As i`ve been checking this topic daily hoping that someone could finally find a solution, i decided to do some testing so you guys can compare the results and in case some dev is actually looking into it.
My system:
Ryzen 5600X (soon a 5800X3D)
RTX 3080 - Driver ver 527.56
32gb 3200mhz
1TB Samsung 970EVO (Windows and game client on it)
Windows 11 Pro (22H2)
Running games like Death Stranding, RDR2 with the expected performance and no issues.
The testing (MSI Afterburner + Riva):
Removed all addons.
Put the graphics on the lowest setting possible, caped my frames at 160fps (My monitor gets to 165hz max).
Loged into game, got to a desert area in Ohn`ahran Plains (only some mammoth and rynos nearby).
Check fps and start benhcmarking:
The game starts with Avg 159fps | 1% low 146 | 0.1% low 120. But when i use a spell (Flametongue Weapon), the 0.1low drops insta to 50fps. The 1% goes to 100ish and, if i spam, keep getting lower and closer to the number from the 0.1%.
Then i tried capping the game at 55fps, will look like crap but at least the game will be stable, right? NOPE. The game drops the 0.1%low to 31fps and 1%low to 33fps if i keep spaming.
I tried to keep playing so i could eventually get used to it but every time i just end rage quiting after a couple hours.
I tested this a while back and found the same result. I have my fps capped at 100 and after the dreaded pre-patch, it would stutter down to around 70fps when doing Oribos laps (prior to pre-patch it was virtually pegged at 100fps). So I tried capping at 70fps and found that it would stutter down to 50fps.
I suspect the reason for this is that the displayed frame rate is actually an average over a very short period of time (maybe 500 to 1000 milliseconds), so when the stutters occur, it’s actually dropping much lower and then jumps all the way back up and you are seeing the reported average frame rate for that short duration.
I don’t know if I’m relieved or not that I’m not the only person having this problem. I’m on an Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptop, and World of Warcraft used to run smoothly before the latest Windows 11 update. Immediately after the update, it was lagging so badly that it was unplayable.
In tears, I completely reset my laptop, which took over 8 hours. I reinstalled all my games, and WoW was working smoothly again, so I was happy.
I refused to download the newest Windows 11 update as I was sure that was the issue, but two weeks later, my laptop pushed the update through. Suddenly, WoW was lagging badly again and I couldn’t play.
This time when I reset my laptop, I chose to keep my files. It only took an hour, and WoW was running smooth again. Yay! I pushed back the Windows update for five weeks to buy some time for Windows or someone to figure it out.
I decided to do a restart early this evening because I hadn’t shut off my laptop in the past week. Nothing really wrong with it, just that I noticed some loading issues with websites. When my laptop booted back up, Windows prompted me to finish setting it up by selecting what I wanted to do with my laptop. I wound up skipping most of the setup.
I jumped in Discord with my friend and then opened WoW, and it was lagging again. I alt-F4’d and checked the latest Windows update on my laptop, and it did NOT update. I restarted my laptop again, opened WoW, and it’s still lagging so bad that it’s unplayable.
There is something going on, and I really hope someone figures it out. All other games play just fine except for WoW.
Don’t worry guys. Pawgwalker figured this out MONTHS ago. No matter what, the issue is your computer’s CPU is being bottlenecked because it’s not powerful enough for WoW and even if it is; Blizzard doesn’t optimize for the “top 5%” so go get wrekt apparently?
To try and help illustrate the issue (for those unsure) and to avoid conflation with other issues, I found this vid that shows the issue perfectly (not my vid) that occurred with pre-patch and is of a 5800X3D (so no slouch) and has frametime graphs to show the stutter in situ.
I have also seen similar stuttering results (worse in Df zones) with that CPU, which legit is the best one currently for WoW, yet it struggles. Been trying my best to annoy @Pawgwalker to get some lame honest answers, as @Bigcogenergy above you mentions.
The @Pawgwalker theory recap is; only HE understands what CPU bound means, and makes excuses that MMOs shouldn’t be able to handle many players in one location (it worked fine before Df, I can assure you). According to him, we’re stuck at 1080p 60fps forever, because that’s the MMO experience.
Did it? Or were you just not looking for it… Also, do you have selective memory from the launch of SL? People complained about performance then, while around lots of people at the start of the expansion. Same went for BfA, Legion, WoD, etc… Anyone remember the 5 minute Dal load screens unless you changed the cvar for preloading? As an expansion goes on, less and less people tend to be in the same place at the same time.
So naturally, toward the end of SL, when maybe 1/5th of players were still playing, your memory of the performance is likely going to be skewed. Instead of there being 100 people in Oribos, there would be like 20 and it was like that for probably the whole last 6-9 months of the expansion.
As for your remarks about being CPU bound, well it’s pretty simple actually… Your average non-MMO type game, with lots of action going on, the frame looks something like this where the bulk of a frame is spent rendering on the GPU: <--CPU--><----------------------GPU---------------------------> 16.67ms
vs MMOs where it looks more like this when you’re around a lot of players: <---------------------CPU----------------------><-----GPU-----> 16.67ms
vs an MMO when you’re not around a lot of players: <--CPU--><---GPU---> 6.67ms
Yes, I’m grossly simplifying it, but it get’s the point across. The problem with things like MMOs is that they are extremely dynamic. The engine can’t predict what needs to be loaded. A random player could decide to rapidly change their armor over and over again, 300 people could randomly decide to hearth back to an inn in front of you. 60 people could randomly decide to have a mount off competition spamming their mount libraries, and so on. There’s no real easy way to optimize an engine to handle that level of chaos, so they lack a lot of the optimization that you’d find in a single player game or a multiplayer game that has fixed assets(once the match starts).
The week before pre-patch doing ZM world boss I had around 60-70 fps in a full raid, the day pre-patch hit disabling cache to remove camera stutters, I had 35-45 fps in a full raid. Same settings, hardware, but all addons disabled and no updates from Windows, Nvidia or anything around that time.
Please enlighten us with your full analysis of how all of this works, to us peasants. I don’t live in a reality where performance being cut in half over night, in OLD zones due to an expansion/dlc/update/whatever being released, is normal.
While you’re at it, please give us all your settings for OS, Nvidia/AMD and in game settings to reduce CPU strain as much as possible, while retaining good graphics.
The Pawg thing is amazing isn’t it? It’s some next level trolling to be so dedicated for weeks upon weeks to such a pointless cause. I envy their free time.
Yeah like that, but it seems the players are already loaded in there. On all systems I’ve tested, flying in from a distance away, players just start to appear outta thin air and cause harder stutters.
All expansions have bugs with launch, however historically, the most serious ones get ironed out pretty quickly! I do agree with you that this expansion in particular, has had some very serious bugs that have not yet been resolved or even marked as high priority to fix! For example; extreme frame stuttering, camera position bug when landing after dragon riding, extreme network lag in Azurespan, major freeze when logging into the game, etc, etc)
