Anyone here that knows me, likely knows that I’m a bit more thorough than the average bear when it comes to testing and troubleshooting.
Here’s an example with an RTSS graph showing temps, usages and with a frametime graph(wow fps set to uncapped): https://imgur.com/Cr9xLHR
Even with slider set to 1, still not gaining a ton more FPS, maybe 10-20 more.
I’ve been noticing this issue before and after updating to W11 24H2, from W11 23H2 (my PC finally got the update today). I’ve tried every combination of settings, including the advanced options. No addons, the PC has absolutely no extra apps running, no extra services running in the background, etc etc. The drivers are fresh and up to date, my BIOS and Intel microcode are up to date, the whole nine yards.
This is not normal, nor has it been normal in the recent past. I haven’t played a whole lot lately, so I’m not exactly sure when this happened. I almost always have the ctrl+r fps meter running while playing and normally lock to 80FPS from which it almost never drops below. I started seeing dips into the upper 70s here in Tanaris with a relatively small number of players around. I clearly remember just a few weeks ago being in the same area with dozens of people around for things like the mount event and still staying locked to 80fps.
I have ran a plethora of other benchmarks and tests to rule out other variables and all of them are coming back completely normal. (I work a lot with UE5 related projects and I’m not seeing any changes in benchmarks)
13600kf with latest microcode
2080FE with 566.36 drivers
32gb DDR4 3200
Windows 11 24H2(also happened on 23H2)
EDIT: Forgot to mention that I’m playing on slider 10 settings and without raytracing. Ironically, even enabling RT on high, my fps stays almost identical since the client is main thread CPU bound in this scenario and my GPU is far from max load.
In-game base graphics affect CPU infinitely more than the GPU, with a particular emphasis on View Distance and Liquid Detail. Either way, the game is criminally CPU-bound no matter how you configure it. If I wasn’t erring on the side of retiring after this tier (again), I’d invest into a 9800X3D, but at the same time, it seems like an unreasonable ask for decent framerate on high end chips of the previous generation.
In my performance case for GPU, I can bury my card by dually enabling RT and supersampling, but I can run pretty comfortably with RT Low (Medium does nothing, while using as much performance as High), and 150%. Without either setting, utilization of my 7900 XT is 48-51% (up to 60%, depending on other settings).
Oh yeah, I’m plenty aware of how CPU bound the game is and have done a ton of breakdowns/tests/benchmarks of it over the years here. My main point is that something changed recently that made it become even more CPU bound. The performance ceiling seems drastically lowered and this is due to there being some changes in the main thread causing a bottleneck. This is why I said that even by setting slider to 1, I barely gained even a few extra FPS and that’s because the main game thread is likely doing something in a serial manner(might be waiting on async tasks or maybe some of the tasks are being executed in a synchronous only manner) or there’s some other bug shenanigans going on.
No amount of extra cores will solve the issue. The game engine itself uses like four threads(probably an average of a couple more threads more for the DX12 batching of draw calls), so if anything, a CPU’s quad thread performance matters most. This usually leads into CPUs around the i5 range to actually end up being a good sweet spot since even a high end i9 doesn’t really perform that much better in single or quad threaded applications.
Overall, they likely need to fix or rework whatever chokepoints are happening in the main thread. I don’t ever really expect to see my CPU use more than say 20%, since the game only uses 4-6 threads out of the 20 threads on my CPU, but the fact that my GPU will sit there at less than 50% on max settings and with an uncapped frame rate, is saying that it’s waiting roughly twice as long for the game to tell it to render a frame, as it does to actually render the frame aka a CPU bottleneck. And again, in my case, it’s definitely not the actual CPU holding it back. For once, I can safely say this is an issue on their end, not on ours.