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.