For a few months now I had been experiencing really massive frame drops, like I’m talking 30FPS and lower. My potato is aging gracefully and I have plans to build a new one this year before Christmas, but I’ve made sure drivers are up to date, I’m running on an SSD, all the good things that make WoW happy. Seriously, I can play DOOM Eternal on some really high settings and barely see a stutter, so there should be no reason for WoW to behave like this, even if it is not truly optimized for today’s hardware. I even did a complete reinstall of the game and addons due to another issue I was having (but that’s a whole other story).
After a while, it seemed to get worse. It wasn’t until I was running a BC TW dungeon and realized that my FPS was still hitting a max of 30-ish… inside a dungeon! Stormwind would spike about 40 and I didn’t dare go to Dragon Isles (we’re talking teens for numbers). I made sure my frame cap hadn’t suddenly been set to 30, but nope, it was where it always had been.
At that moment, it occurred to me that maaaybe it was an addon issue. I don’t know why I thought to check it, but I decided to try it. One of the areas I was really struggling with was Boralus, especially on deck of the ship with the command table. Boralus was always an FPS disaster and I decided to try my test there.
I disabled each addon one by one, but stopped half way and decided to just turn them all off, then turn them all on one by one. From that point on, I have not been able to recreate the frame drop issue and I cannot figure out which addon might have been causing the issue, but now I’m hitting a (capped) 70-75 FPS in most old world zones, Boralus sits at a decent 50-55 (on the boat) and I can see 60-65 in Dragon Isle zones with a good 40-50 in the city.
Just curious if anyone can shed some light on the situation, if you had a similar issue and maybe what addon you think it could have been. I’m not fretting over it, the game is running fine now and I’ll have a new rig in a month or two anyway, but it’s the part of me that “wants to know”.