Ardenweald is really the only place I still have trouble at all. I don’t go back too often, just to do my mission table but I would love to get it fixed.
I’ve even tried dropping my settings to Preset 1 and Preset 3 and still get the same random FPS drops into the 20s and stutters a lot.
This is with all add-ons disabled. I am only seeing these stutters in Ardenweald, Bastion is A-OK since I got the M1 Max.
I have 48-core gpu Mac Studio and Ardenweald is probably the worst zone.
Several places there are causing fps drop. However I am playing at 3840x2160 on 8/10.
on my M1 Max I set graphics to 10/10 in ardenweald and never drop below 60fps, get pretty close but no stuttering since promotion laptop screen. biggest key is using FSR at 50% render scale to still get crisp 4k like display at 1080p rendering cost.
and turning compute off. never use compute, in any zone, but especially ardenweald.
oh and one last thing, probably use mac fans control or else you’ll thermal throttle in ardenweald and some parts of rivendreth. because apple isn’t aggressive enough with fans and will let m1 max and ultra reach 100C before cranking them to max, causing throttling and stuttering when throttling happens
Thanks for the feedback. I’m also playing at 4K and I usually turn down the settings to like 3/10 (and bump a few things up: Texture Resolution to High and Outline Mode to Good).
The settings above were the only way I could get a stable 60 FPS in Oribos… something weird is going on there too. Most zones though, if I uncap the FPS and disable Vertical Sync (just for testing), FPS are in the 100-200 range.
One more thing, I’m using an external display. 
Hi Omegal,
Thanks for the feedback! FSR = Resolution Scale, right?
I don’t like turning that down because I play on 4K OLED and it makes everything kind of pixelated. I’d imagine it looks great on the laptop display. 
To sum up, good to know that I’m not the only one struggling in Ardenweald.
Thanks guys!
no, FSR is fidelity super resolution. when enabled, you can lower render scale without quality loss. you set render scale to 50% and in advanced option change scaling to FSR 1.0
Holy INSANE! This is so nuts!
I was wondering why it didnt change anything before when I played with the FSR slider, you first need to change the default “Resample Quality” setting from “Point” to FSR.
I’ve played with the slider for “Resample Sharpness” but I cannot really tell if it makes a difference.
Any other insane tips like this you can share, Mr Omegal? Thanks!
Edit: I cannot emphasis enough how much of a change this was for almost no perceptible change in visual quality. Thank you, Omegal!
I’ve also disabled “Triple Buffering” and “Vertical Sync” and that helped immensely with the stutters and FPS dips I was seeing.
I’m curious too. The tooltip says “0 is full strength”. Which seems to be kinda contrary of what you’d normally expect when adjusting a slider towards the right… It decreases the effect? Mine defaults to 0.2. I can’t see any difference whether it’s on 0.2 or fully set to the right or left. (M1 Max 32-core here with 4k 144Hz screen, 72% res scale).
Not sure if disabling Vertical Sync is a good idea, that may cause other issues (there are a few other threads about that).
You’re right about that, I turned mine back on last night after playing for a while. It looked too weird with it off.
I left Triple Buffering off as that seemed to help a ton with the random stutters in Oribos.
Right! I can’t tell at all. I’m playing with nearly the same settings (4K/120Hz; 1440P scale) and same computer (16" 32c/32GB/1TB). The trick with the FSR is SO SO good though. Loving it – I even enabled on Classic, even though there really isn’t a point.
I believe that also disables weather effects like rain and snow, unfortunately.
it doesn’t. The only weather effect that uses compute effects is volumetric fog and even when that’s disabled you still see a lot of fog.
You hear buzz words like DLSS and DLSS 2.0 a lot, people at this point are used to it. DLSS magically gives you high resolution at low cost, but it’s locked to nvidia hardware. FSR is basically the AMD market buzzword of same technology, but NOT hardware locked, which means it’s available not only to AMD gpus, but also nvidia and apple.
FSR currently isn’t as good as DLSS 2.0, but that’s because DLSS been around longer. FSR 2.0 is also out now but wow is still using 1.0. 2.0 has improvements that’ll help whenever blizzard adds it, unfortunately that won’t be any time soon.
the TL/DR though is, both FSR and DLSS are technologies that use AI upscaling using a lower resolution input to create a higher resolution output that looks and feels close to the same quality of a native high resolution output, without the actual cost of doing so.
I have a weird install, then, because with compute effects disabled, I don’t see rain. Enabling them and the rain starts. It’s most noticeable in Stormwind because you can tell when it’s supposed to rain and gets all cloudy.
Far as I’ve seen compute aren’t used for rain at all, and I see it just fine without them. If anything toggling it just causes visual effects to reset maybe?
Heh. I’m lucky enough that this game still lets you kill rain and snow so you aren’t visually overwhelmed (it’s controlled by the weatherDensity CVAR, with 0 being no weather).
Now if only I could get the underwater blurring disabled like we used to be able to do…
Here’s a link to a quick screen grab. Not really sure how else to share it.
I tried FSR but on a 32 inch 4K monitor it’s too visible also the shimmering makes it not a viable option for me unfortunately. I just hope for DF they team up with Apple and will use MetalFX 3 and the Apple version of FSR/DLSS. OR even FSR2.1 that should solve a bit of the shimmering.
Just some zones have issues and can’t really figure out why, only thing I see is the efficiency cores are the ones stressed the most.
Anyways I can run it pretty good on 4K 60FPS with Vsync, and most settings on high except compute off.
FSR 2 is not coming to wow for a long time. Was told they’d have to completely rework their engine to support it.
Ardenweald is just a REALLY poor performing zone, even on my AMD 6900XT hackintoish, and definitely on my M1 Max. Sure I can get 60fps there, but I get 120 fps everywhere else so it’s still quite a drop.
I’ve yet to see what apples version of AI upscaling even looks like to be honest.