Yep, a hyperthread is basically like 10-25% of a real core, in terms of real world metrics, since it relies on weaving in instructions during gaps in the execution chain. Hence “threading.”
Nah, I’ve show forum proof from each expansion where people say the same things every time and then pushback the dates to before one of the prepatches and you’ll still see the same complaints. There’s pretty much always complaints of stuttering, low performance, lag, etc.
I’m disproving the claim that the stuttering and lower fps issues were new with the DF prepatch, by showing search results for posts prior to the prepatch. Within those search results, you’ll see the same “stutter stutter lag stutter lag” type complaints over the entirety of Shadowlands. By applying extremely basic logic and reasoning skills, one can safely assume that there have been problems, for some, all along.
As for DF, there was the intial shader caching cvar bug, but that was fixed within the week. The CPU requirements increased with this expansion, so in areas that are CPU heavy, like capitals with dozens of players, you’ll see degraded performance vs prior expansions; due to CPU bottlenecking. If WoW didn’t slowly upgrade the engine over all these years, we’d still be playing on 1Ghz CPUs with 512MB of ram…
Correct, and then they fixed the CVAR and the problem went away for probably 95% of players. I can start linking a ton of clips of the game running stutter free on mediocre hardware, if you’d like. I even showed an almost max setting client on a 12100+rx6600 in a packed Valdrakken with no stuttering. Lower frame rates? Sure, but still completely playable (went no lower than around 50fps on the ultra’ish settings). If the stuttering were entirely the game’s fault, then it would be present in all setups, or at least identical setups, but it’s not. So that implies other variables in the mix, which is exactly what Blizzard has stated in the main thread about this topic.
But again, as for the overall non-stuttering but lower frame rates, while around tons of players: That’s just the client bottlenecking the main thread due to them increasing the work done. The cost of each asset went up, but the client has always pushed like that with each expansion. That’s also why they raised the CPU requirements.
Might they have gone a tad too far? Maybe, but I’m sure they weren’t anticipating the chaos with drivers and Windows. It’s still completely playable and roughly 80% of players are still running 60hz screens, so that’s likely their target hardware metric to aim for with the main core of the engine anyways. As long as the bulk of players are playing just fine, they probably aren’t going to spend the resources coding around Windows/driver issues, just to cater to some small minority of players that obsess over playing the game at high FPS, only to have Microsoft or Nvidia/AMD get their crap together and fix things on their end, like they’ll need to do anyways.