I don’t know what all to say but ever since patch 10.2, my GPU just starts heating up massively and full spinning on the fans.
I don’t quite know how to diagnose it or anything but can provide information if someone walks me through the steps, but basically randomly in 10.2 my GPU just goes HARD and doesn’t stop.
Does it anywhere and any time. Dungeons, Major cities, low level empty zones, phased content, not phased content, loading screens, basically anywhere except I don’t think it’s happened during character selection screens.
I’m nervous this is going to break my GPU, has anyone else noticed similar issues and how did you fix it?
BTW - I’ve gone from 10 on the settings all the way down to 1 on the settings, doesn’t matter. Max settings or minimum, still absolutely destroys my card, and I can’t afford to replace this card - Please help
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Cap the framerate in Nvidia control panel and try DX11 (not legacy).
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Mine only does this in the new Emerald Dream zone. Near the town and some southern areas. Fans go to 100%. I have a RTX 3060Ti. I’m not sure what’s causing it. Usually I never hear the GPU fans when I play WoW.
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Turn on VSYNC or cap your frame rate to 3-5 fps lower than your refresh rate. (you can cap within WoW or within the Nvidia control panel)
I’ve heard some reports though of people talking about recent Nvidia drivers and them not being able to get VSYNC to work at all.
You can test and verify your FPS is capped by pressing ctrl+r while in game to see your FPS.
I currently have frames capped, but here are my settings.
Resolution: 1080
Refresh Rate: 120
Max FPS: 120
Max background FPS: 30
Target FPS: 60
I did notice in other games my fps is capped at 100. No issues with the GPU getting loud. Should I cap WoW frames at 100 too or would I see tearing?
If you aren’t using VSYNC, cap to a handful of frames below. So 115 in your case. Timings aren’t perfect and if you have it set to 120, it can give you tearing from time to time. If you are using GSYNC, make sure to enable VSYNC as well and use reflex on (don’t bother with the boost or ultra or whatever the higher setting is called) which will autocap your FPS like I just said a second ago, or if you don’t use reflex, just cap to 115.
A lot of why you guys are having issues with the GPU fans kicking up is because the GPU is doing more work more frequently. This can be caused by a few things in WoW. Modern areas, like Valdrakken, are very CPU bottlenecked, which will lower your FPS. If you look at utilization on mid to higher end cards, a lot of the time, they will be sitting at low usage in dense places like Valdrakken. The CPU has to tell the GPU what to render, so your GPU will sit there bored waiting for the CPU to tell it what to do. By lowering how often the GPU gets to render a frame, it stays cooler.
When you then leave areas that are CPU bottlenecked, the CPU can feed frames to the GPU faster. If you’re in a modern zone, they can be pretty render heavy, which taxes your GPU more. There can be “sweet-spots” that brew a perfect storm for heating up a GPU in terms of graphics quality levels vs frame rates. Max settings doesn’t always heat a GPU up as much as something like medium settings where it gets 2x the fps. But then you might see that on low settings, it gets like 4x the fps of max, but the temp is similar to the max settings temp.
Anyways, that’s probably enough coffee rambling at 9am. To be honest, for something like an MMO, just cap somewhere between 80-100. This isn’t Counterstrike or Valorant…
Sorry, I forgot to mention that VSYNC is enabled.
I’m having this same problem as well that my GPU will spool up its fans to max (3060xc) specifically in the new zone. And my guildies are also having the same problem and have Nvidia cards around the same level or better than mine.
I play in windowed mode and have noticed the following:
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If I click out of the game and leave the game idling in the background my GPU goes back to normal.
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there are a few areas around the world tree that seem to be worse than others for this.
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somehow World of warcraft is now more graphically intense in the new zone at medium settings than heavily modded skyrim, or star citizen.
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GPU usage only seems to peg out at ~5% according to task manager and other monitoring programs, but something in the game is causing my GPU fans to try and imitate a jet engine
I’ll try the Dx11 and capping my frames below the refresh rate of my monitor trick that has been mentioned and report back after work.
This is why I began to look into the issue. Guildmates with Nvidia cards are complaining about the same issue in the new zone. Also the last wing boss on the Emerald Dream side of the raid. Caused the fans to go to 100% before the fight started when all the green grass was on the ground.
I began to think this was a Blizzard-Nvidia issue.
Download MSI afterburner and tell us your temps while those activities are happening.
My 3080ti spins up its fans in the new zone too, but it’s just because it’s graphically more intensive (it definitely spins up more in Dragonflight zones than in old content). I’ve still never gone above 40% GPU usage on max settings though.
I will say I use a VERY aggressive fan profile that completely maxes out all fans by 60C.
Also, cap background FPS to 8. No reason to waste energy and generate heat when you aren’t even tabbed into the game.
At what temps for a GPU should you get concerned?
Anyone make any progress on this issue or hear anything? I have a 4090 and am experiencing the same issue. Ever since 10.2 my GPU Is like a rocket ship maxxing out at 100% usage with temps going up into the 80’s and my PC tower has turned into a flipping radiator it’s putting off so much heat. I saw there was an Nvidia driver update but it’s still happening.
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Oi good Sir, do you think we will get to a point where a CPU isn’t needed anymore, it’s just all done on the GPU?
When you alt tab, your WoW client is probably going into background FPS mode, which I think defaults to 8fps. Disable the limit checkbox, hit okay and then try alt tabbing. Your usage should be a lot higher.
That’s extremely low and almost pointless. Most dual or triple fan GPUs peg out efficiency around 60-75% fan speed, in terms of “percent increase in fan speed vs decrease in degrees C.” That’s why the default fan curves are set the way they are and only ramp up if it’s about to fry itself. Basically, the cooling is usually overkill so they can run the fans lower, which means quieter.
Certain graphical calculations generate more heat than others. Are you guys running ray tracing at all and can you make sure to verify that your render resolutions are set to 100% and not accidentally set to like 200% or something silly like that?
Like I mentioned earlier, I’ve heard some reports of Nvidia users having issues with Vsync not working in games with these latest couple releases of drivers. So if you’re not using a foreground limiter, you might be getting like 9000 fps on cards like the 4090, which will generate a ton of heat.
So, following up on this. In my case, Capping my FPS in Nvidia Control Panel, and using DX 11 has resolved the issue of my GPU spooling up to sounding like a helicopter on takeoff when doing stuff around the the Emerald Dream areas, especially in areas where I had previously noticed my GPU fans would spool to its maximum RPM.
There is still some increased loading on the GPU in the dream, but this workaround seems to be mostly working right now.
Still not sure what’s causing this. Over here can run DX12 with 3080 without any issues, no max out of the GPU or RAM. Looking for the common thread among these reports.
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I have this issue also, on a 4080, in the new zone.
The fans will randomly surge to 3500+ RPM, and I have to tab out to stop it.
That hot spot sensor has registered 105c-111c several times when that happens. Rest of the temp sensors range from mid 50c to 70c.
I have G-sync Ultimate running from NVIDIA control panel settings (v-sync off ingame), and I’m running the latest NVIDIA driver. Ray Tracing OFF.
I have a 3060Ti, DX12, Windows 10 64 bit. My graphics profile is not very aggressive, about a 7 on the scale, maybe closer to 6 due to some settings I have lower due to personal preference. Everything is fine in DF except a few areas for me.
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Emerald Dream around the southern area of the tree. Temps surge on the card to 75 to 80C and fans go to 100% until I tab out or move away from that area.
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Amirdrassil Raid the only area I run into issues is on Nymue when all the green grass is out before you pull her. Temps shoot up to 75 to 80C and fans go full blast. Once the fight starts, temps plummet to 55C and runs smoothly.
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Halls of Infusion - 1st boss during his intermission. Temps go from 55C to 75-80C and fans go full blast. Once intermission is over, it drops back down.
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2nd boss in Lower Dawn of the Infinites - During his intermission with the swirls going out. Temps shoot up to 75 to 80C and fans full blast. Once its over, everything goes down to the normal 55 to 62C.
My card averages 59C over 5 hours of gameplay. Its just those areas above where it just goes crazy and the only one that really is annoying is Emerald Dream due to being in the new zone.
Could it be particle effects? Is there an optimal setting for particles? The common graphic I see on the screen in all those areas is sparkly stuff, I’d love to disable that, but have no idea how.
I run with VSYNC on and frames are capped at 101FPS.
I’ve heard reports of issues with Afterburner on the 545 and up drivers for some people. It could be that their cards are being set to something whacky or that if they typically run an undervolt, it’s not being applied and the card is drawing more wattage → more heat → faster spinning fans.
But this isn’t widespread enough to fully be able to blame one party or another, so it’s likely as you said: a common thread that they all share and it’s likely on the user system end of things.
The other thing that I’ve noticed that some people(talking about a variety of games I watch tech support for) are using mobile versions of the GPUs and expect to be able to just update to whatever the newest driver is. This is 100% wrong and if you’re on a notebook, you can only use the drivers from the manufacturer…