Out of Storage error / 3.3.5

We'd like to thank everyone for pointing out this problem to us. We've collected a lot of info already and passed it on to be investigated. From what we've seen, it's related to a 64 bit OS and higher than usual memory usage. Please post here if you have any additional, pertinent info to add. Please do not post "me too" threads as they're of no help at this time.

Hothgor,

I wish I could give permission to use it but I can't. Modifying any of our game files is a violation of the Terms of Use Agreement. The info has all been sent over to the devs so they can see if this is the actual cause and if so, what they can do to resolve it as quickly as possible. We're hoping to get an answer by tomorrow. In the meantime, it appears lowering the shadow quality has the least detrimental affect on gameplay while alleviating the issue the most.

Can you guys try changing the graphics api to D3D9ex?

You can do this a couple different ways:

Open config.wtf found in the WTF folder
Find the entry for SET gxAPi
Change the text in quotes to D3D9ex

OR

Log in to a character. If your main is crashing, try creating a new char.
In any chat window type /console gxapi d3d9ex
Restart the game

Q u o t e:


I told you guys....


....................... Soonâ„¢

^^
This. Soonâ„¢

Q u o t e:



So this is just kind of a joke to you then?? Well im not freaking out it sure seems to be a serious issue. And for an ongoing issue, this is your responce? IM sure your the pride of Austin/irving

If you like the serious response, it's "This problem has been identified and will function similar if not the same as it did in 3.3.3 in a future patch". Summarized to Soonâ„¢

For now, you can live with lower settings until it is fixed.

Q u o t e:
im guessing im not going to get an answer to my problem?

Not in this thread. You're posting about patching problems in a thread about the game hitting a state where it can't give more resources to the game.

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:O Thats unacceptable, its been known of for over a year.

Not for 3.3.5. It's using way more resources than 3.3.3 ever did and this patch is only 2 days old. For all other ones, it's something we're constantly tweaking. You don't see as much nowadays (pre-3.3.5) as when Wrath first launched but it's there if you run addons or higher settings, or even a vanilla Vista system. It's also why we started introducing d3d9ex mode and tweaking things further with that.

Q u o t e:
It started here -.- I got the out of Storage error when I tried to install this patch, looked like everything was fine and dandy till 100% then got the error box :/

You're having a patch problem. You need to make a new thread. This one is when you're running the game (you have to finish patching for this) and then you hit a nice error that closes the game.

Q u o t e:


Well i tried d3d9ex and it still crashed

d3d9ex isn't a fix-all, but it's a step towards it. Of course we're talking about pre 3.3.5 stuff so if you're just doing d3d9ex right now, it's not going to do very much :)

Q u o t e:


Your wasting your breath, with 12mil people playing we are the minority. And the amazing rep for blizzard here said "Use lower settings" He is not the one fixing the issue. he is just the person that comes in to calm the masses. He has better things to worry about like doing his time to get his "sword" and planing his PTO so he can go to blizzcon.

I don't have to worry about either because they're already done :)
Unfortunately there's a few NDA stuff that I can't talk about but you'll see it in time. I'm just saying for this current (3.3.5 build 12213) patch, lower your settings until we get it near/back to 3.3.3 levels so you can bump your settings back up.

Q u o t e:


So if lowering my settings does not resolve my issue what do you suggest I do? Cancel my sub until it's fixed? Is it going to be days, weeks or months.. can you not provide a simple timeframe?

If Blizzard said we hope to have this resolved by next Tuesday almost all the @#%!@ing would stop. Not doing so causes people to check the forums on a consistant basis awaiting a freaking update and frustrated when there is nothing..

Extremely low view distance settings (177 vs 1277) is more than enough to compensate for the extra memory being used in this patch by a few factors. A lot of people are able to get by with setting View Distance from max to about halfway using that alone. Using d3d9ex mode (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21723843232&sid=1) can shave off another ~100-200MB from what it's currently doing right now too.

Q u o t e:


so yea basically dont play the game until we feel like patching it? gotcha.

u might as well not even have PTRs and just randomly make patches and push them out live without testing at all after this, because this is just dumb.

You can play the game, just not on Ultra.

Q u o t e:
Its also well noted that a simple hex edit of the executable will allow it to use the 64bit address space. Whats to stop you compiling it this way to begin with, or at the very least allow some very strict exceptions on modifying executables. I have done is on games before (X3: Terran Conflict being the most recent example i can think of) and things performed much better on the highest settings once it was allowed to run rampant past 2GB

You'd limit the kernel space on a 32-bit operating system (majority of the people are on this camp) to 1 GB and if you're already using high settings, this can cause a good deal of stability issues depending on hardware and driver combinations. Also if, say we did do this, and the game uses something like 2 1/2 GB on some higher-than-ultra settings in 3.3.3 (because we not as limited to a view distance cap like 1277), a patch like 3.3.5 would bump it and then you'd hit the ceiling again but on 32-bit systems. So not only do you have most of the people already complaining about higher-than-ultra mode getting crashes if they don't enable the 3GB switch, you'd have all of them come out like now with a patch like 3.3.5 not to mention device behavior quirks that would happen if the kernel space runs out.

One device quirk you may be able to recall is this one - http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=93502
For World of Warcraft, we hit it pretty often when people were using Ultra (before the more optimized shadows were in) where the game would just crash out to out of memory errors and Error 134: end of file statements.

Q u o t e:


No no, that' sucks. Many people were getting this error/crash under 3.3.3, including myself. Can you please FIX the issue for EVERYONE?

Restoring the old functionality is the first step. Modifying the game more over time to squeeze out more stability and features is planned so it's not like we're going to stop.

Q u o t e:



"until we get it near/back to 3.3.3 levels"

That does NOT describe a FIX!

As we can see , this was a problem over a year ago, just not as bad as it is now... So they are going to make it work better, but there ARE NOT going to fix it.

Both my wife and I run Win7 64 bit systems...

Please tell me this isn't the final answer...

Nope. Step 1. Fix bad stuff that was introduced in this patch that made it extra-crashy so a good majority of people can get back with the higher settings. Notice the explosion of posts on this issue and the UI disappearances. Step 2. Resume stuff that we were working on.

Q u o t e:
What I don't get is, WoW is a pretty low-poly game to begin with, why are there so many issues?

Your old Night Elf model might be low-poly but when you turn up the higher quality armor, you're hitting that as well as all the other players wearing armor with higher-quality textures being available. Then you have your scene with many objects and then the larger view distance settings adding on top of that. Then you'll bump up ground clutter objects and that takes up more stuff. It's more or less the same effect as you going into a grocery store and getting a lot of inexpensive items. Checkout won't be very pretty.

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My error report said the file was "FMod", this was different than most, so I thought it may be helpful in some way.

Fmod errors are indeed different. That's our sound system. If you can, please make a new thread and not have it be in this one. This thread is exclusively for 3.3.5 trying to use a bit of extra memory and is crashing people due to that.

Q u o t e:
I've been getting this error for months, and I'm glad to see Blizz will revert it back to 3.3 levels, since that won't help those of us that have been living with lower graphical settings for many months now. I'm positive that this issue will never go away.

Nope. More changes and tweaks later on top of the already existing d3d9ex mode and more optimized-than-released shadows.

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wtf so u can reply to that, but the other ppl asking for a heads up on whats going on, get completely ignored?come on man srsly this is just getting lame now..

You already had a heads up in this thread but I can repeat it. It's being grounded in a future patch. No ETA.

Q u o t e:
u cant say like, possibly this coming week's maintenance?or something other than soon?:p

sry to seem rude or anything, and its prob not ur fault..but we know we wont get extra gametime for all this crap, so all we have left is the hope of SOME kind of timeframe.

Why? It's not a game-breaking bug. Lower your view distance to something towards the middle and then play for now. It's not like NPC and mob spawning will change. All of that is controlled server-side and is the same even for the people on the lowest of settings.

Q u o t e:
yeah true however i play the game due to the option of playing with full graphics. its something that i enjoy. technically, i cant play the game, because i have to turn graphics down. at the end of the day, the patch screwed with the game. at the end of the day, why give us the ability to choose graphics settings, and just make us play with the lowest settings.

edit:i dont know why i wrote at the end of the day so much! could be cos midnight approaches...at the end of a day!lol

We put settings in so that you can negotiate with the visuals and have it playable. We first made Ultra something that would just die and you're supposed to pick something that won't either make your computer crawl or crash. Then we tweaked a few of the backend stuff in 3.1 and higher that made Ultra attainable for most people but shadows were still a pain. Then more changes came. There may be another day in the future (maybe Cataclysm) where Ultra gets to that stage again and you'd have to try lower settings.

Q u o t e:
i think my point was missed..but thats just a side thing..the MAIN question now is, when will the fix be implemented?? Is it in ANY way possible that you could find out do the folks investigation plan on implementing it next patch day?? its understandable that it may not happen at that point, but we'd still like some kind of timeframe here..

Your main point does not make sense, which is why I went back into our old slider system and how it was supposed to be used. There is no ETA on this patch. We do not offer timelines on patches except if it's a world-changing one (world events like 3.9.0), but you generally get like a 2 day notice on it. No dates on bug-fixing patches.

Q u o t e:


You clearly are not reading peoples comments here.
It has nothing to do with hardware for most people here posting, the problem is WoW was designed to have a 2gig limit. Hence why the game slows down, blackouts, UI disappearing, and crashes.
Most of the complaints are from high end 64 bit systems that CAN handle ultra.
The limit in the executable is preventing ultra graphics NOT peoples hardware.
Don't try to mislead people here. Half the people here would be able to use ultra if the game wasn't limited by an error in the programming and the memory leak introduced in 3.3.5.

We are reading the comments. The problem isn't the 2 GB limit itself. If we can keep the game under it, we're good to go. The problem is that we're hitting it this patch more often and that needs fixing, which it'll get in a future patch.

Q u o t e:

My game is crashing because of your bug. Countless other people are crashing because of your bug. Sounds like the game is broken. Or, in a language you can understand, "working as intended"

It only crashes on the high end of the Graphics scale.

Q u o t e:

So you're telling us the fix to this problem... is to create another problem by forcing us to play with welfare graphics? You're insane. Not to mention this "fix" or "solution" of yours is only a band-aid as the it still crashes.

Take your ITT Tech "degree" and go work at Wal Mart.

It's a band-aid until we get it back to normal on our side. Side effect is that it lets you play the game in the mean time on these "welfare graphics". I'm still not sure why a slight decrease on view distance would be called welfare graphics.

Q u o t e:
the GM's that actually play wow(99.9%) probably already have this patch. if there is one

We do not. We're on the same patch you are for the US region. Other regions are on 3.3.3 until they get patched.

My work computer is an i7 965/GTX 275/6 GB RAM.
My home computer is an i7 920/HD 5830/6 GB RAM.

All I did was bump View Distance a bit down and it stopped crashing. I've been traveling the world to desecrate fires for the holiday achievement, too.

Q u o t e:


Do you not play on a populated realm or something? Go to dalran on Area 52 with your view distence slighty turned down and tell me what happens.


Also an easier fix would be to let wow use as much ram as it needs.................. what is the opsession with limiting it to 2gigs. This isnt 2004.............. very few people have 2 gigs of ram now.

I can't tell you what realm I play on but it's it's an original server and it's very populated. It's a PVE server and they're pretty hardcore about new patches and content. Everyone and their extended family seems to come back whenever there is a patch. In some of odd cases where unnatural amounts of people gather, turning off the higher textured armor settings in the video settings can help even it out. And with the word slight, I don't mean one little notch like 1277 farclip -> 1177 farclip. It's more like 1277 -> 977 or 877. They're still higher than Burning Crusade's max but it isn't a little decrement.

Amount of RAM won't have much to do with the very many people that have 2 or less gigs of RAM, as well as 32-bit operating systems. You're supposed to use much less than 2 GB if you fit that category since you don't really want to hit the Windows swap file often when the game or system processes gets pushed aside. Even if it goes above, Windows will just start using swap memory until you either hit the limit or you get angry at it being too slow and then lower your settings. We like having one client that rules them all. One part of the pie for fancy stuff and another part for the lower end, and more pieces for those in the middle.

Q u o t e:
This really is rather ridiculous. My game was working fine until I upgraded my video card yesterday and now I can't even play at the settings I could before. I didn't spend the money to play with worse settings than my wife's 3 year old MacBook Pro can handle. I hate to be one of those guys but the speed at which this gets resolved will determine if I make it to my 5 year point in August.

On another note is this problem also causing kaching.wav to be set as my refresh rate or is that another issue?

The Direct3D version of the game still has more features than OpenGL so even with a bit of a lower setting, you still have more stuff available to you than the Mac. I believe shadow level is one of them and it's more robust on D3D.

Q u o t e:


What about the kaching.wav issue?

You have an item called kaching.wav to appear in your refresh rate dropdown menu? They should all be integers. If you were to open the World of Warcraft\WTF\config.wtf in a text editor, can you manually set your SET gxrefresh variable to something else?

Q u o t e:
Haha, I love the people who say we're being "babies" about this. So... let me throw this theoretical situation at you:

Buy Ferrari. Ferrari is stuck in 2nd gear. Take Ferrari to Dealer, they say "oh, don't worry about that problem, your Ferrari still drives. Yeah, this problem's been around for a long time, but if you just continue driving around in 2nd gear, we might have it fixed when the next model comes out ." I admit, original WoW is no Ferrari for comparison, and is now more like the Clampet's car with all the modifications over the years. But the fact remains-

Are we supposed to take this sitting down?

It's more like some odd Orwellian society (OS) where there's a cop with a rocket launcher at every corner, each equipped with a speedometer. Sure your Ferrari is stuck in 2nd gear. You're still ultimately have some control of your speed but things are a bit out of whack. Until the manufacturer fixes it, don't go past the speed limit or those cops with rocket launchers will blow you up. Of course it's not a life or death situation like a car in real life unless you want to think of programs and data as something from the Reboot cartoon series, and you have some attachment to your bits of data.

Q u o t e:


In the config.wtf file it is SET gxRefresh "60" but in game it still only gives the option for kaching.wav and 50. If this is derailing this topic too much I'll gladly make a new one, only mentioned it here because I thought it might go hand in hand with the other.

I'm not even sure how that's possible. Let's have you make a new thread just for that, and try removing the WTF, Cache and Interface folder to reset any type of variable and addons/settings that might throw odd things in your video UI.

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in other words don't expect it before Cataclysm.

It'll be way before Cataclysm. Shinier game engine is Cataclysm, though so don't get the patch fix and Cataclysm confused.

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Do you have any idea if cataclysm will have 64bit support or if the idea of making a 64bit client has even been mentioned at Blizzard? Just knowing that somebody has in a random conversation at the office so much as mentioned the possibility of a 64bit client would be refreshing.

No but there are other shinies that I cannot mention. It is the NDA thing that I referred to earlier in the thread. Lots of changes are in the works.

Q u o t e:
Just wanted to put it out there that I am getting this error message as well and I am not running a 64 bit OS as was stated in the initial blue post of this thread. Having not read all 47 pages of this thread this may have already been brought up. I can post my system specs if this has any bearing whatsoever on the issue. Deleting my cache or wtf folders appears to have no impact.

It'll happen on 32-bit systems too.

Q u o t e:
Still no fix?

Is there away to pause my account till this is fixed?


I don't want to pay for a game i cant play. Ive never had this issue until the latest patch, now i cant even log in for 30 sec without the game crashing.

Unless you're talking about a different crash, this one can be bypassed by lowering your view distance by a bit, maybe a bit less than a quarter ways from where you're at now. The login screen won't crash and the Video options are in the options button on the bottom right corner of the screen.

Q u o t e:


This sounds like the same Corporate BS that Steve Jobs is spewing about the Iphone 4 reception issue. His response "Don't hold it like that".

Pretty lame excuses I am hearing from blizzard about providing a broken product we are paying for. Not even a heads up on the splash screen. I had to come digging through forums to find out what was going on. They don't want all their users knowing they screwed up. That's why they won't put it on the splash screen.

When you want to use something now, you want to avoid something that breaks it. If the new iPhone model has an issue with you poking at something, try to not poke it. If you want to play the game and really high settings crash it, don't use those really high settings. It will be fixed but there is no ETA at this time.

Splash screen/breaking news is reserved for server issues and maintenance notices. It's not for bugs. Bugs are in this forum for client crashes/odd behavior and in the Bug Report forum.

Q u o t e:
It SHOULD have been fixed over a year ago when others were experiencing this issue. And yes, I'm going to keep hammering this point across. I am going to be as stubborn as you all are with this. And what do I mean by stubborn?

We upped the settings in a major way before the issue popped up. Back then, you had three issues hitting you:

1. Increased settings and features compared to Burning Crusade
2. Addons/custom config.wtf modifications
3. Vista without any service packs (aka http://www.anandtech.com/show/2297)

We've been tweaking 1 since Wrath went live. We can't fix it for everyone and maintain the same settings so we've been throwing in optimizations in the patches. It's the huge bulk of people never hit the crash. Some did but that was pretty unavoidable at times. There were some stuff like SLI and Crossfire configurations using a bit of extra memory and was crashing stuff, then some ATI single card configurations doing it and such. d3d9ex mode got us further while we tweaked settings. Optimizing shadows got us further too. We'll try to go as far as we can but some of the stuff involves big rewrites and thinking out of the box.

2 and 3 are things we don't really have much control over. 3 can be fixed, and 2 will be the stuff where we go through basic troubleshooting steps and remove their WTF and Interface folders so we can narrow it down to 1.

Q u o t e:
Or you could actually spend some of that billion dollars blizzard is making and actually pay for some good sanity testing on your patches before actually putting them on live servers that causes anyone with a 64 operating system to crash.

You can sit there and tell us to lower our settings all you want to but the fact of the matter is Blizzard messed up. Their sanity testing on their new content isn't up to par.


What sanity testing was done on this patch? Why didn't blizzard catch this crash happening before placing it on live servers that affects MOST 64 bit operating systems......systems that a majority of gamers are using these days.

It's not something limited to 64-bit operating systems. 32-bit operating systems hit it just as frequently. WoW ran out of memory when the settings are at Ultra. It's just that simple. At least you all can get around this crash. One time, we crashed a bunch of GeForce 2 folks (there's still more of them than this thread by far) and they also had to wait until we patched that up. They weren't able to avoid crashing.

Q u o t e:

Q u o t e:
This application has encountered a critical error:

ERROR #132 (0x85100084) Fatal Exception
Program: C:\Users\Public\Games\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe
Exception: 0x80000003 (BREAKPOINT) at 001B:0095D397

I'm not an expert, but it looks to me like this is a different issue than what this thread is about. Maybe try making your own thread and see if someone can help?

That is indeed a different crash. Most of the breakpoint ones we see are keylogger-created. Old version of keylogger tries to hook on the game and all of a sudden it's not what it expected, and hooks onto the wrong place. Things start dying.

Raids and instances are very limited. They're closed off (except maybe Occulus, ZA and ZG) and occlusion helps a lot. The good news is that at least 3 types of crashes are addressed in the upcoming patch, this being one of them. No date on this patch yet.

Q u o t e:

So regarding any alteration to the wow.exe (i.e. the Out Of Storage - SOLUTION/WORKAROUND post)http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25559736296 it would appear that you will not get banned by doing this fix given that a blue post by Adams stickied and locked in this forum states:

Tech Support does not make in game policy, nor do we enforce the TOU. All I am saying is that if you applied that "fix", you will have problems patching. I cannot speak to whether your account will be actioned.

Q u o t e:


Nope for me, I used the lowest setting ever possible and I still crash. By lowest i mean everything minimum and turned off. With the ultra setting, my screen will go black after around 2 mins, and nothing can be done despite manually hard turn off the comp and then on again. With everything on bare minimum, it takes 5 mins to go blackout
It has never happen before 3.3.5.

It is game breaking for me. I cannot play the game for more than 5 mins.

Out of storage crashes does not do what you're describing. You have a different issue. Please make your own thread.

You'll be getting your patch today if everything goes according to plan.

Patch is live. Start the launcher to get it.

Q u o t e:


So after today's maintenance this problem should be fixed? I'd be able to run Ultra and not worry about crashing in Northrend anymore?!

=D

If you didn't hit the error before 3.3.5, you should be ok. For the small group of people that had it before the patch, it won't be doing too much other than letting them not use as low of a setting. We're just fixing an issue that made 3.3.5 use more memory than previous patches.

Q u o t e:


For me to play this game, without it crashing on a regular basis, I had to turn the "environment detail" and "view distance" all the way to low! Also "shadow quality is set to the second to the lowest setting. This is _not_ a slight decrease at all!

The game uses just a measly 1 GB of RAM if your view distance setting is towards the middle alone. You don't have to adjust the others. You most likely have a different problem or you're using Windows Vista without any service packs installed.

Q u o t e:
Datth:

Any chance you can divulge any sort of details about what exactly changed in 3.3.5 to cause such a difference in memory usage? Throw the few technical users in the thread a bone, you've got me all fascinated here. :(

Nerd snype :v

Probably some stuff from an incomplete/updated game engine made it over somehow. Keep in mind that we're working on several builds of the game.

Q u o t e:
How do we go back to what we originally had if we used this command?

gxapi "d3d9" is the default but d3d9ex works better and is more memory efficient.

My doodads and NPCs fade in and out with d3d9ex. I can't tell the difference on a 8800GT, GTX 260, GTX 275, 4870 and 5830. Those are the sets of video cards I use to play World of Warcraft depending on if I'm at work, the living room or in my bedroom. Things popping in and out would drive me batty. I'd probably do the old NES thing where you go back a bit and make it pop out and walk forward to make it pop back in, and that would probably amuse me for a bit :)

Q u o t e:
There seems to be a lot of discussion about the 'Out of Storage' crash that centers around add-ons.

I strongly feel that the basic issue is NOT related to add-ons. The reason is that I have been experiencing multiple d/c's and client crashes ever since the 3.3.5 patch, and I have absolutely NO add-ons.

Instead, I think Marty is correct: these errors are mostly happening on Windows 7 64-bit: this is the O/S I am running. I never had this problem before patch 3.3.5; now it is happening frequently.

From the symptoms, this appears to be a memory leak in the client. I wonder if it is in the RealID subsystem, since this is the first truly new piece to be added to the client in some time.

-Sindor@alleria

Back about a year or so ago, there was a certain quest addon that would use up its allocation of memory and more and caused these crashes. It doesn't happen much nowadays but it is possible.

Q u o t e:


nope... game was running beautifully until 3.3.5. Then I started crashing which seemed like an every 5 second moment in dalaran. Flying around in Icecrown was like using the "Dead Eye" feature in red dead redemption except everything would disappear except the backdrop.

Ok for some reason this is hard to grasp by blizzard.

If the game works, without the massive amounts of complaints regarding this error, BEFORE the patch, and then all of a sudden 3/4 of the 64-bit OS using population that plays the game experiences this AFTER the patch. Well, science would say that there is a problem with the patch.

1 + 1 = 2 unless I am missing a hidden variable?

1. This issue isn't 64-bit only. You're seeing more 64-bit reports vs 32-bit ones because people are running high settings on new/higher end hardware. Those tend to come with 64-bit versions of Windows. There are people that max out the settings on XP, Vista and 7 32-bit systems and crash the same way 64-bit systems do. 3.3.5 was broken in that it used more memory than 3.3.3 and lower. 3.3.5a addresses that.

2. You haven't been on the Tech forum when the said addon did not work with a patch, and people didn't quite know how to update the said addon when it was fixed by the author. :)

Memory usage seems a bit higher than 3.3.3 but way under what 3.3.5 was putting out. I'm currently hovering around at 1.4 GB - 1.6 GB usage but not more than that.

After a couple circles around Dalaran - http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2003/335amemdalaran.jpg
Flying out of Dalaran from the landing and doing a camera spin - http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/4646/335amemlanding.jpg

Of course my multitude of addons aren't helping but I thought I'd throw that in to give people some headroom when using addons :)

note - numbers are in d3d9ex mode.

NDA for the Cataclysm Alpha was lifted so I'll say two things:

d3d9ex will be the new default mode in the new game engine and the current d3d9 engine will be going out the window. We're also working on DirectX 11 support and some minor OpenGL improvements on the PC side. Of course that doesn't account for the many new works and engine optimizations being put into d3d9ex for Cataclysm.

I'm just going to drop it from its sticky status. Not enough storage/out of memory-type crashes that are not addon-induced is something we are continuously looking at, as usual. 3.3.5a won't be the end of it but is just mainly to curve what 3.3.5 did way down.

Q u o t e:


what exactly are the differences, advantages and/or disadvantages between using the default setting or changing it to d3d9ex?

d3d9ex is pretty much identical to d3d9 but the game will be actively monitoring your memory usage instead of letting Windows do it. We started seeing not enough storage crashes with the release of Wrath where we bumped up settings far beyond what Burning Crusade had and tried to optimize memory usage. That did some odd effects like having the camera stutter more often when the game was quite a bit aggressive in clearing out memory and you'd have to reload data each time you turn. Also we were seeing weird behavior from some video drivers where they'd start giving off Error 134s stating that the system reached the end of the file but in reality the driver took up too much kernel space and there wasn't any left. The camera was tweaked more and we got rid of most (if not all) of the stuttering on healthy systems and we implemented our own texture and data management system to replace what Windows did. It's not everything that d3d9ex does but it's what I can recall when it's this early in the morning :)

FYI when I mention Cataclysm, I mean the 4.0 game engine. 4.0 will be available to vanilla World of Warcraft, Burning Crusade, Wrath as well as Cataclysm.

Are you using the 257 series drivers and are your video cards doing AFR?

AFR is one of the different ways SLI can render a game. AFR is Alternate Frame Rendering. Good readup on AFR - http://www.anandtech.com/show/3793/nvidia-launches-3d-vision-surround/2