FPS Drops/Performance Issues on AMD/NVIDIA System

Technical Support
1

Relevant System Specs:
-144hz Gsync compatible monitor
-CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600
-GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Super (MSI Ventus XS Overclocked edition)
-RAM: 16GB

Issue Summary:
Often, when I select a unit to build, especially at the beginning of a match, I get large frame drops from 60fps to around 40fps.

Details:
I’ve owned the game for a few weeks now and spent the first two weeks mostly playing campaign. I noticed that in Undead campaign I occasionally had some low frame rates during a few cutscenes. I didn’t think much of it.

Multiplayer is a different story, though. I get framerate drops from 60FPS to around 40FPS whenever I click on a unit to build. This happens mostly at the beginning of each match. Later in the match it doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. I did some reading on this forum and elsewhere, and found that others were having similar issues. A few sources have claimed that the frame rate drops have to do with the way the CPU caches the game assets, but I have not come across an official “blue post” from Blizzard addressing the issue (unless I simply missed it when searching).

Here are a few things I tried so far to fix the issue:
-capped framerate at 60 in the control panel
-set GPU to “prefer maximum performance”
-turned Vsync off, but left Gsync on and capped FPS at 60
-turned Vsync back on, but turned off ultra low latency

Unfortunately, none of these approaches seemed to work. I’d also like to note a couple other things that are interesting. One, the in-game FPS slider doesn’t work correctly for me. Capping the frames at 60 in the in-game menu results in a framerate of 64FPS. Two, playing a versus match with classic graphics, rather than reforged, gives me a stable framerate with no drops.

Has anyone come across a solution to this issue? If the issue has to do with AMD Ryzen CPUs, has Blizzard officially recognized this in a post somewhere that I just haven’t seen?

I’ve noticed numerous other bugs and performance problems while playing Reforged, but this is one of the most annoying ones I have encountered by far.

2

I have this problem with Classic graphics. I capped my fps at 70 for a bit of wiggle room. Currently playing singleplayer undead missions. FPS drops to 40, every 5 to 10 seconds. Especially when trying to select new units with mouse, or scroll the map. I have tried all the same fixes you mentioned. Still have no idea.

1 Like
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Do you mind if I ask what your system specs are?

4

Thank you for the report, both, and the details, mlr! There are a few performance related issues that our team is aware of and looking to optimize. I couldn’t find one specifically that you described, but I wanted to call out some of the ones we are aware of that could be relevant.

There’s a few situations with leaving the game client open for too long causing performance issues, though for this specifically the teams been able to replicate the issue remaining steady at 10-15 FPS. Another one where the performance drops when there are too many hero unites with health bars enabled at once can cause some issues that our team is looking into, as well. Some minor specific performance issues with certain custom maps, footman frenzy, the menu (webUI) issue, replay performance issues. There’s a few others that our team is looking into as well related to performance that’s likely causing the units issue.

As for the FPS slider, I couldn’t find details on this and the FPS slider might try to aim for around the selected FPS rather than being super accurate. It might be something for our team to look into, if you wanted to report this over to the #bug-report forums, since this could be problematic for some. Technical support are not the developers or engineers for the game. We only assist with technical issues that can be resolved through troubleshooting, so wouldn’t know the exact in and outs of the internal system on how the menu settings should exactly function, but it’s my best guess that may be a bug. Hopefully, our team can provide some more information on the matter!

5

Alienware 17r3 Laptop.
GTX970m
16GB ram
Intel something with 8 virtual cores.

I usually have an external monitor plugged in. Games run better this way because it bypasses the Integratted Intel gpu that is wired to the laptop main screen. I havent tried it without external monitor, however I doubt that is the solution.

6

Thank you for the blue post reply. I’ll definitely post in the #bug-report forums about the fps slider issue.

One other question: are the development teams aware of the FPS drop issues and other performance issues you mentioned being related to any specific hardware? I’ve read more from other users saying it is it occurring more frequently on AMD systems (CPU or GPU).

7

Hey, mlr! Our team does run through testing with certain hardware from time to time. Checking through, there are some issues with MacOS and AMD specifically that we’ve been tracking. For Windows though, there isn’t any specifics to AMD hardware other than the ones that the issues been replicated on. There is a specific issue with settings and AMD hardware though that our team is looking into. These issues could be happening more on AMD systems, but it’s not something noted from our Quality Assurance team.

Outside of what our Warcraft III team is looking into, there have been known issues with specific AMD processors causing some issues with some of our games that may be relevant. Ryzen 1XXX and some early 2XXX processors had some memory issues, which can be resolved through a BIOS update after or on the AGESA 1.0.0.6a. There’s also been a handful of issues with Ryzen 3600/3600X processors specifically after the AGESA 1.0.0.3ab update. We’ve seen crashes and BEX errors for these issues in particular across quite a few of our games. There’s some issues with some specific AMD drivers that have caused issues with our games, but none that are known for Warcraft III currently.

Other than these things, I couldn’t find any instance of any specific hardware related issues that our team is aware of or looking into.

8

Thanks again for the response with the info!

When you say “AMD drivers”, do you mean the chipset drivers or the drivers for AMD GPUs? At some point in the (near) future I want to upgrade to a better AMD GPU, but I haven’t found much information about driver compatibility with Warcraft III: Reforged.

9

Sorry for not being too clear, mlr! There’s been some issues with the AMD GPU Drivers for specific cards in the past. I haven’t seen it recently though or any similar issues with Warcraft 3. If it seems it may be relevant to anyone else’s issue, reverting to the 19.11.1 drivers seems to help most of the situations that we’ve seen. This isn’t ideal though since some games may need a more recent update to function. There hasn’t been any known issues with the Nvidia drivers relevant to Warcraft III though.