That black stuff is a portal opening upon the death of Kroke and players killing waves of adds at his location to spawn the Towering Sentinel.
Hmm… Interesting. I was actually going to come in here and compare notes as I have noticed a significant frame rate increase since 9.1.
Night Fae Sanctum before this patch was dipping into 20 FPS range at 1080P. Now it is consistently in above 35 FPS even in the room with the Anima Conductor Most other places in the Sanctum I am at better than 40 FPS and sometimes closing in on 60. Everywhere else (out in the world, I haven’t raided in a while and not since gettin my Mac mini) I seem to be pretty much locked at 60 FPS.
This on an m1 Mac Mini with 16 Gigs of RAM using the level 7 preset.
9.1 introduced a separate setting for compute effects, and probably gave it a lower default too for lower end macines, as such you probably saw performance increase from a reduction of fog effects on ardenweald. the 9.0.5 performance regressions are still in 9.1 otherwise. but a separate issue affecting performance is now controlable instead of just locked into a high setting for everyone like it was before you could control compute effects.
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Interesting… Is this a customer facing setting as the UI shows Compute Effects set to High… Or is the system overriding the UI setting behind the scenes? In any case, I’ll take it.
they added a new drop down to choose compute effects now, before it was a hidden setting users could change but only via cvar, and leading cause of frame drops in ardenweald too (in addition to the 9.0.5 regressions)
Small step to letting users fine tune performance (i recommend setting it to off for most users since it has huge performance impact).
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Ok. I have mine set to high and I am ok with the performance results so far so I am going to leave it be. Thanks for the info.
I completely disabled particle density and compute effects out of curiosity (a lot of other things were already disabled) and it doesn’t really make a difference for me in the sanctums. 60FPS when facing certain directions and 30-40FPS facing others.
Edited to reiterate: the character without an anima conductor still does not experience this issue in the night fae sanctum even with those settings both turned back on. Two characters in night fae with conductor still have the issue.
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Hi all
Since 9.1 went live this week, I had noticed the performance had greatly increased.
I was able to run the game on setting 10 with shadows on low and liquids on fair with all other options maxed (60 FPS V Sync). Before this, I was having to run with particle density on low, this would keep me around 60 FPS.
Wednesday night (Australia) there was an update, since installing the new update and logging into the game my performance has drastically changed. With the same settings I ran pre 9.1 I get 30 FPS mostly, rarely going to 60 depending on the direction I am facing.
I have yet to determine what is causing this, I have tried all settings with trial and error. I’ve even tried the NEW compute settings on disabled or ultra and it makes no difference at all. I’ve also gone through the preset graphics slider and the only way I get 60 FPS is on setting 2 compared to my usual setting 10 (with a few things lowered) pre 9.1.
As far as I can tell, the issue is related to the update after 9.1 went live.
I just want to know If anyone else is experiencing these issues? I have been in contact back and forth with customer support, they have told me to reinstall the game (which I Did) reset UI, ect.
None of this has fixed my issues and they seem to be at a loss as well.
I am playing on the base model Mac M1 Mini 8GB 1080P Res.
Thanks for reading.
Choc.
Edit:
This issue seems to occur in Shadowlands. I have tested Org and no FPS loss at my usual settings, with shadows on ultra.
Similar to my experience with the Night Fae sanctum, I have two Kyrian characters with very few FPS issues in Elysian Hold without an anima conductor, but extreme FPS drops on my main character with an anima conductor. On characters without conductor, I still lose about 10-15FPS near the blue flame braziers, however.
As with PC users, I am now experiencing the map/world-quest announcement/zone announcement stuttering.
Ooooooooh yeah. That’s a real thing there. Open the map, and it stutters like mad. Just opening the map itself also literally stops graphic updates until it’s entirely loaded. You can open/close/open/close in rapid succession to show just how bad it really is. It happens with any map panel, be it the world map, anima conductor map, and even the mission table. Basically anything that pops up an info panel now causes some pretty gnarly stuttering, especially during the initial loading of that panel into RAM.
I know it isn’t a CASC issue on the macOS side because I just did the full 78 GB fresh install to defragment my installation of WoW that hadn’t had a fresh install in more three years. It’s definitely something on Blizzard’s end.
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I went with the fresh install route as well, to no avail.
I’ve made my peace with the fact that all these performance regressions will probably be here to stay.
Glad to know it isn’t just me. I actually went ahead and increased the max frame rate cap to 75 FPS as that’s what my monitor is maxes out at and I was able to sustain that in many areas (not in the Night Fae sanctum, but even there performance is at 30 FPS and higher. ) As stated above, this is on an M1 Mac mini with 16 Gigs of RAM using the level 7 preset. And as you, things changed when 9.1 dropped.
I just came back after a couple months off, and since 9.1, just shutting off V-sync for my MB Pro has made my frames tick higher than 60 in all areas. Before with V-sync off, I was getting horrid stuttering and what not, but now that is no longer happening. Hopefully this helps others with the same M1 chip laptops/Mac Mini’s.
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Tried that but, sadly, no joy. This expansion has been rough on my Mac, something that’s only got worse after 9.0.5. In most zones I’m averaging around 5-15 FPS which just… stinks.
I’m hoping for a fix, but in the meantime the experience made me try out FF14 which seems to work far better on my machine.
Hey folks,
We talked with Quality Assurance about this recently and wanted to share some insight. They apparently tested performance on M1 Macs for 9.1 and found that the issues they were looking into in 9.0.5 were resolved. We appreciate all the info throughout the last couple months as they used those details to analyze things and figure out what was causing the 9.0.5 drops.
Quick caveat here, we have seen FPS drops in extremely crowded areas such as Oribos and the like, but these are expected. If you only see these issues when there are tons of players around, there’s not much else we can do with that other than suggest that you try lowering settings.
The only thing we’ve been able to do to reproduce performance issues in 9.1 is running outdated addons so far, so if you’re running into this issue, please uninstall all addon managers, reset your UI, and retest.
If that doesn’t work, it could be an on board setting with your mac drivers specifically as Eliminator suggests above. Let us know if any setting on the mac itself is consistently fixing the issue and we can see if we can reproduce it that way specifically.
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Hi Drakuloth, thank you for coming back to this thread. The issue is very much still present where anima streams are flowing: characters with anima conductors active in their home zone (particularly Ardenweald and Bastion), Oribos, and (from what I’ve heard as I don’t do this dungeon) Spires of Ascension dungeon. Can you please ask the team to investigate this specific graphical element further? Main characters who have these conductors present suffer while alts do not at all, which is very unfortunate. I do not want to have to change covenants to enjoy my experience. UI resets have been done and addons were removed, several different settings have been tested and nothing seems to fix this graphic element. Please let us know if there is a way that this specific element can be disabled.
Edit: this is also experienced on Intel, not just M1 from the thread title.
Marwenna,
Earlier you mentioned you are on an intel mac, which is not the same issue as we are talking about in this thread. Do you also have an M1 Mac that you are having problems with? If not, you’ll want to start your own thread to keep this one from becoming overcomplicated by unrelated issues
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Intel only on my end. I had started to compose one this morning before your response. I will do that.
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Thank-you guys, I’ve actually seen my FPS recover back to pre 9.0.5 levels and advise people to turn off V-sync (which I began using post 9.0.5 because my M1 Mac began freezing). Thanks again for the update.