Around the time of the most recent Windows update the game has been hitching / micro freezing / delays / choppy. Other players no longer fade in. Instead there is hitching and they pop in. The problem persists throughout the computer until the game and launcher is closed.
When does the problem occur?
Players loading into view.
Combat in proximity of other random players.
Opening the world map.
Opening the Macro window.
Tabbing out.
Launcher refreshing.
NPC’s loading in, to a much lesser extent.
What isn’t effected?
FPS tracker
Latency tracker
Raids, after the first pull.
Even at a steady 100+ FPS the issue occurs. Higher player density increases the severity of the problem. Large groups of players zoning in almost freezes the game. Flying through unpopulated zones the game runs pretty smooth.
These issues are a mirror image of what happened 7-8 months ago. That issue was resolved after 8/04/2021 Tuesday Maintenance.
Are you running out of space on the drive? Do you have lots of things running in the background? Are you experiencing connection issues (checked with WinMTR)?
If it’s still mechanical, you might need to do a defrag+optimization on it. Defraging takes files that are split into pieces, and puts them whole again, so the drive doesn’t have to read a bunch of places to load a file. Optimizing orders the files of directories so that they are all in a similar region of the drive, physically, so that the arm that swings around doesn’t have to travel all over to load related files(lowers seek delays).
If it’s a solid state drive of any type, you need to keep your drive <80% full, otherwise, you’ll run into massive slowdowns.
MMOs tend to need to stream assets in and out constantly, based on players coming and going, where you’re going toward, spells being cast, sounds being loaded, etc. So when something new happens on your client like an unloaded spell being cast or player zoning in, the game has to load things related to them like texture files and then usually has to quickly compile a shader to draw them on your screen during that frame or maybe the next frame.
The hitching is your game having to wait for either the asset to be loaded from the drive, or the cpu to compile the shader. In either case, the CPU will stall while it loads or compiles and if the CPU is stalled, it can’t tell the GPU to render a frame. This is where a lot of stuttering can come from.
You can also try clearing the nvidia/d3ds shader caches: C:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\Local\D3DSCache C:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\Local\NVIDIA\DXCache
idea that might work is to see if disabling Vertical Sync will solve your problem . also check if your power plan is set to High Performance and graphics card to Maximum Performance.
Had to wait till Tuesday to test everything. World content isn’t populated enough on the weekends.
Clearing the D3DSCache’s did nothing
SSD has over 60% free space
I did get a suggestion from Blizzard on my old thread from 8 months ago to turn off FidelityFXSuper Resolution 1.0. Helped a tiny bit. Didn’t resolve anything.
I am waiting till this weeks raid schedule is over to reset UI, clear WTF, and remove addons. Last time i did it I lost all my setting.
Already checked and done. Did all that when we where having this issue 8+ months ago.
All of this happened directly after the last windows update. Only effected WoW. Blizz maintenance on 8/04/2021 resolved the issue for a lot of people back then, but, I think Blizzard never disclosed how it was fixed.
Off the top of my head, if everything is up to date and you don’t have any failing hardware, the only other thing it could be is issues with multimonitor outputting. I’ve noticed a lot of games lately have been having stutter problems if you’re using mismatched refresh rates and it leads to stuttering. Probably games using older versions of directx like 9 or 11 (not the later version of 11 that’s basically 12, so like games that are using what would be called 11 legacy mode in WoW).
For instance, I have a 165hz main screen and a 60hz display tablet. If I hit WIN+P and set it to duplicate or extend, I run into massive stuttering issues on some games. If I set it to PC screen only, the issues go away 100%. The game stays capped at 165hz in both cases, but stutters like mad if I’m using multiple screens. Also, some games will get confused as to which refresh rate to cap to for vsync. It was happening to me with that Lost Ark game and driving me crazy because it kept trying to sync to my tablet’s refresh rate of 60hz.
I have multiplane overlays disabled, for work related compatibility reasons, but the core of the issue is likely tied to the Windows Desktop Manager, which MPO is a part of, and is trying to line frames up for both screens, so it’s holding frames, which causes stutter.
Try hitting WIN+P and set it to PC screen only and see if you’re getting any better results.
Your processor is at the very bottom of the minimum system requirements. WoW is quite CPU intensive, even more so in Shadowlands. An older CPU like that one will have large performance hits as that’s your primary bottleneck.
If at all possible, I’d look into upgrading the CPU to minimize the bottleneck effect.
McAfee and MalwareBytes seem to be battling it out in the background, so I would probably address that by deleting them both. With your CPU being at the minimum, you don’t need those hogging processing power in the background.
Here’s the thing. I had zero problems playing WoW before this recent update. Hitching only happened for a few seconds when 40man raids zoned in for world bosses. And yea, I build this PC a while ago lol . . its old.
try this when in the game … esc…graphics (or any window)… at the bottom click recommended… popup window “do you want to reset all setting to their defaults?-------” click All Settings …logout/login and test if all is fine adjust setting to your liking .it’s a bit of mucking around but it may work for you
Recommended setting is at the “Good” level for everything. I tested with everything deactivated or set to low. Hitching is still present. It lasts half the time. Still worse than before with no hitching.
These issues are a mirror image of what happened 7-8 months ago. That issue was resolved after 8/04/2021 Tuesday Maintenance.
Hope this helps. Crossing fingers for a quick fix