Been having this issue on and off for a month or two now, not sure what is going on. It happens infrequently enough that I just consider it a nuisance but I figured I would see if anyone here has any idea what is going on. Basically, I am seeing huge FPS drops from time to time w/ corresponding CPU utilization drops as seen in task manager. The issues seem to happen pretty frequently in Ardenweald, less so anywhere else in the game, though I spend a lot of time in Ardenweald so that may be confirmation bias. FPS is usually 60-100 (100 being my set FPS cap) w/ CPU utilization for wow.exe sitting ~ 23%. When this FPS happens as you will see in the image below the FPS will drop to 4-6 while CPU utilization on wow.exe will drop to 1-4%.
First, DX Diag:
Second, a screenshot of it happening:
Things I have tried that do not resolve the issue:
Reinstalling the game.
Updating addons.
Changing GPU driver versions.
Updating chipset drivers.
Changing graphical settings (DX11/12, currently one DX11 due to the Ardenweald flicker bug… another issue…), RTX on/off, etc.
Running the game on as close to a clean install as I can get by manually shutting down all other running programs.
Running w/ and w/o overclocks on hardware.
Thermal throttling does not seem to be an issue, the 3900XT is on a 360mm AIO, rarely crests 65c, GPU is even more frosty.
Things that fix the issue (temporarily) alt-tabbing out of the game, or literally just panning the camera.
It’s not a huge dealbreaker for me, like I said, it is fixed easily enough when it happens, but it certainly is odd. It almost seems like the exe’s thread priority just disappears and the PC stops allocating it CPU resources until I interact w/ the game at which point it wakes up.
I don’t see any performance oddities in any other titles I play, and no other sort of system instability, just seems to be an issue w/ WoW, other games play flawlessly.
Anyways, thoughts? Anyone else seeing a similar drop in performance at random times?
Edit: Another thing I just noticed while reproducing this issue. My wallpaper is animated and when the FPS drop happens in WoW it also affects the refresh rate of the animated wallpaper, so it seems like the issue, while being caused by WoW (or only happening while WoW is open) affects CPU performance of all applications currently open, or at least those that use animations/rendering.