hopefully there’s a fix soon.
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Blizzard doesnt seem to be in very much of a hurry improving performance.
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Same issue here…Been googling why FPS on Valdrakken is super low (50-70) compared to average 80-100. I guess low FPS (misery) loves company.
Ryzen 7 5800x
3080
32GB 3200
I found a solution… It worked for me. not sure if this will work for everyone else… But the stutter and the 50fps and the lag went away actually I’m at 70 now without noticing any lag almost smooth.
Go to NVDIIA control panel, then go to manage 3d settings, then Program settings… Select World of Warcraft Retail if it’s not there select ADD and choose WoW.Retail from your folder…
then go to Low latency mode set it to ULTRA
OpenGL GDI combability set it to: Prefer performance
Triple buffering set it to ON.
then click Apply and go to WoW Folder… click on Retail. then Go to the WoW Icon the game itself inside the folder… and right click , Proprties last option. then compability then remove the Check on disable full screen optimization…
This worked so well for me… let me know.
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I have a 9900k and 1 core is pegged at 80-90% the whole time in Valdrakken.
Since 2004 cpu ipc has only increased about 5x (not much really) People keep assuming it’s the game… No its the instructions per clock and L2/L3 cache that help in these situations. The 5800x3d is capable of 70-80fps in valdrakken so all these people saying they have a good rig are unfortunately incorrect. I for one are waiting to drop coin on the upcoming 7700x3d/7800x3d and know exactly what to expect by doing so
Pretty dumb take if I’ve ever seen one, the game engine is definitely badly optimized. You shouldn’t need an X3D CPU for an 18 year old game, with graphics far from 2022 standards.
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I actually got a 5800X3D just a week ago. The improvement in WoW from a 5950X was really noticeable. It’s the most substantial that a CPU upgrade has felt for this game since I upgraded from an i7-920 to an i7-4770K in 2013.
I do get 70-80 FPS in Valdrakken at times, but busy nights will still drop it a bit lower. It holds far higher and steadier than the 5950X, regardless.
Still, there’s probably a fair bit of additional room for client optimisations so that people don’t need a 5800X3D or current-gen chip to get better performance. Hopefully someday. 
Yeah, I didn’t see anyone say they had this amazing highest end machine. I saw people saying things like it’s not a potato. Most of the CPU’s I see listed are decent CPUs, not junk by any stretch. My 10600 at the time was right up there in single core performance. When 95% of the game runs between 80 and my cap of 140 fps and literally one area runs at between 45 and 70 fps there is absolutely optimizations needed and I refuse to believe not possible.
Saying that I have an extra GPU and powersupply sitting around and was thinking of building a second computer. Was thinking of a 12600 or a 13600 for that build. Seems like they are the best bang for your buck. I don’t need massive core counts/threads. Hopefully a modern CPU will get me 60fps in a 20 year old game
I just tested FF14 and frame rates get absolutely ravaged in city hubs where there are 25-40 people hanging out. Go from being able to get around 150-200fps on ultra settings, in the world, to 40-60fps in the hubs with a lot of people in proximity. I don’t play the game, but there’s some hub area in some foresty looking starting place that had a ton of people around one of the teleport hub things. Yeah, I know, super vague, but I didn’t really pay attention to the names because I don’t play the game.
This isn’t just a WoW issue, as I’ve stated in other threads, MMOs are brutal on the main thread and there’s no real way around this other than to shard the hell out of the game so that there’s never more than a few dozen people in one area.
Come back with some better stories, as the Tortollan says. I’ve tested all the other MMOs in packed cities, doesn’t stutter and the fps drop is nowhere near what we see in WoW.
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https://imgur.com/a/NeM7j69
You were saying?
Out in the actual world, the FPS can go even higher. The drop in this clip is roughly 50% with only a couple dozen players+NPCs around… WoW’s rendering, while stylized and cartoony, is far more intensive to render in the newer expansions like SL and DF. Would you like me to whip out some GPU profiling analysis to prove that as well? GPUOpen works pretty well for doing so…
In WoW, I’ll average like 80fps on ultra settings in the newer zones and drop to like 50 in packed areas like the Org AH. Sounds like a similar drop, but the difference is that there will be 40-60 players+NPCs in view on Area52 that I play on.
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That wasn’t too bad. I could go into the Valdrakken bank with uncapped 400 fps and outside near the fountain area and have 40 - ON an absolute high end PC.
And as I’ve explained plenty of times now, you’re experiencing a CPU bottleneck. Notice how FF14 caps to the same 50% usage? I’d bet money that it also caps to four threads. MMOs are brutal on CPUs when you’re around a lot of players.
If I show the actual GPU render times, as in only the portion that the GPU has to work on before pushing the image out to your screen, you’d see that the frames still go pretty fast. What’s delaying the frame from being rendered is the CPU having to do a ton of work, before it can tell the GPU what to do.
Going from 2.5ms to 25ms frame times, in your case, likely means that your GPU is still taking roughly that same amount of time to render the frame. It’s the CPU that’s stalling it for 20ms with all the extra work it has to do. You’ll notice this by looking at the GPU usage. If you were at say 95% GPU usage at 400fps, then you’ll be at like 10% GPU usage when you’re at 40fps.
It’s pretty interesting how these so called updates for Df impacts CPU, and even all old zones. So much in fact, that 4000 dollar PCs gets crippled.
I explained this in the other thread: We aren’t on 9.XX anymore, we are on 10.XX and the hardware requirements have gone up. Any changes made to the engine, for the newer content, affect the rest of the game, including all previous content.
Blizzard knows what kind of FPS people play the game at and most players are still capped to 60hz. So long as the game keeps frame rates stable around that mark, they likely aren’t going to go too out of their way to optimize the engine for people that want to play the game at 240fps.
WoW caps at 200fps. Also the 10.XX excuse is getting old, as I’ve played every expansion and there has never been such a drastic performance drop between them with such strong hardware being out now, especially in old zones.
In limsa it will be 20-30 
You are looking at an all-core load and WoW has a 4-core limit. One “main” core and 3 side cores for draw calls and whatever can be parallelized.
The main one will go up in load the more is happening around you (the more complex the world state becomes) like during mass combat or a really big player group. Based on single-core performance at some point, it gets 100% load on that one core and limits the FPS.
In graphics-intensive zones, like say widefield view of Ardenweald and possibly widefield views of new zones the GPU will be hit hard, the more the higher your resolution. You will need like RTX 3070 to get a fast framerate of such widefield views at 1440p or up on high settings.
And there are WoW bugs/regressions, like those we got early in Shadowlands where the GPU got flooded with pixel shading requests and caused massive FPS drops in some areas, in SoA dungeon, and so on. They fixed it only partially.
And player hubs like Oribos, Legion Dalaran, and so on have problems of their own. If you start going around the circle you will notice some parts of the circle will have vastly lower FPS. Complex geometry and whatever is the problem there.
And I’d place a large bet that 80% of players are still on 60hz monitors with and play with vsync on(I think it defaults on? I’d have to double check). So whatever CPU side changes they made, were probably with 16.67ms frame times in mind.
I’ll have to check it out, is that like an Org AH hub or something where everyone hangs out?
Exactly, that I9 that they have has 16 threads. So at max WoW CPU load, it would show them at 25% usage. This is why for years, I5s were recommended for gaming (6c/12t) since most game engines don’t really benefit much from going beyond that thread count and it left some wiggle room for the ADHD people that need to have streams playing or people that wanted to stream. Realistically, most game engines stop scaling well beyond 4-6 threads. Throw on anymore threads and you get very minor diminishing return style gains, at the expense of potentially causing a ton of random bugs.
Is anyone noticing any actual graphical improvements this expansion though, with the update to the hardware requirements for the game? Serious question.
One of the things that struck me when this expansion first came out is how it actually wasn’t very graphically impressive. I wasn’t blown away like I usually am upon launches of new zones. I even went back to the Shadowlands the other day, and yeah, the graphics were definitely better in those zones.
If the engine was updated to the point that people on high end PCs are getting bad performance (even in old zones), then why isn’t it visually apparent with the graphics quality?
Isn’t it possible that maybe poor coding is the culprit here?
It’s not so much about the visual aspect of things, but more of what’s going on under the hood. The ability to dragonride, at that speed, is a pretty large upgrade. One of the main reasons why flying speed was capped has to do with limitations on IO operations for loading assets. But it also seems to have introduced the laggy popins of low priority assets as well, so it’s kind of a double-edged sword there.
Possibly? Sure. It’s more of an issue of continuing to build on the back of dated code and systems. The problem is that a true refactor/overhaul of the underlying engine would likely take them at least a year or two and quite a few very experienced programmers. That’s just to get it out the door… Probably another year or two more to work out the rest of the kinks. They’d be better off just porting the game to another engine like UE5 or Unity at that rate though.