I am experiencing a serious FPS drop issue during 25-player raids, and I would appreciate your advice. In the following video, you can see how my FPS drops from nearly 80 to 35, along with FPS statistics, processor temperatures, and GPU temperatures displayed at the top of the screen:
I would greatly appreciate your expert advice on what I might be configuring incorrectly to achieve at least 60 FPS in 25-player raids. Your help would mean a lot!
CPU seems to be running warm, might be throttled, definitely make sure those cooler fans are clear especially on a laptop. Might have to get in and really blow them out. Depending on the laptop, it might be as simple as removing the bottom, or might be a task.
Not sure if you are encoding a stream, or saving the vod to your HDD, but that might also be slowing your performance. SSD is recommended for the game.
I need to clarify that I replaced the HDD with an SSD a while ago, so the game is running on an SSD. As for the fans, I perform maintenance every three months because dust does accumulate, and I start noticing a few degrees of temperature increase when it does.
However, what concerns me is that I don’t see the CPU or GPU getting overloaded to cause a bottleneck, nor the RAM, which is 16GB and never reaches its limit. Also, since almost all settings are low and optimized for the raid, I don’t understand why the FPS drops so much.
Having the same problem as you. Cpu and Gpu usage never goes above 30-40% and frame rate tanks in raid or congested areas. Usage never changes. FPS is 144 in open world otherwise.
WoW is ostensibly a CPU bound game. It only utilizes ~4 threads so IPC is extremely important and your GPU is largely irrelevant.
As a result, reducing CPU load is important which means removing as many addons as possible, lowering settings which are CPU bound (eg: view distance, shadows etc, ground clutter).
If you have done this and checked that your PC has good airflow to avoid CPU thermal throttling and also that you don’t have any other system tasks that are using up resources or have your energy plan set to minimal then there isn’t much more you can do. You can try upgrading your CPU (as 10th gen i5 certainly isn’t the fastest any more), however a word of extreme caution:
WoW’s engine is quite old at this point and has received many changes and additions along the way. Unfortunately, it is not very efficient in dealing with large numbers of players in combat on the screen simultaneously. Combined with the fact that it only utilizes a minimal number of threads, the game engine itself becomes the bottleneck.
You can check youtube/twitch for yourself at people running the game with the latest fastest CPU/GPU and see that in areas of combat with 40+ players and multiple NPCs that the game STILL will drop below 30fps even with zero or minimal addons.
So while upgrading your system will certainly boost your performance, you will not be necessarily getting 60fps in all scenarios. And while many people will say to you “oh I can play at max settings in any raid or BG and never have any problems with 100fps at all times”, they never actually link a video, so just be careful of taking anecdotal accounts and instead do some searching for videos/streams where people have their fps counters visible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWft42OF2Lg