Just adding to others that did LFR and had 0 problems but when playing with their guild, the FPS dropped to single digits. I have no idea why that would happen but wanted to support the others having the same issue.
We have a Holy Priest who said that lag is always bad when she is casting Salv. Not sure if thats the cause of not, but havent heard anyone else come up with anything specific.
This, exactly.
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Did LFR today and my frames dropped like crazy, all the way down to 25-30 FPS, ironically my CPU & GPU temps were the lowest they’ve been when the drops happened (and then they kicked back in after the frames recovered), which also means there’s low resource utilization going on.
High player areas are also spiky like Dornogal.
3700X, 3070ti, 32GB RAM, game is on an SSD.
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I did some testing myself and i believe the main culprit is on the nameplates. If you switch off name plates for both allies and enemies, ur fps is likely to go back up a bit. However, realistically speaking, offing nameplate for enemies is not really a thing if u wanna M+ or raid, so i am not sure if it’s a our problem or wow’s problem.
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I had ~40 fps in Nerubar Palace LFR yesterday. When I did timewalking Black Temple it was also around 40fps. This is on a beefy system as far as this game is concerned:
12600k
3070
32gb RAM
installed to SSD
Also showing me plenty of headroom on GPU and CPU. Definitely not using anywhere near all my RAM.
EDIT: I tried setting Details refresh rate higher like I’ve seen suggested, set it to 1 sec instead of .25. No difference in frames during raid bosses. It is weird because it will be 60fps lock during trash with all those effects going off, as soon as boss is active fps drops to 40. And will say 57% GPU usage, 6.2gb VRAM (so my 8gb is still good for WoW), 1 CPU @ 52% rest 20% or lower.
EDIT: Also tried disabling all addons (including weakauras), still get the frame drops.
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I just don’t understand the CPU and GPU usage.
Yes, I get it. WoW is a old game. But how can my frames in raid drop from 100 to 15 while my CPU and GPU don’t go over 30% usage all the time? Like, 30%!
Even TS3 which is a old game that have 0 support for newer hardware uses more than that.
And just so you guys have an idea, as I use a second monitor to watch twitch, my idle CPU and GPU usage is around 13%. So WoW is currently using only 17% of it, no matter what my FPS is.
Multicore CPUs will only max out if all of those cores are working at capacity. The only way I can ever do this is with video rendering (or benchmarks). WoW isn’t going to fully max out my CPU, since it’s not exactly optimized to utilize all of its potential.
As for the GPU, the game just really doesn’t go hard on the GPU unless you jump into High ray tracing, or super resolution. Those are the only two options to push my 7900 XT into getting out of bed.
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Is that normally these old games push the first core to max, then the rest is not usable. All of the cores are equally going for less than 30%, so that’s really weird.
With so many people talking about various settings, your looking at usage is the thing people need to start doing. Since you have found your way to your performance tab in task manager, I’ll tell you to try this.
- Click the 3 dots in the right hand corner to open your “Resource Monitor”
- Open the CPU tab. There you see your individual cores.
- Leave that open, as it plots usage over time, and go in game. Just get into a capitol city and fly around for like 30 seconds.
- Alt tab and observe the useage while you did that.
From my experience, everyone I have got to do this notices the same thing. The game is “using” about 4 cores in a sawtooth pattern. By this I mean, you can usually visually identify the cores that it is using. How many Cores is your CPU? Why does the CPU usage show so low despite frames being an issue? That’s why. Its allocating a few cores, using the performance of 1 of them FULLY LOADED, and then passing that load off. Just look at the “peaks” on the cores. When one starts to lower, the other rises. If you were to horizontally line up the usage, you would notices its the equivalent of one fully loaded core.
The old advice of “disabling your mods” is to lower the load of calculations per cycle to run the game, and give that back to render.
Why has it got so bad now? Every class has hero talents that have many more “and calculate this too” Go into a raid, especially a raid with a lot of players, or drop into an open world boss, and now all of these “and now this happened, render this too” gets added into the limited compute allocation.
The picture really is worth 1000 words in this case. Just use your eyeball to line up the peaks on your per-core cpu usage. This is what needs to be addressed to meaningfully impact this conversation and get users to stop chasing their tales on mods and drivers and settings. Yes there are optimizations to improve this. Yes those things suggested can help. This is the root problem of “why my new machine with big graphics and top end processor run slow in raid.” Its an old engine with lots of updates. It is GREAT for what it is.
FWIW, 5800x3d, 3080, 32gb ram, pcie gen4x4 SSD, a process cleansed Win 11, with the Ryzen update (saw about 10% here), 100-120FPS in Dornogal near the bank, most open world 144 against frame cap. 20-30 on pull 20 main raid, slideshow on pull open world boss or raid bigger then 20.
Its a processes per second CPU bound problem. IMHO. The only resource to ever get close to 100% is single core at a time, that’s the problem, there is the bottleneck.
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Bumping this. Using 5950X and 4080 Super. I’m dropping below 20fps in raid with settings set to 1…
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There are plenty of threads about it. Everyone in my guild is having the same issue but none of them are making threads about it because there is no point to add another thread.
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This doesn’t work. I completely removed WoW from my PC before the xpac and tried playing with 0 addons and I have the same issue that is being stated here.
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we know wow and its old engine will never perform as good as new games… or use all CPU or GPU …
but darn! those low fps on raid! and big city’s
im rocking a ryzen 57003dx with rtx 3070, 1080p monitor and i had to set raid graphics to 1(ultralow settings 
) with only protected textures ENABLE… and im in 60-100 fps on raid…
totally feels bad man . for wow… the only game i care xD
Has some really good information on the problems. The Twitter link post has an awesome breakdown on the roots of a lot of the issues and some workarounds/fixes for them:
Long story short, 90% of it is just addons choking out the main game thread on the CPU. I still don’t understand why Blizzard refuses to decouple the addon execution to a separate async thread, but it’s one of the largest contributers to poor raid performance outside of the obvious draw call and netcode nightmare that can happen when replicating all the information from the rest of the raid.
Well take that back, I do understand why they haven’t decoupled it, but honestly, I think stable client performance is far more important than ensuring same-frame execution of some addon’s sparkly UI portrait or someone’s fart emote spam weakaura. It’s probably alright if addons fall behind a frame or two. I know macros are a part of it all as well, but they could just keep regular stock macros on the main thread.
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I can’t view that link (twitter blocked on my network and devices) but that doesn’t surprise me. The biggest fps losses in raids are combat log parsers like Details. I stopped running meters when I returned for Dragonflight after a many year absence. All meters do is make people toxic.
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Add-ons cannot be the sole culprit… Bad advice to blame this on add-ons when there are many systems chugging with single or dual core limitations… Even resetting UI and settings does not resolve the issue.
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If you have Game Bar, try disabling, made a big difference for me.
No, but like I explained earlier, they are probably ~90% of the problem. It’s extremely easy to test and prove. Just do a full UI reset+/console cvar_default and then go do an LFR raid with absolutely zero addons. You’ll likely notice a much higher overall frame rate, along with much higher 10/1/0.1% lows(stuttering and microstuttering). I can always whip up a mock addon for you to prove that yes, addons will destroy your performance, if they aren’t optimized correctly.
All it will take is to write a few nested loops doing expensive operations every frame and I can make your client go from running at 200fps down to 20fps locked. This is due to what I have explained plenty of times before on these forums: The main game thread has to complete all of its work before it can tell the GPU to render a frame. Even if they offload the actual addon code execution to another thread, they are still running it synchronously and not asynchronously; meaning the main game thread is going to wait for the addon code execution to complete before moving onto the next step of getting ready to render the frame.
It likely isn’t the game bar itself, but rather the setting in Windows is called “record what happened.” It’s located within start->settings->gaming->captures. Basically, the option makes the game bar keep a constant buffer of the last 30 seconds of gameplay, so that if you press a hotkey, it will save it. That way, you don’t have to be recording ahead of time and can just save small clips right after something happens that you want a clip of. To disable it, just turn off that feature.
As for game bar itself, it uses next to no resources at all and even if you disable game bar itself, all the subsystems it latches onto, within Windows, will all still be running anways since they are part of Windows itself. So you’re just killing off the ability to open the GUI, not the actual subsystems themselves.
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I disabled Game Bar and it eliminated nearly all of my lag issues.
To be exact I went to Game Bar Settings > Click “Off” on toggle.
Toggle says:
"Control how Game Bar opens and recognizes your game
Enable game bar for things like recording game clips, chatting with friends, and receiving game invites. (some games require game bar for receiving game invites).
If I only killed off the ability to open the UI, why did it immediately improve my performance?