I would like to preface that my game runs perfectly fine and is unaffected.
The problem is that while I am tabbed into the game, my videos or streams from Youtube or Twitch will lag and sometimes just stop working until I tab out of WoW. As soon as I tab into WoW, the issue persists.
My task manager is not showing any huge spikes or anything, my RAM usage is sitting comfortably at 25-30% and my CPU is never getting close to 50%+.
This was NEVER a problem before the pre-patch and I DID notice it in the Shadowlands Beta and I am shocked it made it into the prepatch.
Issues persist with or without addons and I have tried low graphics.
I have a GTX 2080, i9-9900k, 32 GB 3200 MHZ ram. All of my drivers are updated.
I tried messing with my monitor’s G-SYNC, refresh rates, NVidia control panel settings, everything…
PLEASE help, I do NOT want to switch browsers either from chrome
The CPU usage indicator isn’t a very good metric for determining usage. 50% of your CPU would imply that 4/8 cores in your CPU were under 100% load and that sill isn’t even how it really works either. What kinds of tasks are being crunched is the bigger issue.
First thing to try would be renaming your WTF and interface folders, see if the issue persists with zero addons. A lot of times, it’s a bad addon that can cause issues like this.
What are your heat readings at while in WoW? You can use CPUID’s HWMonitor to check all your thermals.
Also, try going to ~chrome://settings/system (remove the ~ from the url) and see if the “use hardware acceleration when available” option is enabled. Try it with and without it turned on.
It really depends on what the content is that’s running. I can easily choke your CPU out with a couple dozen lines of code that make it look like you’re only using half of your CPU. WoW is famous for having poorly coded addons that hitch the main thread.
Maybe there’s an issue with core parking or process affinity? Maybe chrome is going into a reduced power mode when it senses it’s in the background? Kind of like how in WoW, you can set the max background fps to reduce it’s consumption when you’re alt tabbed out.
What quality level are the youtube videos that you’re watching? If they are 4k 60fps videos, that’s still a pretty decent amount of strain and I don’t know if they can multithread decoding operations like that or not or what the limitations might be.
Again though, you probably have a bad addon and need to reset the UI. Within your wow\retail\ folder: rename the interface and WTF folders, delete your cache folder and start the client up. Then log in and once you’re in, run /console cvar_default to wipe any remnants of cvars that might get saved to the cloud instead of the local client.
Deleting the cache has not done anything. Like I said, this was not an issue before the patch and I’m beginning to wonder if it is just a driver update I’ll need when Nvidia releases a new update.
EDIT: IT WAS WINDOWS 10 “Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling” that caused all of my issues!!
