https://pastebin.com/1LByQWcb
https://pastebin.com/1LByQWcb
For me, disabling audio in game completely resolved any stutters I was having.
DxDiag: https://pastebin.com/uUNfU9p9
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This thread isn’t about micro stutters.
Another weekly reset,another day getting stuck on the load screen.
What are you guys using to save the dxDiag,MSInfo and stuff on this thread?
It seems like a lot of issues with stuttering have been caused by the sound bugs and the poor optimization. Hopefully when Blizzard gets back from break we see some update on this. We are already at almost 2k replies. Lets see how far we can go without a comment.
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For anyone with freezes on logging into the world first time after starting up the game, it just started happening on my alt after I finished the Thaldraszus/Primalist Future campaign and unlocked all that account wide stuff.
I was going to do a big write up, but people only want to know what worked, so here is what fixed my FPS issue.
The Basics
Make/Model: HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop 15 (Using an external monitor)
OS: Windows 11 22H2 with KB5020044 (KB5020044 is also packaged in KB5021255 if you see that installed instead)
Graphics Card: NVIDIA RTX 3050 Laptop GPU
My Fix
I suspect it’s probably only one of these and some steps might seem like doubling up, but I will give you the order I executed things to get the result.
- Uninstalled NVIDIA Control Panel
- Uninstalled All NVIDIA Software & Drivers from Add or Remove Programs (This included GeForce Experience, the driver that was listed in there etc)
- Uninstalled NVIDIA Display Adapter from Device Manager (Also selected "attempt to remove the driver for this device ")
- Instead of using the driver from NVIDIA I let Windows discover the driver for the NVIDIA Graphics card. Doing this from Device Manager windows will either do this automatically (as in you will automatically see the NVIDIA display adapter appear again) or you will need to right click on the Display Adapter that appeared after uninstalling the NVIDIA one and selecting Update Driver and let Windows search for it.
- Reinstall NVIDIA Control Panel via Windows Store
- Configure Manage 3D Settings in NVIDIA Control Panel to the High-Performance setting.
- Downloaded the latest driver from NVIDIA and express installed it.
Launched WoW and everything is back to normal.
If I was to point a finger at anything, I actually suspect that it’s the NVIDIA Control Panel.
Hopefully this helps some people!
Also disclaimer: It sounds like there are multiple issues being reported in this thread so the above fix may not work for everyone, suggest if you are reading this thread for the first time and my steps dont do anything for you, to go through the others and test other fixes / workarounds
Interesting but to all those experiencing the issue this thread is about, who have AMD systems, it’s moot.
Absolutely agree, hence the disclaimer. There is surely a few things going on which is what is making it so frustrating for everyone.
It will be interesting if anyone having these issues that is running a AMD graphics cards to try the same with the AMD equivalent of the NVIDIA Control Panel which is “AMD Radeon Settings”.
Maybe it’s actually an underlying windows issue that is affecting hardware vendors software. Either way it’s all speculation until we get something solid from Microsoft, NVIDIA/AMD or even Blizz on these matters. /HintHintNudgeNudge Blizz
None of this has any affect because it’s the game, not on our end. I’ve lost count on the systems I’ve tested at work with Intel/AMD/Nvidia GPU and AMD/Intel CPU, having Windows 10, 11, Linux or macOS on them with the same stutters and lower fps that didn’t exist before the pre-patch hit.
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This.
First step in troubleshooting is to isolate variables. With a test pool of multiple systems, each with varying hardware vendor/software/OS configurations; all of the variables are instantly isolated and the only constant is the game itself.
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You aren’t on the 9.XX client anymore, you’re on the 10.XX client and the system requirements have raised. As I’ve stated before, don’t expect identical performance in legacy areas. They’ve made changes to the CPU side of the engine, for better or worse, bugs or intended. Realistically, the game needs to scale to use a couple more threads, but it doesn’t, it caps to four threads. On top of that, there are issues between the client<>OS<>drivers, on some configurations, that popped up around the same time, due to changes in Windows and Nvidia/AMD drivers.
There are mostly three main issues going on in this thread:
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Stuttering caused by interactions between the client<>os<>drivers when assets are needed or when shaders need to compile, on some system configurations.
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The lower overall FPS due to the client being CPU bound, mixed with the OS/driver issues. Likely caused by changes to the rendering thread and probably centered around culling, draw calls and animations, but could have UI related things in the mix as well.
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The low priority asset popins that are likely by design and probably tied to dragon riding at 300,000,000 m/s, to avoid unnecessarily wasting time loading assets that aren’t going to be on the screen for long enough to matter as you zoom by.
1 Like
QFT.
But Blizzard released this expansion in this state. So either they consider the asset-loading major stutter to be acceptable, or else they intend to address it further down the line. Either way, an official statement about the status of this issue is needed.
WoW has always been a game that ran on most computers but flawlessly on none, however with the performance gains made by hardware/OSes in recent years, the scaling issues with WoW’s engine are being drastically amplified.
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I still want to know how WoW manages to get so sluggish simply by turning the sound on, compared to having Firefox open, watching streams, with like 8 billion open tabs.
Like, how poorly could the sound code possibly be written that it would eat THAT much more processing power than watching streams in the background while playing?
Clearly there’s an actual issue with WoW itself, since so many of us are directly observing that turning the sound off alleviates the majority of the micro-stuttering.
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The big issue with MMOs is how main thread bound they are. It’s really hard to actually scale them out because there’s so much work that has to be done in the main thread loop. Stuff that can’t easily be multithreaded, and even if it were, you’d still end up missing frame queues because it would have to wait for other pieces to finish before moving on. Yeah, you can offload some async tasks like effects, sound, physics, etc, but the main thread still needs to tie it all together each frame to tell the GPU what it needs to render and there are a lot of key things that can’t be skipped each frame or delayed for a future frame.
Each expansion has added more and more complexity to the game’s world, rendering effects, the characters, animations, armor, potential permutations of all the above, so that compounded cost is finally starting to show the cracks and limitations of the engine. Even if the game scaled to N-threads, you’d still have CPU bottlenecking due to the main game thread holding it all back.
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Can’t they reduce some of that CPU strain with better servers or however it’s done when you play cloud games (like GeForce Now).
I’m having all of the problems described in this thread as well. The asset loading stutter is the biggest problem as it makes flying around the open world unbearable.
The Blizzard acknowledgment of this seemed far too cryptic and non-committal, and so I’m left wondering whether this is just the new normal. I’ll just move on to other games if it is, which is a shame as Dragonflight otherwise seems like it is going to be good.
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And flexing their computer knowledge 
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As the Top of this Thread says , STUTTERING , I have a 5800x3d and a Saph Ref XTX 7900 , I can set my FPS at 120 and it barely drops when VAL is Full it is the Stuttering that comes and Goes. I see people that own 4090’s saying they cannot get decent Framerates so I do not know. But if I go to any other Zone , Zul head back to Legion , no problems. I also have no Heating issues or Power Complaints , I have also used the 3080 but I had the same issue.