World of Warcraft: How to Reduce Lag, Increase FPS, and Make Gameplay Smoother

World of Warcraft is a game that requires a computer with some decent hardware to play while getting the full effect without sacrificing any quality or performance. With that said, many people do play the game with minimal settings in attempt to reduce the lag that they get while playing. Many players report only seeing 5 frames per second in basic questing situations where there are no other players around, and there is very little action in the game. If this is you, this article is made to enhance your World of Warcraft experience.

Game Settings
For one, your game settings should be as low as possible if you're trying to get the maximum performance out of your World of Warcraft game. You'll want to reduce the resolution to the lowest amount possible, which decreases the quality of the game dramatically, but also greatly increases performance. Also, disabling tripple buffering and vertical sync tends to help most. Make sure to have all bars fully to the left for lowest quality but top performance. Also, you can disable "input lag reduction" to increase frames per second dramatically in many situations, however this can also cause mouse-movement on your character to become much more weird and difficult in various terrains. This, I cannot explain, but I do know that it will increase frames per second as a whole in almost situations

Background Programs
Running programs in the background while running WoW can greatly reduce the overall performance of the game itself. To increase performance of the game, make sure to keep all other programs to a bare minimal. Disable all anti-virus and firewalls, as well as any other programs you may have running. You can end unknown processes with the task manager, so long as they are not in the "system" category, and make sure to not disable "explorer.exe". This will allow your computer to use less memory on unimportant tasks to you at the time, and focus more on the game at hand. Also, you can change the process priority of WoW.exe once you open the game, to above normal or high priority, but I do not recommend real-time priority as it may cause hardware problems to your central processing unit.

User Interface
I've seen people experience great amounts of lag on wonderful computers strictly due to add ons erroring and just being overall laggy on their system. The best way to test this is to simply get rid of all add ons, and try to run the game for a few different occasions without them, if your frames per second or overall performance increase, you may have found your problem. Look for the specific add on by first checking with the add ons that alter your user interface graphics the most and disabling them, or just get rid of all add ons completely and keeping the bare essentials. My frames per second increases dramatically when I made this change.

I hope this article is able to get everyone on the right track for making their computer more able to run World of Warcraft, and if these tricks still don't work, it may be time for a computer upgrade.