10-18 FPS When Fighting Raid Boss

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Can someone explain to me why am I able to get around 60 fps steadily out in the open world and dungeons, but in Uldir on boss fights my fps drastically drops down to 10-18 fps? BTW I'm playing on the lowest graphic settings in the system menu for Raids.

If I'm able to play modern games on my bootcamp partition on Ultra settings and get a steady 60 fps if not more, then darn I should be able to play a game that's over 10 years old, or at least you would think.

MacPro (mid 2012)
Processor - 2 x 2.4 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
Graphics - Radeon RX 480 8192 MB
Memory - 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
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Howdy!

Your Xeon CPU is not supported. It knows how to run the game but performance wise will not do it as expected. The base and Max clock of the E5645 is
2.40 GHz to 2.67 GHz, both are lower than the base clock of the lowest Intel CPU we support: i5-760. This CPU has a base clock of 2.80 GHz upto 3.33Ghz. The main factor here is World of Warcraft still prefers strong single core/threaded performance over more cores.

In a raid like this you have a lot of action going on in a small space. If a world boss fight is big enough, battlegrounds, or Warfront with everyone focused on that final boss, you will see major dips in performance. How bad depends on your system's setup and settings. Your CPU's performance in this case isn't helping as much.

You can press "Esc" -> System -> Graphics -> Check: Enable Raid and Battleground Settings -> Then set your Environment settings to 1. Disable Outline Mode. Goto Sound -> Set Sound Channels to Low and Sound Cache to Small. These settings should help lower your overall CPU impact.

As for feedback you can always post on our General forums or provide direct feedback in game to our developers in game "Esc" -> Help -> Submit Suggestion. If you would like to see them focus on this in the future.

Thank you.
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09/12/2018 09:58 AMPosted by Zuvykree
Howdy!

Your Xeon CPU is not supported. It knows how to run the game but performance wise will not do it as expected. The base and Max clock of the E5645 is
2.40 GHz to 2.67 GHz, both are lower than the base clock of the lowest Intel CPU we support: i5-760. This CPU has a base clock of 2.80 GHz upto 3.33Ghz. The main factor here is World of Warcraft still prefers strong single core/threaded performance over more cores.

In a raid like this you have a lot of action going on in a small space. If a world boss fight is big enough, battlegrounds, or Warfront with everyone focused on that final boss, you will see major dips in performance. How bad depends on your system's setup and settings. Your CPU's performance in this case isn't helping as much.

You can press "Esc" -> System -> Graphics -> Check: Enable Raid and Battleground Settings -> Then set your Environment settings to 1. Disable Outline Mode. Goto Sound -> Set Sound Channels to Low and Sound Cache to Small. These settings should help lower your overall CPU impact.

As for feedback you can always post on our General forums or provide direct feedback in game to our developers in game "Esc" -> Help -> Submit Suggestion. If you would like to see them focus on this in the future.

Thank you.


So basically what you're saying is the coding for your MMO is completely outdated and does not look like it's coming into the new era of gaming? Not even with the GPUs we have today? That's what you're saying right?
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some games can have the gpu do everything. games like warcraft can't. they need the cpu too. your cpu is a 6 year old workstation processor - its not their fault it runs badly. it'll run the new era of games badly too if they need to use your cpu.
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Zuvykree is correct in that the E5645 is below the listed minimum requirements for the game (for comparison's sake an E5645 on geekbench scores 2160 vs the i5-760 score of 2387 for single core performance) and that WoW prefers strong single-core throughput over multi-core throughput.

However, all is not lost -- you have the ideal starting machine for creating an excellent workstation (and pretty good gaming machine) -- you can upgrade that machine to two x5690s (single-core perf of 2866), and that will be plenty powerful enough to run WoW for this expansion. And if they ever pull off the rumored attempt of moving the main engine to better utilize more cores, you're set.
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09/12/2018 04:27 PMPosted by Yindar
some games can have the gpu do everything. games like warcraft can't. they need the cpu too. your cpu is a 6 year old workstation processor - its not their fault it runs badly. it'll run the new era of games badly too if they need to use your cpu.

technically, in uldir it is there fault

There are some issues with uldir that make it use more cpu than it should. Major issues in fact. Even a 4 year old CPU with an overclock in a high end hackintosh struggles, badly. You basically need a cpu that's less than 3 years old to have any hope of good performance in uldir for some bosses.

Fortunately, blizzard is aware of issues with Uldir and hopefully has some fixes planned with how bad it is on cpu. It's far more demanding than it should be. You can compare it to any other raid from recent times like legion and the cpu was not that bogged down.

Meanwhile, I'm actually waiting for 9000 series intel cpus to come out then i'll probably buy new ram new board and new cpu and swap them into hack just so I meet the min specs for Bad blizzard coding in Uldir.
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09/12/2018 12:28 PMPosted by Blacck
So basically what you're saying is the coding for your MMO is completely outdated and does not look like it's coming into the new era of gaming? Not even with the GPUs we have today? That's what you're saying right?


Pretty much. All of WoW's coding is pretty much outdated and they've made it worse by rolling out Direct X changes into Metal which has caused problems and broke various third party drivers as well that relied on Blizzard's previous hack job.

Recently Blizzard removed Exclusive Fullscreen from the options (as opposed to windowed fullscreen mode which is now forced) which has caused massive performance decreases across the board for all sorts of hardware users because of WoW's poor CPU optimisation in hogging the last core of your CPU when it should be doing those rendering on the GPU. Unfortunately, Blizzard's coding department never got that memo and removing EFS has further exposed the poor optimisation.

Also, that Blue is completely wrong about WoW not supporting Xeon CPUs. If your OS supports a CPU, the game supports a CPU as has been the case for years now. If it didn't support your CPU, it wouldn't run at all. As a Google search would reveal to the Blue. It's a wonder why any tech support at all is offered in the Mac category when it's so blatantly wrong.
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MacPro (mid 2012)

LOL

and u are pretending to have good performance with a machine that old

is this a troll post or this guy knows nothing about computer...
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09/21/2018 03:58 AMPosted by Nausic0F286B
MacPro (mid 2012)

LOL

and u are pretending to have good performance with a machine that old

is this a troll post or this guy knows nothing about computer...
I'm actually amazed this guy hasn't been banned yet.
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09/21/2018 03:58 AMPosted by Nausic0F286B
MacPro (mid 2012)

LOL

and u are pretending to have good performance with a machine that old

is this a troll post or this guy knows nothing about computer...


Intel architecture hasn't actually changed that much in the last few years performance wise, so a "a machine that old" doesn't really enter into it, especially when the Xeon is more than capable of steamrolling something as trash as WoW at a coding level. Until graphene can be mass produced, it's unlikely to get much better either.

Your contributions aren't terribly valuable either, especially when you, being the highly educated individual that you are, don't know the difference between a MacPro and a Macbook Pro as demonstrated in other threads. You're not really one to be saying someone else "knows nothing about computer[s]". Even if you are a "troll", you're just... pathetic.

Now toddle off and let the adults tell Blizzard how to make their game client run better. Though I'm sure OP appreciates the topic bump!
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09/12/2018 08:41 PMPosted by Sagerremeseb
Zuvykree is correct in that the E5645 is below the listed minimum requirements for the game (for comparison's sake an E5645 on geekbench scores 2160 vs the i5-760 score of 2387 for single core performance) and that WoW prefers strong single-core throughput over multi-core throughput.

However, all is not lost -- you have the ideal starting machine for creating an excellent workstation (and pretty good gaming machine) -- you can upgrade that machine to two x5690s (single-core perf of 2866), and that will be plenty powerful enough to run WoW for this expansion. And if they ever pull off the rumored attempt of moving the main engine to better utilize more cores, you're set.


Came back to visit this old post...I'm going to buy those and give it a shot, thanks to all of those who contributed, really much appreciated :)
1 Like
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Good thing I came across this thread, I DO have an aging 5,1, but it does have a W3680 Westmere CPU, 6 core, 3.33GHz, GTX980, geekbench of 2934. Going to be interesting to see what happens when some multi-core efforts come into play, supposedly in 8.1.

Indeed, I kinda notice some low fps on some Uldir bosses, but the real noticeable hit comes on world bosses. Those guys sure hint at slide shows rather than "frames per second."
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you might see minor gains at best with 8.1, but the age of cpu matters a LOT cause there is more to it than just clock rate and cores. it's efficiency and power of each cycle. a processor from 8 years ago at 2ghz is not equal to a 2ghz cpu from this year. now factor in that in addition to fact the cpus today are pretty much all turboing 4ghz or higher these days on at least 2 cores.
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Add to that the dramatically improved memory speeds. The DDR3 running at 1.33 GHz of 8 years ago is half the throughput of today's DDR4 running at 2.66 GHz. Within a year we might see DDR5 in general use on high-end machines (like the *cough* 2019 Mac Pro *cough*), and that should be another big step forward.

That said, I was seeing 20 percent gains in frame rate on 8.1 (at least when it was working on Mac OS) on my Mac Pro. Certainly not overwhelming, but I'll take it.

World bosses are basically raid bosses with usually more players involved. But if you have separate raid settings -- usually sacrificing detail so as to maintain frame rate -- they are not invoked on a world boss. This is what leads to slideshow mode (I like that term -- I'm stealing it). I never could find a group to try a world boss on the PTR -- I suspect the benefit might actually be more noticeable.
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11/10/2018 08:01 AMPosted by Sagerremeseb
This is what leads to slideshow mode (I like that term -- I'm stealing it).


I like slowdown salad more. Has more crunch to it. :)
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11/10/2018 08:01 AMPosted by Sagerremeseb
Add to that the dramatically improved memory speeds. The DDR3 running at 1.33 GHz of 8 years ago is half the throughput of today's DDR4 running at 2.66 GHz
To be fair though, the difference RAM speed makes is *there* but I honestly think you'd be pretty hard pressed to notice it playing games unless you're using something like Ryzen on the PC side which benefits a lot... (but mostly only because the core interconnect is tied to RAM speed.)