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.
I tried this, both regular 11 and the legacy, the issue is still persisting for me. It’s great that it resolved it for you but I don’t think it’s a cure all for everyone.
Thank you for the input. Now if we could get Blizzard to say something about it. The fact that they haven’t is suspicious. You would think announcing an issue with Microsoft would relieve some pressure on Blizzard, but they haven’t . . . .
Yes I have been having the same issues as well. It was happening just before 9.1 launched, but is even worse now. At the beginning of the expansion it definitely wasn’t like this for me. I did a full UI reset, removed all my add-ons, and it helped a little for a few days but now it’s just back to being horrible again. I’ve lowered all my settings, still doesn’t help. I do run it on DX12, have tried running it on 11, but it didn’t help.
Well I guess technically, Blizzard could try to rewrite their rendering thread around the bugs, but it would take a bit of refactoring work to do. Also, the bug isn’t super widespread because for the most part, most people aren’t running at 8xMSAA, where it’s most prevalent.
But then comes the problem of okay, they rewrote the code around the problem, but then Nvidia changes something to combat their problems with Windows and now it breaks WoW again. But wait there’s more! Microsoft makes some changes to fix their problems, that now break some of Nvidia’s fixes, that break some of Blizzard’s fixes. See what I’m getting at? Blizzard probably doesn’t want play that whack a mole game.
From a CS standpoint, I doubt Blizzard is going to want to admit that to customers.
Have a brand new high-end PC. Everything was working perfectly… today upon logging in, I also have ‘the random stutter bug’ as well. The game runs very smoothly but randomly ‘stutters’ every minute (timed it with a stopwatch). At first I thought it only happened while moving to different parts of a zone but it does it while standing still. It happens in several random zones I’ve tried. Changing to DX 11 has no effect. Tried all the usual stuff (addons, renaming cache/wtf) to no avail. It is SUPER annoying. and interferes with the general play of the game. What a bummer!
Never had any issues prior and did not change anything.
AMD-Ryzen 7 5800x
32GB RAM
Nvidia Founders 3080
Samsung SSD
I found a solution that worked for me (crazy as it sounds). Apparently, it was the windows desktop wallpaper changing every 60 seconds that was causing the stutter. I made the wallpaper static and BAM… no more random stutter!!!
Me and 1 other in my guild get these drops. We are both running gtx 1080s but these issues started around 9.0 during 8.3 it was fine but ever since 9.0 we both lock up in raid fights and some dungeon bosses. Drops from over 100 fps to literal 1 or less for a solid 5-10 seconds until it slowly builds back up. Denathrius was bad for this but it’s happened on most Sanctum bosses now as well. I don’t know what to do anymore.
I’m not sure if this is helpful or not but I had this same issue. Tried everything I could with graphics settings bottomed out and no addons. I got rid of deadly boss mods and started using bigwigs and haven’t had a problem since. I’m not sure why. All I know is I’m not getting hiccups anymore.
Glad to hear I’m not the only one with this issue. I just came back within the last few weeks for 9.1 and started noticing huge FPS drops within dungeons once the boss was pulled. I thought maybe it was my imagination but when I did SoD last night my FPS dropped to 10~20 when the first boss was pulled.
Went through disabling all WAs, addons, dropping raid settings down to 1/2/3/4. DirectX 11, manually setting main GPU, monitor, pretty much everything that was already suggested here.
I did a clean install of my GPU drivers (DDU in safe mode then latest driver), re-installed WoW and still having the drops.
For anyone still having this problem, if you use Overwolf/Curseforge, try closing it out after you download/update your addons for the day. It’s unnecessary bloatware that bogs down your computer with multiple processes even if you’re not using it.
I was having an issue with my 6800XT where I couldn’t upgrade the drivers or I’d get a grey screen.
I fixed this by updating the vbios (video bios) through MSI’s Live Update utility. After that I was able to update drivers to current, and a great deal of the stuttering has gone away.
Keep in mind that any overlay will cause this game to stutter now including and especially discord overlay.
RTSS overlay as useful as it is will also cause it.
Having any web browser open in the background, regardless of if you have hardware acceleration turned off will cause it.
I’ve also been having fps issues in game recently.
When doing sanctum of domination, my fps drops on most bosses from ~50-60 to ~10-25. A couple of bosses where it does not lag nearly that bad and seems fairly smooth are Eye of the Jailer and Painsmith Raznal.
I had little to no issues in Castle Nathria with the same or better settings.
I have tried:
-Setting everything to lowest settings
-Disabling Addons
-Scanning and repairing game
-Clearing cache
-Making sure drivers are up to date (they are)
-Switching to DX11
-Undoing every overclock I had on my PC (made it slightly worse in the world but no change in raid)
Nothing seems to affect the fps in the raid.
Computer specs:
CPU - Ryzen 7 1700
GPU - NVIDIA GeForce 1080
RAM - 16GB 2133mhz
OS - Windows 10
Sounds like your CPU is getting choked out then. I think WoW will use up to four cores. The R7 1700 has 16 threads, so in your task manager, if you ever see 20-25% overall usage, while playing WoW, that means your client is pretty much 100% saturated. This can lead to delays in telling the GPU to render the frame and can produce stuttering and FPS drops.
There are also some special effects that are pretty hard on GPUs as well, which might be the case with your issues.
to all the people trying to troubleshoot this still…
Again, they have fixed this issue and then it came back after a new patch, and even have addressed this on the forums
“Update: Our engineers confirmed the bug is back and are working on fixing it again. I don’t know exactly why the previous fix was taken out - but usually when that sort of thing happens it’s because it caused an unforeseen issue and we have to temporarily remove it to tinker with it some more.”