Not sure where this should go so I choose General Discussion.
I normally play at my computer desk moreover, the same desk where I work from home from time to time. Honestly, (trigger warning to the tech people) contrary to popular opinion, I prefer to work at the office. I spend about 4 days in the office.
When I get home and want to enjoy WoW the last thing I want to do is sit at my computer desk. It reminds me of work or having to do adult stuff. So instead of playing on my desktop I play on my laptop either on my table or on my couch connected to my OLED TV (LG G3 or G4 I forget.)
The problem I have is when switching to the desktop or the laptop I also have to redo the graphics settings. We have a āBaseā and a āRaid and Battlegroundsā profile which I believe has been the case for the last decade.
Why donāt they have a Dungeon graphics profile?
Why donāt they have a āmajor citiesā graphics profile?
Why donāt they allow custom graphic profiles?
This seems obvious. Forgive me if they exist but I canāt find them in the UI. (Another problemā¦)
I find 5-player dungeon and Dornagal have vastly different performance profiles compared to Raids and Battlegrounds based on the amount of players alone. Based on how much time I spend in Dornagal I have to tweak settings which are different from Dungeons, Raids, and Battlegrounds.
One last thing. What cases does āBaseā cover? Cities? Open World? Again, different regions in the world, Stormwind, Orgramar, Dornagal, all (at least to me) feel like different cases and I find I also adjust settings irrespective of being on a different computers (gaming pc, laptop, MacBook.) Iām not a performance snob. I have VRR on my TV, my laptop, and the monitor I use for gaming and changing the settings allows me to stay in the VRR widow.
These donāt exist. A quick Google, youāll need to just use the dungeon / world presets - you can keybind them apparently. Butā¦upgrading your laptop is also an option, if you must play on it. Or, upgrading your PC / and somehow connecting to your TV so you can just use the PCās hardware instead of relegating yourself to the laptop.
Everything not covered by the other profile (raid and battleground).
How do we bump this to Blizzards attention? I just recently found the graphics optimization video by Quazii. While it has been a great help for dungeons and delves, which for whatever reason were left outside of the Raids and Battlegrounds option, it sucks to leave my settings that way all of the time. Flying is horrible. Itās like putting the fog of war back on but worse. I changed a lot of settings to get better performance in dungeons and to put them all back every time I enter or exit a dungeon is a pain. Couldnāt dungeons and delves be added to raids and battlegrounds or at the least give us the ability to make presets I can easily swap between.
I think it would be really awkward to change graphics settings on the fly as you enter and leave a city. The graphics will likely glitch and flicker as the game reload assets.
Raids is understandable, there is a loading screen and they can change the settings there and load in the correct assets.
5-man dungeons probably isnāt worth it as you arenāt likely to encounter problems there.
Thank you for your reply. While I appreciate getting responses, being told to āget a long HDMI cableā or āupgrade your GPU/CPUā felt reductive (and demotivating.) Your post motivated me to continue the discussion.
I want to provide more context by saying I play WoW:TWW on multiple configs.
Desktop: 7950X, 64GB DDR6000, RTX4090 / Side Display: a 27ā 2K/240Hz 40Hz-240Hz VRR / Main Display: 6K 60Hz No VRR
Desktop 7950X, 64GB DDR6000, RTX4090 / Side Display: a 27ā 2K/240Hz 40Hz-240Hz VRR / Main Display: 6K 60Hz No VRR
Playing on the desktop using the 2K is the most flexible if I stay within the 40Hzā240Hz range. While I can handle most Mythic+ and Delves at max settings (with ray tracing on for Delves), Dornogal causes severe performance drops that sometimes fall below the VRR window. This is the best scenario where I can have Dornogal be somewhat tolerable and have change few settings between Mythic+ and Delves.
Most of the time, I prefer playing on my main monitor (6K, 60Hz) rather than shifting to the 2K monitor on the side. The settings from Dornogal to Delves to Dungeons is wildly different and there is no middle ground for all three when trying to alleviate screen tearing and a very unstable frame. This is mostly due to how unpredictable Dornogal can be. Having to manually change settings during regular gameplay (shopping in Dornogal, flying to Dungeons picking minerals/herbs, then back to Dornogal) is absurd.
TV LG G4 OLED 4K 120Hz 40-120Hz VRR
On my TV, I use the Windows laptop, which has similar issues to the desktop but with less frame headroom, especially on the 780M iGPU when running on battery. I acquired a GeForce NOW 6-month subscription through the Dragonās Age promotion and the service performs similarly to the desktop + 2K monitor though Dornogal is more problematic. Dornogal suffers from screen tearing artifacts even with Cloud G-SYNC as it frame rate starts becoming unstable with bigger drops than my desktop. (TLDR: RTX 4080 < RTX 4090, server grade CPU versus 7950X.)
Macbook Pro 14ā M4 MAX
The MacBook Pro handles 6K at 60 FPS relatively well, even in Dornogal, but its renderer behaves differently. Some settings, like projected textures, can tank performance in specific scenes. Raids, dungeons, especially classic dungeons can behavior widely different based on graphic settings that are not a problem on the x64 WoW build.
Summary
Customizable profiles for āDelves,ā āDungeon,ā and āOpen Worldā would make a huge difference in addressing these issues and improving QoL. No matter how big of a difference between the machines, I set each profile once at the start and forget about it. This could even be made better with some API changes to allow add-ons to extend the functionality based on which machine I boot up WoW.
I tried to reply to you but it wonāt let me post two times in a row.
What do you mean by āglitchā or āflickerā?
Which specific graphic settings are you adjusting that are cause those issues?
I change graphics settings frequently and havenāt encountered flickering or game reloads. The exception is adding or removing addons. Some settings, like setting compute effects to Ultra (e.g., Mistsā volumetric fog), have a noticeable visual impact but the changes is seamless.
The only time Iāve seen frames flicker or graphics redraw (e.g., wireframe or texture loading) is when switching GPUs (i.e. RTX 4060M ā AMD 780M iGPU.) This typically happens because of the frame buffers and scan out changes triggered by system power settings (i.e. laptop switching to battery power), not changing in-game graphics settings. Unless youāre using a multi-GPU desktop and manually switching GPUs, which is a very niche scenario these days.
