Getting 4-5fps since last patch, was 20-30

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My MacBook Pro (8-core, 16GB, Radeon 460/4GB VRAM) was previously running 20-25 fps consistently in questing/major cities, and for the last week or so I get 3-5 fps. I can’t even run from the Inn to the Flight Master now without running into walls.

Was just fine before the recent patch, now it’s unusable. What was changed in the graphics support for the last patch?

Even after setting graphics to Level 1, with all add-ons disabled and 30 seconds after a clean system reboot I login and over the next ten seconds watch my fps drop from 30fps (my max setting), into the 20s, and the teens and then single digits. All without touching my keyboard it drops from 30fps into single digits.

As mentioned, I have a recent MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and Radeon 460 - nothing has changed on my end except my fps has fallen into not-usable levels. OS is unchanged, 10.13.6. All other games and applications are behaving normally.

Need to fix this before I re-sub, game is currently unplayable.

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Hey Tyvek,

Does the same thing happen in Window mode vs Full Screen?

Since the game is starting at a normal FPS and rapidly lowering to a different value, I might also suggest checking out our Overheating article for information on how to reduce heating issues.

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Hi, Kaldraydis - your reply is much appreciated! Going crazy here :slight_smile:
Happens in Windowed and Win/Full Screen, changing this made no difference. I do use smcFanControl and check on the temp pretty often, it gets up to 62-64C while gaming, but doesn’t go higher. I’ll read the article though, that may help.

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those are actually good temps. anything under 80C is acceptable but anything under 70C is actually quite good, especially for an AMD. nvidia gpus typically always under 70C but amd ones rarely stay under 70C, so I’d say those are excellent temperatures.

More than like the patch reset your graphics settings and you overlooked something maybe. maybe render scale is dialed up?

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Starting to see what’s going on now, not a thermal issue but in fact WoW is now pegging all 8 CPU cores to 80-90% busy.
CPU is 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7, 4 MT cores (basically 8 cores).

WoW without MT ran in about 30% of one CPU core, now it’s hogging the whole machine (maybe thrashing back and forth between the threads?). In any event the entire system slows to a crawl.

Funny thing is, it seems dependent on the server load (# toons in the zone maybe?). Early AM or after 10pm or so PST Tanaris is pretty quiet, and I get the full 30fps (my limit) with very responsive play. CPU threads look normal then, all 8 maybe 20% busy.

It’s now 7:40pm (prime time) and I’m tabbed out, so my wow client is capped at 8fps - and yet the CPU meters are all 80% busy running Wow. Very sluggish in-game response as you can imagine.

My Radeon Pro 460 is only running 25-30% busy. It’s a CPU-busy problem, not GPU-busy.

Wife’s 27" iMac w/Nvidia show normal CPU use (all threads <20% busy). She gets 60fps …

Any way to use cVARs to limit CPU core usage?

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You can turn MT off, it’ll reduce performance of game since you’ll lose out on all benefits it gave. I don’t recall cvar off hand.

It’s supposed to use more cores, it’ll use cores more effectively now instead of sitting there with unused cores and dropping performance cause it waits for the one core to get done instead of giving work to the idle ones. This was literally main feature of 8.1 to bring game performance up a lot.

I did worry crappy design of apples hardware may cause some machines to thermal throttle with the cpu being utilized better though, especially if gpu also generating heat. you only told one temp, and don’t know if it was gpu or cpu but need to look at both and see which one is thermal throttling.

You could also try to make sure nothing else is eating tons of cpu. you have to consider certain things affect it a lot, most notably the environment detail slider in game, any high cpu addons that are running, whether or not you excluded time machine and spotlight from wow folder (not excluding either can cause performance issues galore).

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I get how MT is supposed to work (15 years at Sun Microsystems as an OS specialist :nerd_face:) - what I don’t see is how WoW has gone from 25% of one CPU core to 80%+ of all 8 cores. That does not make any sense whatsoever. It’s killing my game performance, even after reducing game graphics from “4” to “1”.

Temp is a logic board temp, sensor is near both the CPU and GPU, so if either was getting hot the temp should show it, yet it tops out at 62-64C. You can even hear the fans spool up when it gets warmer, as it always does. It’s a Powerbook Pro, and other games play normally.

In any case I get this same behavior after a cold boot, before the system can even heat up. The CPU cores get very busy as soon as I start wow and zone in.

Guess I’ll search the web for cVARs relating to MT - it may give a clues as to where the problem is.

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I’d rather know the actual temp on the cpu cores, even each core. trust me, you can even have a core have a much higher temperature than another core or even the cpu package, some heat can be trapped and not reach an ambiant sensor. when I’m doing overclocking stress testing I’ve literally seen a core be 90C when another is only 50C. it might be very brief.

That cpu usage is pretty high but I attribute that to fact machine isn’t very strong at this point and since it can’t actually achieve 60fps (or whatever your vsync or foreground fps cap is) it’s literally being told to “work as hard as possible to get fps as high as possible”. the governor was removed from car so to speak so now engine is redlining to try and do 120mph, but since it’s only a crappy 4 cylinder, it’s working literally as hard as it can, overheating, and still not getting to top speed. compared to prior to 8.1, where there was a governor in place preventing that from ever happening.

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Thanks for the reply - I’m sending some data attachments with my bug report. No way wow should go from 50% of one CPU core to 80% of all eight CPU cores post-patch.

Quick followup, some good news! –

My “WoW eats all CPU cores and kills fps” problem has stopped, at least for now.
I played for hours yesterday and today, getting low CPU usage (CPU cores all <20% busy), and normal Radeon activity (75-80% GPU busy). Last week or two it was the other way around, very busy CPU cores and gfx chip was idling.

Were there wow client patches rolled out on Tuesday’s restart? Really not sure what happened but it’s working again - 25-30fps on gfx level 3, which is fine for my MacBook driving an external 27" monitor.

Totally baffling, but thanks for the replies/suggestions. The problem just disappeared on Tuesday, no changes on my system.

After 20+ years in the computer biz nothing really surprises me any more, so many layers of complexity…

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Did you ever solve this? Just run into what sounds like the same inexplicable problem.

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The problem just disappeared after the 4/30 patch. No mention in the patch notes of graphics changes, but that does not mean there were no graphics changes in the patch.

Since that patch day, with zero changes on my system or wow setup, the problem is gone. CPU usage is back to normal, ~10-20% busy on the cores. Apple’s Activity Monitor has a cool graphical display for CPU cores and for GPU, under the Window menu.

So no, I did not solve this - it just stopped happening to me. Frame rates have been normal ever since, 25-30 fps on graphics level 3. Hardware is 2016 MacBook Pro 16GB Core i7 (4-core) w/Radeon Pro 460 (4GB VRAM) and external 27" 4K Samsung monitor.

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Thanks - problem persists for me but completely sporadically. I’ll try to check out the CPU usage as you suggest.

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Spoke too soon, problem is NOT solved. It had disappeared for two weeks or so, came back big time Tuesday afternoon.

CPU averages 75-80% busy, very abnormal for WoW, given I have an i7 cpu with 4 cores (8 if you count MT). GPU is barely breaking a sweat now, whereas before it was always maxed out and CPU was <25% busy.

What was changed in the patch besides the documented items? Nothing different here but wow is killing my CPU now and that gives me very low frame rates. Can’t even fight simple mobs reliably with single-digit frame rates and 3-8 second freezes. Soooooo frustrating when nothing’s changed on my end.

Yes, I tried rebooting, tried resetting UI, tried without addons, tried the Repair function, and CPU temps are fine (56C when it’s 80% busy).

Nothing helps. :anguished:

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try Mojave on an external disk ?

(external, so you can keep your current disk untouched)

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Unfortunately Mojave has graphics problems, tried it a month back and had to uninstall/wipe disk, back on High Sierra.

These lag spikes seem to occur only when wow servers are loaded, so it may be sharding/CRZ related, or voice chat related - kills my CPU somehow. Only game I’ve ever seen that uses more than 30% of a 2.7GHz i7 …

Off hours this does not happen, CPU is maybe 25% busy typically, and GPU is running 70-80% busy, as it should be.

Currently seeing 6-9fps every 60 seconds or so, gradually improves back to 25-30, then degrades again to 6-9 fps.
Constantly cycling between playable and unplayable, 1 minute or so between cycles. Something Blizz server-related is driving my CPU nuts.

Logout fixes it for about a minute, then it’s back to the playable/unplayable cycle. I’m thinking another game at this point – in 10 years of wow it’s never been this bad.

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Tyvek,

The only thing our server does is send your PC data. Whatever’s happening with your CPU happens on your PC, and while the game client could theoretically be doing this, if it was we would be getting a ton of contacts on it, like we got with some of the investigations we’re working on in some of the other recent Mac Support threads. Thus far the reports of this are pretty unique. Given how much you’ve already tried here, it’s probably best if you submit a ticket on this. We’ll need some files to diagnose this which are best gathered over a ticket - like your system profiler.

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