Is this what I should expect? My settings run between 70 fps and 140 (my set cap) everywhere else including raids. But in Valdrakken I am seeing 50 to 55 fps. I can turn ever single setting to low and it literally doesn’t improve a thing. The only setting that actually makes a difference is view distance and to a much lesser extent environmental detail/ground clutter. These are more CPU of course. Sitting in Valdrakken at 52 fps, GPU load at 37% percent I have to crank view distance way down to get a smooth frame rate. Full UI reset doesn’t change a thing. Is this what people are seeing?
It depends which way I am facing of course so it makes it even more jarring. Some massive optimization needed in this city?
10600k stock
3070TI
16gb ram
windows 11 fully updated as well as current Nvida driver
This seems to be normal, and fairly typical when comparing against populated cross-faction capital cities in previous expansions. I get much lower FPS in Valdrakken than elsewhere, highly dependent on how many other players are around. Where I may be easily getting 80-100+ FPS in many areas out in the world, I’ll rarely hit 60 FPS in Valdrakken.
WoW is just a really CPU-heavy game, like many other MMOs. Even out in the open and despite downsampling from 10240x2880 w/ max settings + “good” RT shadows, I can still be severely CPU-bottlenecked (albeit still at much higher FPS in Valdrakken). Hopefully we can continue to see more general CPU optimisations in the future, regardless.
I agree more recent capitals the frame rate is lower than outside in the world. This I accept will be the case, however performance is still at the acceptable level. It is what it is. But to be honest my rig is a decent rig and the performance is not acceptable in a capital city. I feel bad for people who have an older PC.
I cant believe this is how it was designed. So either I have an issue on my end or it is something blizzard needs to fix. This is why I was asking what other people are seeing.
I have read the other threads and there is a lot of lag and stutter talk but in this case it’s just low fps. If I face one way 70 fps I do a 180 and 50 fps. Which is behavior I can create in many other parts of the game. It is just super low and jarring in this city.
Tbh if you look at CPU usage this is 100% false. Go to Valdrakken and look at CPU usage. It will probably be under 20%. With my I9 9900k. None of my CPU cores go above 25% usage EVER. Its just the game and the old engine.
What he said is completely true. Wow is a really heavy single core reliant CPU game. But you are right the reason for this is that it is a a old engine. Its a fact I am CPU bound almost all the time with a 10600k and a 3070TI.
Like I said, look at CPU usage. If it was single core heavy, wouldn’t single core use be very high. Like I said, on my I9, I hardly EVER see it go above 25% usage on core 1. Spikes to 50% for 1 second or so maybe but after the draw-calls, on average its around 15%.
I look at this stuff all the time. Mine is always high on a single core. Always sitting at around 45-50 watts on the CPU never higher while playing wow. If it isnt CPU or GPU what is holding it back then? It has to be something.
The only other reason he (outside of some issue) wouldn’t have high single core CPU usage is having a frame cap. Still though highly dependent on where you are and what you are doing.
For example, if I am in any vanilla zones with a frame cap at 60 my single core CPU load will be much lower. Go to Valdrakken and it will be high even at 60fps (or in my case 50fps). This isn’t me guessing at it either this is from actual observations.
At the end of the day. I shouldn’t have to have my settings at a level that gives me acceptable performance for one city in the whole expansion. I wouldn’t care if it was some off the beating path that I may rarely be in but this is the hub city and I expect to be there a lot over the next 2 years.
This is because WoW isn’t fully using all of your cores/threads. It’s relying heavily on a small number of threads, and that’s why you’re not seeing 100% CPU usage.
With a 9900K and with Hyper-Threading enabled, you have 16 logical threads. If you’re seeing 20% CPU usage, that still means that ~3 cores are effectively pegged at full load. You also likely won’t see individual cores at 100% all that frequently, since the OS is likely scheduling the load between cores. This is very common.
So with all this in mind, is there any way for the Devs to assign certain elements of the game, to certain cores/threads? I got no experience with WoW’s engine, I just know other MMOs have added multicore/thread support after release.
WoW has had some multi-threaded optimisations over the years. DirectX 12 in patch 8.0 yielded some general improvements, and there were specific multi-threaded optimisations on top of that in 8.1 as well. Here was some short testing I did a few years ago, when 8.1 was on PTR:
I’m sure I had more benchmarks/results somewhere, but they don’t appear to be in my post history. Odd.
Anyway, I too would love to see more general optimisation. Feasibly it can be really tricky to do - especially if trying to improve parallelism in a game whose technical roots are as old as WoW’s - but the benefits could be large if they manage to squeeze more performance out of the client.
If this game could utilize 98% GPU in Valdrakken or packed raids/bgs, we’re talking 30fps average up to 60fps easily on low/midrange systems. I just hope the performance issues currently going on gets fixed and then some optimizations.
This is related to Graphics->View Distance. Setting this to 1 doubles my FPS in this city. Seems that the city is just very poorly optimized in terms of blocking out the surrounding views from being rendered.