Question about FPS

Ok when im running WoW and i try running itunes and firefox etc. at the same time and switch between them, my FPS goes to all hell. But when i play guildwars i can have itunes firefox, ive even played 2 different games while playing guildwars before, and my FPS remained in the high 50's the whole time. I was wondering why i can play GW with many other applications running but when i try and play WoW, my FPS drops horribly? (btw im typing this while im playing gw and itunes right now too :P) I can also run GW with full specs anti aliasing up to 4x with no problems at all. With wow i HAVE to use default specs with 800x600 res

Why does what happen? Why does WoW suffer slowdown with other apps running or why does Guild Wars run perfectly well under the same circumstances?

All I know is that with Guild Wars running I can run Firefox, Photoshop 9 CS2 and Lightwave 9 with no noticible slowdown in gameplay at all. Can't say anything about WoW though as I don't play that particular game.

Perhaps it's down to the fact that Guild Wars is much better than WoW! I don't know, maybe it's coded better!

Last time I checked, wow used more resources than GW. I don't play it, this is just what i've heard from friends. Its possible that you're simply at a lack of memory/processor usage with WoW and all those other apps running.

yeah, but last time i looked at the requirements, there both relatively the same. Also GW has much better graphics, i can run GW with full specs 4x anti-aliasing, with WoW i have to use the defaults 800x600 res.

Well, I'm no expert on resource usage, but it seems to me that the only plausible explanation is that WoW and GW use different resources. And iTunes and Firefox probably use the same resources WoW uses, thus making the programs suffer a hit in performance.

Can't think of any reason beyond that.

even tho GW looks pretty and stuff it actully doesen't use that much ram or anything where as WoW actully use alot more ram and other resorses like video and CPU cuz it has to render alot more stuff like all the extra lighting effects and stuff and also cuz it has to read alot more stuff ofer the net to cuz there is ppl every where in WoW not just it towns like GW and all the extra stuff in WoW like crafting everything but almost all real MMOs use alot more resorses the GW

and Harah would you mean WoW has better GFX if you can run Full GFX setting in GW where as WoW you have to turn down the GFX for it to run smooth

The difference in system performance between the two games sounds very strange, considering I've run both on this system (and both with nothing out of the ordinary settings - 1280x1024, most settings medium to high, anti-aliasing or without) and had no issues like you describe.

WoW is -very- RAM intensive though, and if your system is running with than 1gig of RAM you'll experience lag that appears as a FPS drop but that's what is causing it. When I first started playing WoW, back at release, I was using 512meg of RAM and things weren't so good. Upgrading to 1gig improved the performance ten fold and I've been on systems with more and it's been once again better.

Perhaps the issue is related to alt-tabbing between applications? If these extra apps you're trying to run are being tabbed too, you may be experiencing the slow down in FPS when you tab back in or similar. Try running WoW in the maximised window mode if you do this. (Not sure if that's relevant at all).