I was commenting in another thread and a few people made a post about how certain add ons take up quite a bit of resources and slow down/impact game play graphics and stuff like that.
Is this accurate? Specifically Details but other ones as well. Like if i shut off Elvui, Details, raiderIO, silver dragon and others, will WoW run NOTICEABLY different or smoother?
(I am sorta computer illiterate so sorry if it is an obvious answer to most)
Dunno. It would probably depend mostly on your computer specs.
I can definitely see stuff like Weakauras, boss mods, and damage meters being resource hogs while doing content with a lot of other players. But I’ve never really bothered testing things without addons myself.
As someone who uses over 200 mods, including those you mentioned, using almost 300MB of RAM, it can but that depends on your computer specs and the mods themselves. I still push over 100FPS at the highest graphic setting.
Use enough addons, or have weak enough specs and disabling addons will make a noticeable difference.
As others have said, how big an impact will depend on your computer specs and how beefy it is.
As someone on a potato, the only time I notice much about addons having an impact is loading screens, but even that is minimal since I tailor addon profiles for the content I’m doing at the time.
Something that did make a noticeable difference to performance was disabling stacking nameplates. I went from frames per minute to normal frames during boss encounters with excessive adds and/or motes.
It all depends on how low end your computer is in the 1st place. If you have a solid computer then having a lot of add-on have very little to no effect on performance because your computer has more than enough resources to handle it all. If you have a toaster oven of a computer that is in great need of being updated. Then yes add-on add to the stress on system resources and will affect how will the system performs running WoW
Thank you for making this/asking this. I was also curious. 
Depends on the addons and how often they trigger. If an addon triggers constantly and is doing a lot for each trigger then yes it will cause major stutters. This has happened in the past. But most addons try to not do that.
SO something like Details, since it is real time calculating, might impact quite a bit if you are say in a raid and like have 3 parses going (DPS, Heals and total DPS) or something like that?
Potentially, Details used to be known for being a bit heavyweight. But the authors have done a lot to ensure that isn’t the case as much in the last few expansions.
An odd one that happened was the better wardrobe and transmog addon which was running on combat for example when it shouldn’t have been for awhile. The author AFAIK has since fixed that so that it basically shuts down in combat.
TSM makes my load screens super long for some reason
200 addons and only 300mb usage? Lol wut I have like 15 and hit 500 mb… you gotta get “all the things”
How do you determine this? Is there a 3rd party program? Or is it an add on to monitor add ons heh
I have a fairly decent PC. I can run most settings on Ultra but choose to go with the recommended settings, which puts things at like a 7. Aside from Details and ElvUI, the big one that I notice taking up the most resources is WeakAuras. That’s also gonna be really dependent on which ones you’re using, though. Typically the more “sparkly” it looks, the more resources it will contribute to eating. Especially if you spec swap a lot and download a package for all of your classes specs.
yes.
the biggest impact will be loading screens. mine take foreeeeeeeeeeeeeevvvvvver. when I shut down all addons they’re almost instant.
you can look and see how much memory your addons are using. there are some that use a lot more than others. elvUI, Details, MoveAnything, Mogit are some big ones that pop to mind.
I had to shut that one off it was just a 800 pound resource hog 
All The Things is awful like that. I only use it when I’m actually running around for transmog farming or looking to see who has what recipes learned for professions. Just chilling right now on a little auction alt, TSM is at 150mb while ATT is at 300mb usage.
JFC… that addon added an extra 300MB+ and dropped me to 60FPS, 
The biggest performance hogs are going to be the ones that frequently scan players (e.g. surrounding players, your raid, etc) or parse your combat log. Addons are single-threaded and run on the main thread, and thus competing for the same CPU capacity as a lot of WoW’s rendering pipeline, meaning that tasks that take a lot of time (like iterating through 40+ players) are going to drag down FPS.
Whether that’s noticeable or not depends on your machine, but even those with beefy rigs will see performance improvements from turning off things like DPS meters.