Hello all. I am a IT illiterate wow player and was wondering if getting a SSD will make much of a difference. The game has worked fine for me, sure load screens are a bit slow, but until this morning I was happily playing the game. I logged on, noticed the driver update thing and started updating my drivers. I went in to poke around a bit and the game was fine. I then finished the update, and the game is flat out unplayable. 7-10 fps everywhere. Boralus 10fps. Dalaran 10fps. Class hall, out questing, etc. Low settings so the game looks like it did in 2004, 10 fps I simply won’t play with the stuttering as is.
My laptop was $2k (Australian so that is pretty high end, but not super computer level like 2k would be in the US) 2 years ago. Not 100% sure of the specs, but my graphics card is a Geforce GTX 1050 and processor is i7-7700HQ @ 2.8GHZ according to my device manager. Looks to be well above min specs for shadowlands. My impression of the SSD issue was that it was likely to just be crappy load times but wouldn’t make the game unplayable. My laptop has about a 120gig SSD, but there is stuff I can’t move off and it will be almost impossible to fit wow in and I will constantly be looking to tidy up folders just to keep it on. I am obviously resigned to the fact that I will need a SSD (have look at external ssds) but dont want to pull the trigger just yet. Anyone else having similar problems or think it might be more the driver?
Edit - ok problem 1 fixed
So -is it a good idea to get a external SSD over internal? I have kind of been thinking about getting one for a while due to large file transfers for work (i.e several gig). An external would mean I wouldn’t have to crack the thing open and would also serve dual purposes.
CPU is plenty, GPU isn’t stellar but should be getting better framerates. If I had to guess I’d say your graphics drivers or Windows install is screwed up somehow.
That processor is fairly slow for this game. Also the game is Poorly optimized during the dlc days. Check in again on the weekend when some of the dust settles. However the cpu you have is fairly old now and was fairly slow when it was released as its locked to a slow clock speed. Its good for document processing but with the amount of things that you need a cpu to render in an open world game that is being updated by the minute its probably getting overwhelmed.
Reducing spell effects and animations could help. Closing other programs that take up bandwidth and increasing your laptop power consumption to max might help also.
People that go to SSD’s from hard drives will never go back. Never. The performance difference is just night and day. Game load times are very quick with SSD’s over conventional hard drives. They will not, however, improve frame rates at all.
Replacing the drive in it with a bigger one (if desired) is pretty easy if the disk is easily accessible. There’s free software out there that will clone from the old disk to the new one.
It is like going from a jalopy that is lucky to break 40mph with the pedal to the floor with a tail wind to a porsche 911. People just don’t tolerate the speed decrease. The nicer mid-range ones are starting to do away with SATA SSDs and move to M.2 NVME drives because they are even smaller and better performing.
It should make a difference but you shouldn’t be forced to get one.
I found the problem to the load screens. Set your graphics options for:
View Distance
Environment Detail
Set them both to as low as they can be. Hearth into Dalaran, watch how fast it goes. Then fly up into the air and slide those things back up. Watch the world SLOWLY start popping in around you. By the time it finishes? That’s when your load screen ends.
The thing is, Blizzard decides to just keep you trapped in a load screen until the entire island is rendered even though you’re hearthing to Dalaran. A city and location where you can’t see the island… until you start flying above it.
Mine has one a 1tb sata ssd and 2 m2 NVME 500gb one for OS and one for wow. The sata was a cheaper mid range Samsung for all my other games due to budgets
In summary the game is more than capable of giving us faster load screens at the cost of distant objects MILES AND MILES AWAY being loaded in more slowly. But they’d rather keep you frozen in a loadscreen. Personally I’d rather just be able to move freely and let the distant objects load in more slowly but hey I guess I have to do it blizzard’s way or get an SSD.
That was my next question - is external similar to internal - I read something about ‘make sure you get USB 3.1 drives’. Will all SSDs work on my laptop?
Laptop picked out for dear old mom a couple months back has two M.2 slots and a SATA slot, which I filled with her old SSD in the middle of the night unseen and unheard.
The razor blade 15 I bought back in June has two M.2 slots. At this point probably shouldn’t have bought it but my laptop of nearly 10 years had the power brick die and it wasn’t worth replacing.