A small update.
Bad news: you have to do this every time you restart the game
Good news: In the first step of the fix, setting both window size and resolution scale to their minimum value (instead of just window size) further increases the fps/performance gain after completing the other steps and now SoA uses max 70ish% of my gpu (a gtx 960 2gb) regardless of the direction I look and runs smoothly at 60fps again at 1080p (which is the best it ever has since shadowlands launch)
Really hope all the information provided leads to a non-temporary fix but for now doing a quick fix every time I start the game makes it run perfectly again. Thank you everyone who assisted with this!
Edit: For clarity these are the steps I did:
- Set both your Window size and resolution scale to the lowest value possible.
- In advanced settings set your Rendering API to legacy directx11 and then back to directx 12
- Set game resolution back to the resolution you normally play at.