We should not have to deal with ‘fine’. Sure, it’s fine in the open world, fine to lower your settings while raiding, fine to run 60+ with lower graphics or addons. But going at 10/10 settings and 250 FPS in the overworld to 50-60 in a city, that’s certainly not fine.
What other game out there will have such a disparity in FPS from simply walking into a more densely populated area?
Are you running WoW on a 40 year old hard drive or something? The issues you’re talking about are not real
I have a modest system… neither a $5,000 modern beast, nor a decade old potato… mine is somewhere in the middle. I built this system myself with the goal of avoiding bottle-necking either the CPU or GPU, which is where a lot of people waste money.
i7-10700F 10th-Gen Comet Lake CPU
RTX 3070Ti GPU
32GB DDR4 Memory
2TB NVMe SSD
I usually run wow at fairly high settings and get smooth framerates everywhere except in a raid with 30 people popping off everything at once.
Im very happy with WoW’s game performance on my modest system.
It is kind of ironic that the “MMORPG” doesn’t run well with large groups of people…lol
Let me guess, you have a 5 year old i5 6th series PC that runs 200 FPS in all parts of the game (and neglect to tell us all your settings are on 1) because of course you do. If any of you “This game runs good” crowd would even read what I wrote you would know it’s far from OK.
No older system, anything more than 2+ years old, can get 250+ FPS on max settings in DF, it’s just not possible. If I was to join the “Game runs good” crowd and dunk my settings I would be getting 150-200 in Valdrakken no issues, but that’s my point, why should I? Why should I have to turn my settings down from max when I can get 250+ FPS on max when out of a major city and not raiding?
It used to back in the day, back way way way back in the day, I’m talking MC days where bosses had a hard limit of how many dots they could have on them at once, back when there was like 20 things max going on in game when there was so much less things for your CPU to calculate.
Irony can be pretty darn ironic at times.
I’m not sure why some people are giving you are hard time, OP. It’s a known thing since forever that the WoW client can’t always make the best use of certain types of hardware and that the best systems don’t always get the best performance, oddly enough. 
No I’m a sane person who caps the FPS at 60 because there’s no point in a system running extra hard to achieve imaginary FPS we can’t really see
As has been very well known for quite a very long time, this game is more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. Highly populated areas or encounters with a lot of effects occurring simultaneously are going to drop your framerates.
With the setup I have I expect FPS drops. I do not know what the expectation for performance is, but in all honesty, unless you have a setup that is less than 2 years old you are going to experience FPS loss.
Can anything be done about it? Not unless an entire overhaul of the game engine is done placing more load on the GPU rather than the CPU.
Because people run the game on mid graphics with the default UI and don’t even bother to look at their FPS and anything over 30 is not really all that noticeable a difference. I mean the 50-60 I get is perfectly fine, 250 in the overworld is completely overkill since I’m cheap and my monitor is only a 100hz refresh rate so really anything over 100 is null and void.
But my point still stands, how can a game have so much of a disparity in FPS just by crossing into a subzone with more people? I know why, but it should not happen, there has to be something they can do to better work out the issues that cause it.
No you are absolutely right, however it should not happen either.
You can notice the difference between 120fps and 60fps.
Not really.
It’s strange in that, you dont really see it on the screen, but the game will feel like its running smoother at above 60fps. For example, you will feel like you are running faster, but you aren’t. I’ve noticed dips and checked my fps counter when its gone down to 80, for example, from 120.
You don’t really see a difference, but the game certainly runs smoother above 60, this game does due to how it works. When your CPU is pushing one core to near maximum you can start to feel a difference before you see it.
Yeah, I finally figured this out after building two PCs that are beastly, the latest one of which has an i7-12700k with an RTX 3070 Ti and 48GB of ram which seemed like a hefty upgrade over the first one but made zero difference. I’m still having fps drops and inconsistencies (that cause eyestrain and headaches) in Valdrakken and Dalaran, and also places like Val’shara where there are a lot of graphical extras.
The next thing I build will have better single core performance, or I might go to an AMD system vs. the Intel systems I’ve always had, since I hear they are better for gaming.
My system is less than two years old, and has fps drops depending on location. All I want is for that not to happen, but so far, I’ve been unable to realize that dream. LOL
Therein lies the issue, Intel are hitting a limit on single core performance which is why I noted the X3D chips from AMD, the way they do things makes games run better.
But it’s just dumb that is even a thing, with how much stronger CPUs are now compared to what they have been, pushing games to the limit is just silly, no one should need a special CPU in order to have high FPS in a major city, it should not be a bottleneck, but it is.
The x3d chips have a high core count and lower single core score than any of the last 3 gens of Intel, including being about on par with my 13600k in the best case of the 7950x3d.
It benefits games but WoW is not a normal game, hence why no one benchmarks it, because it’s a mess to even approach a method to do that.
The chips that push past in single core are hugely power hungry too, like an i9, that would be better, but the power draw might not be worth it compared to an i5.
WoW is my main game, and lately, my main entertainment period. I’d give a lot to know what CPU I need to get to make it run perfectly on max settings. Even with what I have, I still run it on 8 because of the fps issues being worse on 10. It’s ridiculous.
Yes and no.
Either you have a garbage monitor or you capped it too low.
You can definitely notice FPS higher than 60 FPS, but you have to have a monitor that can handle it.
An old junk monitor usually were 60hz monitors, so the monitor itself would only handle 60FPS screen updates.
If your system could do 200FPS but you had a 60hz monitor, you’re basically capped at seeing 60fps. Get a better monitor, like a 240hz monitor and then you’ll notice the 200fps performance.
Idk about all that. I dont ever have these issues of maxing at, somehow, 10 FPS. Its always 55-60