For the last month or so, I’ve been experiencing large drops in FPS when flying. I’m going from 200+ FPS to sub-30 FPS, sometimes it’s okay for a while, but when it happens it doesn’t stop until I exit and relaunch the game. As soon as I touch the ground, it goes back to 200+ FPS. Anyone else have this happen and know of a solution? This also sometimes happens in the car in Undermine.
Things I’ve tried:
Toggling off skyriding graphics
Turning off skyriding
Disabling all addons
Turning all graphics down to lowest settings
Reinstalling graphics drivers
Reinstalling WoW entirely
Changing power plan settings in Windows
Reinstalling WoW on a different drive
Turning off the optional GPU features and other settings
Limiting FPS in-game
Ensuring no Nvidia overlay stuff or Windows game bar stuff is turned on
Monitoring hardware temps and everything is normal
I can’t for the life of me figure this out. It was fine all expansion until recently. It seems to happen most frequently when there is heavy loading occurring when I am taking flight(Dornogal, exiting Delves, etc.), it’s like the game hitches and doesn’t stop. As soon as I land, my FPS skyrockets back to normal. Any ideas?
Would start with a UI reset.
Completely exit World of Warcraft.
Uninstall any addon managers to make sure they don’t re-add your removed addons.
In the Blizzard Battle.net desktop application, click Options (the cogwheel next to Play button) and select Show in Explorer (Windows®) or Reveal in Finder (Mac®).
Open the World of Warcraft® folder.
Open the folder for the game version you’re
troubleshooting (retail, classic_era, or classic)
Rename the Cache, Interface, and WTF folders to CacheOld, InterfaceOld, and WTFOld.
Re-launch World of Warcraft so the changes can take effect.
Also make sure that WoW is installed on an SSD and that the drive has at least 20% free space. If SSDs get too full, their read and write speeds become terrible. If the game is having to wait for assets to load from the drive, the frame is going to stall and if it takes too many frames in a row to load everything, the overall frame rate will drop until all CPU work(loading the assets) is done.
i have a M.2 drive at 9% sometimes 15% free and read and write speeds are fine. i do have 5000MB paging file (virtual memory) i don’t have any slowdowns apart from network / server lag. a bigger paging file means less space on the drive
Yeah, an M.2 NVMe is still an SSD and the same rules still apply. The read speeds might seem normal in simple benchmarks, but games like WoW load tons of tiny files throught gameplay. So this is where the drive being really full can bog things down the most: response times. Also, for example, a drive advertised as being a 5000MB/s drive usually only gets 100-200MB/s on small random file reads, especially if it’s single threaded.
As for the page file, games should NEVER use the page file since there are a ton of extremely latent hoops they have to go through to shuffle things back into physical memory when needed. Some memory operation that normally takes 10ns might ballon out into the ms range if the CPU is under a lot of load and this translates into hitching, stuttering and fps drops.
If your system has at least 16gb of ram, WoW should never touch the page file at all. If you happen to only have 8gb of ram, then make sure you don’t have anything else open on the PC while playing, since Windows 11 usually eats up 3-5gb alone and WoW usually doesn’t go above 4gb or so, but that depends on your texture resolution settings mostly.
I was recently dealing with this same issue and here’s what fixed it for me:
Updated chipset driver. I have a 7800x3d (AM5 chipset) and I found the driver install on the AMD website.
Disable integrated graphics.
Go to Device Manager → Display Adapters and disable the CPU’s display driver. For AMD it was called “AMD Radeon™ Graphics)”
(Note: Don’t disable it if you don’t have a GPU for some reason. Obviously)