mac at home though which is where I game most (PC in the office). I'll have to check if iTunes helps my WoW loading. :)
12-20-2007 @ 3:16PM
Equynnox said...
Nah, I have Itunes in the background all the time for music, and it doesn't make any difference. The WMP trick is pretty neat though, a nice boost to people with slower connections or crappier computers.
12-19-2007 @ 11:18AM
pikachunks said...
This is probably because WoW doesn't have to load audio libraries, since WMP has already loaded them. I would be curious to see what the gain is when you figure in the time you're spending booting up WMP before WoW, if any.
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12-19-2007 @ 11:19AM
Jonathan said...
Actually this is a very old tip. This originally surfaced around the time of BC. Back then however the game was limiting the FPS to around 64 on dual core machines. Eventually the 'set timing method 1' or 2 were introduced which removed the cap.
So with the new optimizations something is probably wacky with the way the games utilizes the cores.
Hope this sheds some light on it.
--Wide (tech forum lurker and occasional helper)
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12-19-2007 @ 11:20AM
Nails said...
what the
*blinks*
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12-19-2007 @ 11:20AM
Durrill said...
It is entirely possible that the Windows version of WoW is heavily dependant on the WMP API. With having WMP already loaded and minimized, its API libraries are sitting in memory. Where if its not loaded, WoW makes a call to the OS to load them into memory for itself, which is the added 15-20 seconds of load time.
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12-19-2007 @ 11:25AM
Tridus said...
How many people are testing this by loading WoW, quiting, loading WMP, then loading WoW again?
Anybody who does that is doing a bogus test. The second time you load WoW, most of it is in the system file cache already. Try it sometime: load WoW, quit, and load WoW again. The second time will be faster then the first time.
This sounds about as legitimate a tip as when people were saying that changing your raid leader would alter the loot in the instance.
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12-19-2007 @ 11:26AM
SirCasey said...
I've tried it on 2 machines that aren't dual-core and I can't say that I've noticed any difference. I still load it on both just in case it is helping and I'm not noticing though, the benefits sound too great to pass up!
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12-19-2007 @ 11:29AM
Naix said...
It totally worked for me! A side effect was it leveled all my alts to 70, gave me 80000 gold, and the tier 8 gears too!
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12-19-2007 @ 12:10PM
Chrysee said...
win
12-19-2007 @ 11:29AM
Juneau said...
No WMP:
WoW load: 40 secs
Login: 52 secs
With WMP:
WoW load: 12 secs
Login: 24 secs
That's a 3 times quicker loading time, and less than half the login time. Sweet damn.
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12-19-2007 @ 12:47PM
DrDiesel said...
but that test is only valid if you rebooted between tries.
12-19-2007 @ 2:09PM
Justin said...
Buy a mac my load times are faster than that and It doesn't matter what program I load first... hahaha... Now if I could play more than 3 games on my mac...