Been having pretty bad FPS in raids for the past two months (I first noticed it happening in the last phase of mythic ghuun, which coincided with around the time 8.1 dropped). Frames would drop to mid-20’s. In the most recent raid, I’m regularly dropping to the teens, and even single digits in some spots (like second phase of opulence).
My system: i7-6950x CPU; 64GB ram, titan x. Dxdiag at pastebin dot com/1iejuwVK
Things I’ve tried:
Full reinstall of WoW (twice).
Uninstalling/reinstalling graphics driver with the graphics driver tool thing.
Making sure GeForce experience has Wow set to high performance
Eliminating all unnecessary weakauras; deleting unnecessary addons. Also, disabling each addon individually and testing to see if removal made a difference (it didn’t).
You will want to reset the UI to default to start with . Disabling addons is not the same as removing them. Even disabled they still load and can cause issues . Start with a full UI reset Cut and paste the following to your desktop interface, WTF and cache and test.
GeForce experience in itself can cause FPS issues. I actually never install it as it has been problematic
Will be doing a complete UI reset after LFR comes out (can’t annoy my teammates at the moment with the time sink) and will report back. Not particularly technical here: what is ‘stock speed’?
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-6950X CPU @ 3.00GHz (20 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
No over clock on the CPU.
The X CPUS are not very good for gaming out of the box. They are more designed for graphic production and music production or anything that can actually utilize all of the cores. Generally to get optimal performance with gaming they have to be Over clocked. But as you stated you are not that technical it is not something I would mess with.
Ok - but to be clear - regardless of whether this system is ‘optimized’ for gaming, presumably it should be able to play wow without any issues. I’m able to play Skyrim VR, modded, wirelessly without a problem, so I highly doubt it’s a CPU issue…
Wow is very CPU dependent. And relies heavily on the single core performance of the CPU.
Which generally puts the load on the GPU. Not the CPU .
wow is not very threaded even running dx 12 it still is a CPU bound game. The single core performance of a i7-6950X at stock speed is about 20 percent less then a I-7 4790K. Couple that with the fact the game is on a 4K display. a 7 is as high as I would set the game for performance reasons at 4K and a 5 or 6 in a raid
Thanks for the clarification on how WoW works; might need to look into overclocking then. I did seem to have a smoother raid today (though Opulence will be the real test).
Did three things today, which may have improved the situation: (1) Changed WoW settings from using “default” graphics card, to ensuring it was using Titan X; (2) Changed WoW settings from Dx 11 to Dx 12; (3) Lowered settings from 7 to 6.
Update – issue definitely not solved by any of the three items mentioned above. For whatever reason, things seemed fine on first two mythic bosses (20 man); and first three bosses LFR (25 man).
However - Heroic 27 man from Jadefire on was a mess, with sub 20 FPS almost the entire time, and low one digit FPS on Opulence second phase. Even with settings at 5.
It’s not the CPU: I monitored that on a second screen and it wasn’t breaking a sweat.
Now to brave heroic without any addons I guess and see what happens.
First any Addons that are not for this expansion I would remove. If you use weak aura’s or elvui would remove those two.
you have a 20 thread CPU and the game uses 3 cores its not going to show any load really. even if it was possible for the game to cap all three that is still only 15 percent load . You want to look at each cores load would bet one is hitting 100 percent. You will want to open resource manager click on CPU it will show all the cores induvial. A lions share of the game runs on a single core. which would only show as 5 percent usage on your CPU
EDITED: I just went back in to reconfirm. CPU 18 at the bottom is indeed at 100%, but that doesn’t seem to vary depending on whether FPS is good or bad. None of the others are spiking during FPS drops. (Side note: I was experiencing excellent performance until 8.1. Unless there’s a good reason why suddenly my CPU can’t handle WoW, I’m inclined to move on to other troubleshooting).
Re: Addons – yes, I’ll remove all, including Weakauras. But I just wonder why everyone else in my raid is fine using Weakauras and I wouldn’t be.
Addons can interfere with each other . One of the reason I run the bare minimum addons when raiding. Any addons you do not use doing a raid should be disabled. Any addons not meant for this expansion should also be removed, If you do not have it addon control panel is a good addons.
Addon s can become corrupt over time so some time. So sometimes a UI reset and a fresh reinstall of the addons can fix issues.
It is very difficult since 8.1 to really establish if FPS, Lag, Disconnects, error are the users problem or serer problems. Blizz has confirmed they are having massive issues with the sharding system but are unable to pinpoint the issues. They have been collecting data but it isnt enough to find a stable reason.
I have tried playing on a completely fresh install with nothing else but wow on the pc and it still has random issues. Even went as far as going to a friends to try a different internet connection with a different provider and still had the same issues.
My understanding is this is something we will be dealing with until the next x pack or maybe we will get lucky during a patch
If I use blizzards raid frames in a 25+ group my brand new beast computer stutters and I usually end up turning off the frames and reloading. It’s silky smooth otherwise.
Just updating here to note that I agree with other posts that my issue appears related faction change. My absolute worst fight is Opulence, but I also experience low fps on conclave and king. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s almost obvious: the issue starts as soon as trash begins after Jadefire.
Additional notes: I tried playing on husband’s computer and had the same issue (so it’s not something related to my physical computer). I also tried the person’s suggestions above to turn off blizzard raid frames, but that made no difference.
Latest Update (Feb 7: Just wanted to share that I narrowed down the issue to weakauras, and am 99% confident (will confirm next week on heroic opulence) that I’ve identified my issue as stemming from Tehr’s External CD’s. )