I know its 2020 and computers nowadays are seriously fast (or WoW is not really that demanding, either or) but I really think that the swirlies for world/raid boss encounters really hits hard on my system. Sad thing about it is that I can’t really turn it off since I plan to do M+ and raids this coming reset.
I hope there are a couple people out there who share the same sentiment. Upgrading my system is not a roadmap that I can follow anytime soon. I wish there is an optimization plan for the swirlies.
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Ya, some of the important “get out the fire” ground effects are in projected textures and not “Essential” spell density. And they bog my aging system down for hard to explain reasons.
It’s not like they suddenly added 600,000’s poly’s, it’s a handful of projected textures.
Hi there Tongki ,
I am sorry to hear the particle effects are hitting the system hard. We would love to offer some advice here but to do so we will want to get your Dxdiag. It will help us see what we are working with. 
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I look forward to hearing from you.
/Nathardrick
Since the GPU is the min spec model, turning down settings may be the only reprieve to low fps/bad performance. I also noticed some audio driver crashes, so reinstalling those may help a bit.
Textures that have translucent effects are pretty brutal on GPUs. Particles are made up of tons of them. Then when you mix in projecting decals on the world, it further adds to that mix.
There are quite a few new particle effects to some of the mobs/bosses in this game that will absolutely destroy frame rates if you’re already on a low end device.
Oryphrion, in Spires of Ascension, is a good example of what I’m talking about. The blue pools he drops would take my FPS down to like 5fps if there were 5-6 of them visible. Normally, I’d be in the 45-60 fps range. I haven’t checked again, but I think there was some minor patch that reduced how badly it hurt frame rates.
Another good example was Elegon back in MoP. That fight was an FPS destroyer as well in raids when everyone turned into stardust people.
Your best bet is to set everything to 1, then turn on projected textures, set particles to fair(needed to render a lot of important aoes on boss fights), set spell density to essential or dynamic if you have your target FPS set up in the advanced tab.