WoW Forever Hardware Usage Compared to Retail

WoW: Forever World of Warcraft: Forever General Discussion
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I’ve noticed that WoW Forever seems to be considerably more demanding on hardware than WoW Retail, and I’m trying to understand whether this is expected behavior at this stage.

I’ve been playing WoW for years, and although my hardware is no longer particularly new, I can still run Retail comfortably. With reasonable graphics settings, I get stable and acceptable FPS without the system being pushed unusually hard.

Forever seems to behave very differently. Even with the graphics settings turned all the way down, both my GPU and CPU reach noticeably higher temperatures, which in turn causes both the GPU and CPU fans to ramp up significantly. The GPU fans can reach 100%, and I’ve now noticed that the CPU cooling also becomes much more aggressive.

The interesting part is that performance itself doesn’t seem to be the problem. My FPS remains stable and perfectly playable, and there aren’t any obvious stutters or major performance issues. What stands out is simply how much harder the hardware seems to be working to achieve that level of performance.

There also doesn’t seem to be much more I can reduce through the graphics settings, since I’m already testing with almost everything at minimum.

As soon as I close Forever and switch back to Retail, temperatures and fan speeds drop back to what I would normally expect, while the game still runs smoothly.

So my main question is: how much more CPU/GPU resource usage is Forever currently expected to have compared to Retail? Is the higher hardware load simply part of the current build/engine baseline, or could there be an optimization issue causing the game to use significantly more resources than Retail even at very low settings?

I’d also be interested to know whether other people are seeing similar differences in CPU/GPU temperatures, utilization, or fan speeds between Forever and Retail.

5 Likes
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Im getting same issues

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I reduced Secondary Lighting (to Fair) and now both CPU and GPU tempuratures and fan speeds are much lower.

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I think it has to do with the new lighting engine, compute and a splash of PBR (though it doesn’t appear that all materials use updated shaders).

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I didn’t see an issue until after their server shutdown/emergency maintenance several hours ago.

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I think this is a big one, my understanding is that secondary lightning is ray tracing but not utilizing whatever dedicated thing GPUs have to calculate that which is causing a lot of heavy lifting for the CPU/GPU.

Bellular has a video on optimizing settings that helped me tune things.

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AFAIK all you can do is reduce the secondary lighting (software raytracing) down low, but not fully turn it off and go back to Classic / Era / Retail lighting. You’re forced to have the raytracing on which can (and clearly does) hit some GPU’s harder than others.

It’s software raytracing but running at a much slower update cycle than traditional raytracing we’ve seen in many games that suck up FPS. It probably does get access to those cores on AMD / Nvidia cards these days but I doubt it utilizes them fully as hardware solution raytracing does.

On the flipside, 8 year old GPU’s can run it pretty decently…

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Idk, I had 0 issues until early morning log in session today. Felt like blizzard was attacking my pc through that exe. :laughing:

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After the patch, my CPU and GPU are running so hot that I do not dare to play. My CPU runs at around 200 degrees.