Ever since the latest patch on March 1, I have been getting horrible frame rate issues in Zereth Mortis and Torghast, along with a few other zones and areas. I’ve also had screen flickering (only seen in Zereth Mortis) so bad I feel like I could honestly get a migraine from it.
I have had this PC since black Friday and have been able to play WoW at the max settings flawlessly and easily getting over 100+ fps. Never any issues.
March 1 patch drops and now I’ll randomly drop frame from 120 fps to 10. Just today though I was in the Queen’s Conservatory and I dropped to 1 frame per second.
After playing with some settings I thought I had it figured out. I lowered Compute Effects and Shadow Quality and that seemed to fix it, or so I thought.
I went to do some dailies in Zereth Mortis and went up to a mob and I instantly dropped to single digit frame rates again.
At this point I don’t know what to do or what the problem is. There is something with this patch that really messed up the graphics for me and it doesn’t seem to be a very well known issue. Meaning I don’t think many people have it. Oddly though my girlfriend also has the same issue on her gaming laptop that she also bought on black Friday.
I also have a temp monitoring app running while playing and neither the CPU or GPU is overheating.
I also play other games at max settings without issue either. I just ran a dungeon in Destiny 2 last night for 2 1/2 hours and never had any lag, frame rate drops, or stutters or anything and that game is way more graphic intensive than WoW. And the screen flickering doesn’t show up anywhere else while using my PC. Not while browsing the internet or playing other games.
I need some help on this issue because if the game will continue to play like this for me I won’t have any choice than to stop playing. I’m not going to pay for a subscription for a game that literally can’t run.
That’s a good direction to go in, but shutting off addons does nothing to correct UI corruption, which can remain even if the addon is “shut off”.
@OP, it’s better just to do a full UI reset. It’s quick, simple, and completely reversible if the reset actually does nothing to rectify the issue:
If this does nothing to help, simply delete the new Cache, Interface and WTF folders, and rename the CacheOld, InterfaceOld and WTFOld back to Cache, Interface and WTF. That’ll restore what you started with today before the reset attempt.
If this does resolve the issue, then how you proceed is up to you. You could either rebuild from a fresh UI, adding your preferred addons back one by one, or reverse the UI reset as I described above, and try to update/troubleshoot/re-install addons one-by-one to find the culprit.
Note that reversing the reset and doing the one-by-one addon update isn’t 100% guaranteed to fix the issue. The corruption could be something that stays even after an addon uninstallation.
I’ll echo the suggestion of a full UI reset. Most likely it’s one that hasn’t yet been updated for 9.2 that’s misbehaving and tanking performance.
I had the same thing happen to me about a year ago. I was seemingly getting way less performance than it felt like I should’ve been. Wasn’t dropping to single digit frame rates, but sub-30, for sure.
Moved my addons, WTF, and interface folders out of my WoW folder, and relaunched WoW without putting a single addon back, and my frame rates absolutely skyrocketed. Closed out of WoW, put back only addons that were updated for the current patch, and were ones that I actually used/needed, and the performance of the game stayed much higher than before.
Update: I completely uninstalled the game and re-installed it and I’m still having all of the same issues. So I honestly don’t know what to do from here on out.
on my laptop having Vertical Sync disabled and unticking the FPS sliders under “Advanced Settings” and graphics quality slider down one or two notches increase FPS / performance for me.
Not exactly. If it were the game, it would affect everyone, and this forum would be absolutely flooded with people reporting the same issue. I get a locked 144fps, except when things really get crazy, but I’ve never seen it drop below 120 on my system.
It’ll help if you posted a dxdiag from your system.
If it complains about the file being too big when you post it, put it on pastebin, and then post a link to the page, just the part after the / in the URL
How other games perform is completely unrelated to how another game performs. They interact with the OS and the computer’s hardware in different ways.
The very basics…
If, when you uninstalled and reinstalled WoW, you put all your addons back, that’s not a good test. Try it with absolutely none. Move the addons, WTF, and cache folders out of your WoW folder and see how things go. If it doesn’t make any difference, you and put those 3 folders right back and everything will go right back to how it was
Check and update drivers
Run all Windows updates - go in and actually click the Check For Updates button and let it check
Definitely install all major OS revisions (Win10 21H2, Windows 11… also appears to be 21H2, build 22000.567)
Any runaway background processes? What kind of CPU usage are you seeing while WoW is running?
You say your CPU and GPU aren’t overheating - what kind of temps are you seeing?
Any antivirus or antimalware scanning while WoW is running?
What kind of hard drive are you running WoW from? Standard spinning drive? SATA SSD? NVMe SSD?
OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 22000)
Processor: Intel(R) Core i9-10850k CPU @ 3.60GHz (20 CPUs) ~ 3.6
Memory: 32768MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
Display
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
Total Memory: 28452
Display Memory (VRAM): 12108
Shared Memory: 16344
Version: 30.0.15.1179
GPU and OS are both up to date on the latest versions.
I thought after yesterday’s patch that my issues in Zerth Mortis were gone. But after playing a little longer they were, in fact, still there.
And I just ran a Spires of Ascension dungeon and I was constantly at 20 fps or lower. And in the dungeon I even moved the Graphics Quality slider all the way to 1 and it didn’t make a difference.
I have also completely deleted my addons and walked into Spires again and still having the same frame rate issues.
I still have no idea wtf is going on and this is very frustrating to play this game now. There’s no reason this game should be running like it was on my old 9 year old PC when this is a very capable higher end gaming PC.
*side note: I also noticed I’m having major frame rate issues with Warzone now too lately (another Activision game). I have no idea if these are related on Activision’s end, but it’s very coincidental that I’m having issues with 2 games from the same (parent) company. Yet any other game I play runs just fine.
Did you recently move the computer or unplug things? Is the monitor plugged into the GPU instead of the onboard graphics? Asking because the monitor ID isn’t being reported.
It’s also possible you’re running into an issue with Synapse, as it causes Overwatch to go into single-digit frames also.
Aside from that, you may want to run an MSInfo report on your own and review any errors at the bottom to see if an external app is causing this.
I haven’t moved or touched my PC or monitor since I set it up months ago. And I have literally never had any of these problems until a couple weeks ago. It’s just very strange that when the patch came out on Tuesday then all of a sudden the game is running horribly.
I’ll look into Synapse though. Do you know of any work around? Should I just delete it all together?
There was talk about Synapse 3 working best. If you’re already using that you could try reinstalling. However, it really does sound like your GPU stops responding and the integrated GPU is taking over if it’s seriously single-digits.
I believe my issue was Triple Buffering in the “Advanced” menu was enabled. I turned it off and my frame rate never dipped under 100 fps.
I was in Spires dungeon again experiencing horrible frame rate. Mid dungeon I was looking through options and gave it a shot. When I disabled Triple Buffering I instantly saw a huge performance jump. Never had any issues the rest of the run.
Went to Zereth Mortis, did some quests, even killed the world boss without any issue. And last week when I did the world boss I was in single digits for frame rates.
Hopefully this was my only issue and I can enjoy the game smoothly again! Not sure why this only started a couple of weeks ago, but this seems to have been my problem.
Update: I did have to disable Compute Effects unfortunately. I was flying around the ampitheatre in Ardenweald and I started dropping frames again So I played around with some settings again and turned down shadow quality to high and turned off Compute Effects completely. That seems to have further fixed my problem. Here’s hoping this is finally it
update 2: not fixed
update 3: latest patch that dropped on March 22 seems to have fixed my issue?? I haven’t had any frame rate issues at all. No idea what the original issue is, but hopefully it’s gone for good.
Running ray traced shadows at all? Turn it off. The optimization is abysmal. Also, switch to the studio drivers, not GRD’s - had the same problem on my 3080 Ti. Disabling ray tracing and using studio drivers fixed it.
I think I did turn ray tracing off sometime last weekend and it didn’t help too much. But I believe I left them off anyway. And I’m not sure about the studio drivers. I’ll look into it.
However, I did notice that after this latest Tuesday update, I haven’t had any issues at all. None. Not in any dungeons or zones or world rares that I used to in Zereth Mortis or anywhere.
Did Bliz fix my problem??? I have no idea how I could have such a strange issue with fps that started only a few weeks ago and then all of a sudden its gone. But as long as it’s actually gone, I’m fine with it!
Long shot but same thing sorta happened to me until I “fixed” the power issue in Windows.
It was by default set to “Power Saver” and then when I changed it to “High Performance” and rebooted that made a massive difference. /shrug - ya never know
My gpu burned up in ZM I noticed the same response asking for my dxdiag as if it was my fault. Something is going on with the code because I played every other game on the planet on high without issues ever.
So I played around with some settings again and turned down shadow quality to high and turned off Compute Effects completely. That seems to have further fixed my problem. Here’s hoping this is finally it 