UPDATE
I may have found the solution. I entered the following command in the chat box and went from 99% to 55% GPU usage:
/console cvar_default
I have tried everything I can think of. Any suggestions? Running RTX 3090. Dropped frames to 100 max, turned off addons, Swapped to DirectX 11, followed NVIDIA recommendations for WoW settings. Restarted. Even have graphics on 7. Nothing seems to help. Suggestions?
For reference, BDO (Black Desert Online) at max settings in a very populated town (Velia) runs at 50% to 55%.
Some addons are notorius for messing with hidden CVARs that can negatively affect the client performance. There are even options to mess with things like the effect densities in there. The densities for things like the effects that rain down from spells like blizzard, to the point where there can be like 10000000 effects raining down vs maybe a dozen.
/console cvar_default wipes all of the potentially messed with settings and is best used in conjunction with a UI reset where you remove addons and the WTF folder. It’s in the advanced help dropdown on the UI reset page:
A full UI reset should almost always be the first thing people try in the way of troubleshooting performance issues in the game.