I’ve been experiencing microstutters in WoW, just random hiccups even when running around doing nothing. I disabled all addons, quit all other programs, and lowered my graphics settings. Then I took this frame time graph while just running laps in Oribos.
As you can see, the FPS is typically above 100 but there are these spikes with a kind of periodic pattern. The spikes above 50ms are noticeably jarring when the FPS is otherwise smooth.
My system is fairly high end, as you can see from the sensor data the CPU/GPU are not being taxed much. My drivers are up to date. I’ve run various benchmarks and stability tests and nothing is out of the ordinary.
I’m curious if other people experience the same thing but just ignore it because it’s normal for WoW. And if it’s not just me then I’d be interested to see if the devs could determine what causes these spikes.
The frequency that they are happening on definitely implies there’s something running in the background, whether it be an addon or some kind of background service. Looks like it’s ticking roughly every second.
If your client is:
Fully repaired
WTF/Interface folders are deleted/renamed
You ran /console cvar_default to undo any server stored CVARS from addons
Then you’ll need to start looking at your operating system:
Making sure you’re on the 21H2 build for Windows 10/11
GPU and soundcard drivers up to date(reset Nvidia control panel or run a DDU reinstall to make sure you don’t have any wonky profile shenanigans going on)
Network/Wifi drivers up to date
Disable any custom firewalls or antivirus softwares
Disable any VPN softwares
Disable any VMware
Etc,etc
Long list of other potential things, but that should get you started.
Correct, I’ve shown proof of this before where I wrote a simple addon that simulated a very heavy load, then shown it on and off. If an addon is disabled, it doesn’t run any code.
Proof here: https://imgur.com/a/4oaBi2R
That being said, addons can mess with CVARs that are stored on the servers and that can persist even after you’ve done a local UI reset on your PC. As soon as you log back in, your client redownloads some of the CVARs from the server, which is why you also need to run the command /console cvar_default to do a true full UI reset (advanced drop down on the Blizzard help page about it)
As the Blue posters have stated many times in the past, disabling does not keep all of the settings from still being there for the addons and those can affect the game, even if the addon associated is disabled. One particular addon that proved this in the past was bagnon. It could be disabled, but certain settings it had changed still remained. The authors of the addons have to adjust the addons as well.
The problem isn’t the addons loading or not; it’s the changes addons make to other game files that are the issue. These changes are why Blizzard’s core troubleshooting step is resetting the UI.
Realistically, Blizzard needs to do away with server stored CVARs like this or have the client do a check on bootup for “if we sense that the WTF folder has been removed, assume they are doing a UI reset and go ahead and reset all CVARs on the server.”
If it makes a small minority of players cry because they lost their settings on accident, then so be it. It would save them tens of thousands of person-hours in the long run on redundant tech support for people that didn’t realize to click the “Advanced Troubleshooting” dropdown on the UI reset help page.
In the case of this post though, I don’t think this is a bad CVAR doing this. The one second spike like this sounds more like something running in Windows and doesn’t sound WoW related at all.
