Except for that part where he’s not having lockups, merely performance drops.
And i highly doubt you’re running everything maxxed out, because you know better, and he is.
And if you’re going to claim 100fps in busy areas at all 10s, ill just go ahead and refresh my “you’re a liar” statement. I mean, we’ve proven that extensively in the past, but i thought i’d mention it, just in case you thought we’d forgotten how full of crap you can be.
We haven’t.
To the OP:
Check the following:
Render Scale: If you just went hog wild turning up settings, you may have cranked this up to 200%. Try turning it down, as at 200% its effectively running 4K and then downsampling it. When you add in that you are likely running the settings higher than you need to, this cam put a serious strain on things.
However, a 2080 SUPER should be able to handle even 4k just fine, so this is likely not the sole culprit. My 1080Ti (which is not a lot slower than a 2080) can handle 5k Effective (200% of 1440p) as long as i keep the other settings in check. So your 2080 SUPER should be fine.
Draw Distance: If you set this to 10, you’re basically throwing performance under the bus for virtually NO fidelity gain. You can step this down to 7 without noticing in most cases. The only difference for me, for example, is that if im standing in Zul’Dazar (? i cant even remember what the horde capital is this expac) and looking off across the continent, going from 7 to 10 merely changes the mountains in the distance - the very furthest ones, out at the border of Vol’dun - from shadows to textured mountains. I wouldn’t notice during gameplay. But jumping from 7 to 10 cuts my framerate by 40% right off - because the CPU now has to issue draw calls for a bunch of objects that are “technically” visible but that you cant see (obscured by other things, etc). Turn it down.
Environmental Detail: Just like Draw Distance, this adds a ton of overhead for almost no visual fidelity increase. Yes, it will make it so you can see full trees or boxes or other things that are SUPER far away (instead of shadows or lower textures), but in gameplay, youll never notice. It can be quite punishing. Drop it to 7 or 8.
Ground Clutter: Same thing, though the performance drop isn’t that high since ground clutter isn’t as punishing.
Consider dropping SSAO to High instead of Ultra. Once again, performance loss for almost no visual gain. Unless you’re staring at the advanced lighting effects all the time youll never notice (and even then. I have trouble telling the difference between Ultra and High anyway, even when i know i should be looking).
Drop Particle Density down to High from Ultra. More Particles = more Draw Calls = more CPU overhead = lower framerates. The difference between the two is not that noticable.
Drop liquid Detail to Good. The “Full Reflection” on the Ultra setting basically means its doubling up on draw calls for anything in the reflection. Unless you’re staring at the water, you wont notice.
Shadows: This is MURDER. EVERY Shadow is another draw call, and the two highest settings geometrically multiply draw calls by using high-res dynamic shadows for EVERY OBJECT (and sometimes, if there are lots of lights, each object will have several shadows!). I run it at High, which uses the high res dynamic shadows only for things that are nearby, which really eases the pain.
Try those changes, and see what happens.
You will almost certainly not notice any difference in visual quality unless you’re just sitting around staring at random objects, and even then it isn’t that big of a difference, but the performance difference is massive.
Also, make sure your RAM is running at the rated speeds and the timings are as tight as you can get them. Ryzen really likes fast low latency RAM.