For anyone on ATI video cards, if your shadows are flickering here is the fix for it.
In your chat window, simply type the following line /console shadowinstancing 0 . Blizz says that it may be fixed in a future driver update.

Sorry I need more caffeine. The way I read your comment the 1st time I thought you were confused as too why your FPS doubled :P

Most likely this is because of the changes they made to shadows on Ultra. It was in the patch notes somewhere near the bottom I believe.

Ok maybe you should explain the whole issue the 1st time around then. If it is jumping around that much from 30 to 50 fps then yeah that's not cool. And yes higher framerates are important to games like FPS's but at a certain frame rate you are not going to see much of any improvement in WoW.

And yeah if you're running at 75Hz then 60 fps will be a bit noticeable. I also did not say it had to be your drivers, it might be something else in your system. My main point was simply if other people who have basically the same system specs are getting a solid 60 fps or more, especially at higher resolutions, and your bouncing back and forth between 30 and 50 there may be something on your end causing the issue. What that problem might be I can't say though.

@Kyudo
A) He is also running at 1900x1200 as opposed to your 1280x1024 so basically Matt's point is there is something wrong with your drivers or something else is going on since your not hitting those frame rates at a lower resolution.

B) If your screen refresh rate is at 60Hz then you are not seeing anything on screen more than 60fps so running a game at 150fps means absolutely nothing. Your not seeing the other 90 frames.

Now I do agree that dropping to 15 - 30 fps is pretty unacceptable but at the same time I have to ask, are you running Vista? Because if you are 2gigs of ram is also unacceptable. Sure you meet requirements but you really should be aiming for more like 4 gigs.

And this is a problem why? A lot of you are complaining but I really don't see any reasons besides "It's easier to level on a PVE server!" And then they transfer to a PVP at 80 and.......what? What happens? They are worse at PVP than most of the rest of you? Those of you that leveled characters on PVE servers (like Zach here on WI) can move your characters over to your PVP server and have more class or character options available to you without needing to level a ton more alts?

The only problem I could ever see from this is you might get some people who are not helping as much as they could in a battleground or something. This is not going to ruin your server. At worst you'll have some easier ganks when your running around in Northrend.

@Carbon Heh yes but that is exactly what the both of them are doing is complaining about the beta being set in stone. "Omg! They dug up these titles which means there is no chance ever of there being more titles than these in the game! GG Blizz way to screw up the game!"

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/01/01/dell-xps-contest-winner-revealed/
Here, they announced the winner of the WoW laptop that this site gave away and here is the link to their weblogs profile. http://www.wowinsider.com/profile/1183764/

Happy now? Saying that you suspect these sites of not being honest about these giveaways because TB is defending them("Further, all this defensiveness around it makes me wonder even more. After all, if there was nothing to hide..."), all because you cant take the time to do 5 minutes of searching is really pathetic.

And yes Blizzard lists who won because they ARE subject to United States sweepstakes laws unlike this site.
"It really does not seem as though "harassing" is an issue anyone else worried about."
Well maybe WoW insider IS concerned about it and that's up to them to decide. When Blizzard posts their winners they do it as such http://www.blizzard.com/us/inblizz/contests/artcontest2006/secondaryprizewinners.html

It is just a persons name. There is no way to easily figure out their characters name and harass them in game, no easy way to know if you have the right John Smith if you tried to google them.

But you see how easy it was for me to find the winner of the laptop and if I wanted to harass them every time they posted on the Weblogs network it wouldn't be that hard. And yes TB went on the defensive cause you attacked the honesty and integrity of this site and the people who operate it ("I often wonder if anyone wins some of these contests at all.") in your initial comment.

Lighten up. Just cause you don't win doesn't mean no one does.

My exact same thoughts. I think we can all agree with Procris that he should get an overhaul before Wrath goes live. But from what I understand there are a lot of placeholder models/skins up in Northrend at this point so we can only hope his is a placeholder as well.

lol yeah I became sorely tempted to go through and add all my /played together but, well frankly I don't like crying myself to sleep. In all seriousness though, Schramm had a good point. You shouldn't feel all that bad about the time you've invested in this game as long as you had fun.