Hello there! There have been quite a few other posts, but I hope I can gather what information is available and shove it into one post for others about the recent WoW: Forever performance degradation / low FPS issues that I and many others have been running into.
First, let me say that I’m a Linux user - OpenSUSE Slowroll with Proton GE 11.7
System Specs: Ryzen 5 5600, 32GB RAM, RX 9060 XT.
I’m not making this post JUST for Linux users - I used to be on Windows and I hope to fix your problems as well, since this seems to be a game engine problem than Operating System specific.
The Problem…
This is not just AMD cards having issues - NVIDIA cards also are running into the same problem. There have been mixed blaming on what’s causing these problems; memory leak, VRAM leak. We don’t know the answer to the problem until Blizz tells us. But! I come with you with hard solid facts tested on two systems.
Here’s what I do know with those hard facts: Retail WoW runs at 350 FPS in Ironforge.
WoW:Forever barely got past 60 FPS - even in Dun Morogh looking at the ground.
Those two numbers don’t add up - even with recently added lighting / volumetric fog effects.
… and it gets worse. Remember that potential (but not confirmed) memory leak? Well, something is accumulating in the background. Your framerate will drop steadily over long sessions. Just an hour for me - I noticed a 20FPS drop and the only fix was to log out and log back in.
Maybe they released a debug build or the game was compiled with optimizations that aren’t ideal? We don’t know. But it’s affecting a lot of players.
Known Solutions…
Secondary Lighting
The biggest hit to performance is Secondary Lighting, which I believe is part of the new Global Illumination that Blizzard added in.
My recommendation: Set it to Fair
Side note: This also apparently fixes GPU drivers hanging for players on Windows, and in some reports - Linux.
Compute Effects
Another hidden FPS drop. This handles the new volumetric fog for Forever - and as many of you might notice… it’s set to Ultra which claims to add “additional placements” or something similar. Yeah, don’t believe it. I gained about 20+FPS just by switching to High.
My recommendation: Set it to High if you have a recent video card. Set it to Good or lower if you have a potato.
Low Latency Mode
Hear me out. This is crazy, but - recently I discovered a thread saying this is another source of lag and frame timing issues - and they’re right.
Blizzard has this set to “Auto Detect”, which is fine on Retail. But as I described in the beginning part of this post - something is astray. Changing this just made the game felt smooth and from my observation, unlocked the GPU to render the game at 150FPS rather than being stuck at 80FPS. Dare say, it feels like World of Warcraft again rather than some slideshow even at 80FPS - frame timings are weird to describe. But you’ll know it when you feel it.
And yes, VSYNC is disabled in all these testings.
My Recommendation: Set it to Disabled
With these changes, I managed to get my game from 80FPS up to 150FPS. Nowhere near the 300FPS I got on Retail. We’re still early in the beta - so I hope Blizzard’s taking notes and if so, please - just a simple “We’re investigating…” is beneficial at this point.
Final Note: No. I’m not a Retail Player coming in on the Forever bandwagon. I started off in Vanilla (just before Ahn’Qiraj - I want to say 1.6.#) - and this is something I’ve always wanted… and I hope Blizzard actually delivers.