From all the forums I’ve thumbed through WoW reinstalls, beefy computers, removing add-ons, and disableing all kinds of features have no effect.
Blizz says they know what the problem is and are working on it. Those kind of statements are usually followed by dramatic drops in Support responses. Hopefully they are working on it.
Thank God there is a post about this. I was starting to think it was my computer. Tried a lot of what many of you here have tried as well, including reinstalling/updating all my addons, disabling them, putting all graphics settings to bare minimum, adjusting my monitor settings, restarting my computer, clearing my computer cache, got rid of my foreground FPS cap, checking for sufficient free HDD space, ensured my GPU drivers are the most updated, tried turning addons on/off with multiple WoW/Blizzard/PC resets, and probably some more, but no luck.
I have a pretty high-end gaming desktop. This issue just randomly began for me this morning and I’ve been playing a little bit pretty much daily since 9.1 dropped 2 weeks ago.
Possible Fix found or work around depending on your view point.
Switch to DirectX 11
Still testing but so far the issues are gone.
Im still experiencing some choppy game play. Its a fractional amount compared to what it was before
I can’t even run instances because of the frequent freezes. I went through all of my hardware and add-ons. Outside of instances, my latency and FPS are fantastic on a relatively new computer. But if I zone into an instance, it’s Freeze City. So it’s not just dungeons and raids that are unplayable, but Torghast too.
If I can’t do those things, then . . . . back to being a Sims-playing-housewife for me, I reckon. 
I’ve found that if I’m listening to youtube (music) on another monitor I get the choppyness. If I pause the video, the issue disappears entirely. If I minimize it, or go to another tab I get significantly less but it’s still there.
Disabling hardware acceleration in Firefox fixes it.
I’m guessing that Blizzard’s having issues with DX12 and contention/prioritization. In the meantime, making WoW the only thing using the graphics card, or removing hardware acceleration, seems to be a highly effective fix - for me at least.
i9 7980 XE @ 4.2GHZ, 64GB DDR4, Optane 905 primary disk (wow installed there), Win10 20H2, 1080TI x2 in SLI. Latest GeForce drivers.
Just wanted to say same issue here, it’s absurdly annoying, already tried disabling addons or lowering graphics, reinstalling stuff, nothing works. It seems to happen when a lot of stuff is being loaded in ram, such as when you pull a raid boss for the first time, open your map, macros or any other sort of menus, etc. Previously the game ran just fine.
GTX 1050, i5 7th gen, DDR4 RAM and M2 EVO PRO SSD.
Today, for me in Spires of Ascension was nearly unplayable, I’m having once again massive fps drops moving the camera in certain angles, lowered my graphics settings to (1) and still I’m having the same 30-20s fps drops from constantly (75), people in the dungeon also called that they were lagging maybe was the fps drop.
After the reset this was fixed, I’ve been having this issue since the start of Shadowlands first was only the entrance after the first boss, now is the whole dungeon. First the open map stutter bug, next was western Korthia skybox fps drop and now this again. Whats going on?
Same here. I’m so glad I found this thread. I tried everything and couldn’t figure it out
Found a temporary fix in the forums that helped me, hope this helps anyone too with the dungeon and some random fps drops 
Blizz please fix this.
Something simple…Go to System. Go to Advanced. Under Graphics API - change it to Direct 11 Legacy. See if it helps. I was having choppy graphics in raid and it fixed it.
I have a subpar laptop but i’ve never had problems with doing content, even Castle Nathria I had 60 fps. Spires i’d have like 40 but was doable. I did the Terragrue boss and I dropped to like 6 fps and that’s obviously unplayable because I cant even rotate or click my screen to move, see where to run etc. Also have problems during world bosses but those aren’t as important, i’m just concerned about SoD. Torghast is completely fine for me but i guess raiding is out of the question for me.
I don’t think that’s the case. I guess I could write a fake addon that hogs a big chunk of memory and runs a heavy CPU load on tick to test it for sure.
I think where a lot of people mess up is they forget there’s an “All” and “Per character” set of enable/disables for them.
My issue is when I mouse over things or move abilities around on my action bars, it causes micro stutters.
I have deleted the cache folders, deleted the WTF folders, disabled all addons, switched to DirectX Legacy 11… nothing gets rid of the issue.
I am beyond frustrated.
Ive played a few other games without any issues. The only game I am able to duplicate these problems with is a over the top mod’ed Skyrim that is way beyond WoW. When I move fast I get bottlenecks/stutters on my screen as I wait for everything to load in.
With my meager coding experience that tells me one thing. There is some “junk in that program trunk.” Our PC’s are racing through a Blizzard mine field while loading everything.
Anyone figure out a fix? Nothing I try works.
Disable all addons? Still does it.
Mess around with settings? Still does it.
Delete Cache/WTF/Interface folders? Still does it.
It’s to the point I don’t even want to play because the micro stutter lag drives me to annoyance.
The raid is a struggle…once combat starts, it hits super low. We had to do raids without using hero on pull/cd’s…
This is on Oceanic servers.
8700k/3080.
Still awful stuttering since 9.1. I have done everything mentioned here, but like others It’s still pretty unplayable. You can play, but its not enjoyable ect. So much hitching.
You’re going to be waiting on Microsoft to hammer out the rest of the kinks in their DWM when using DX12. It’s an issue across the board right now. There’s a part of the DWM called the multiplane overlay system and that basically got turned all the way on in recent Nvidia drivers and Windows. That’s why any driver after the 457.XX ones introduced all kinds of bugs for almost all games now. It’s technically been around since around the Windows 8 era, but wasn’t really used. It handles compositing frames to be rendered and handles all the mixed refresh rates, windows and such. There’s something wrong in the pipeline that’s leading to a lot of issues when using DX12 because it receives different optimizations. I won’t turn this into a rant about it all though, just know that this really isn’t likely an issue on Blizzard’s end.
But yeah, for now, DX11 in WoW is faaaaar smoother than DX12. I switched back to 11 the other night and rarely ever have a hitch ever. The only time it does is when my client suddenly needs to load in dozens of new people at once, like when you phase to fight a world boss in LFG, but that would happen in DX12 as well.
Yup, DX11 is the fix right now.