I posted some of this in the stuttering thread over in tech support, but I felt this needed to be posted here as well since this is an actual reproducible bug, at least on this system. It appears in pretty much every version of WoW and even in other games, depending on the game. This is a Microsoft issue, so maybe if more people see this, more people can report it to Microsoft, so they can hopefully fix it on their end.
- Windows 11 22H2 fully up to date
- Memory integrity ON (Core isolation)
- TPM ON
- Secure boot ON
- AMD RX 6600 using 22.11.2 drivers and a profile to prevent any aggressive downclocking, but that isn’t overclocked or undervolted. Just keeps the clocks at max.
- i3-10100
- Power plan set to max performance
- 32GB ram
- WoW installed on a SATA3 SSD
- No external programs running other than RTSS
- No addons
- Fully reset client using
/console cvar_default- WoW set to slider 10 with distance sliders all at 8
- Vsync ON
- Raytracing set to fair
- DX12
- AMD freesync premium ON
Steps to replicate:
- Restart PC (ensures the Windows defender counters are going)
- Open Bnet
- Launch WoW
- Go to a graphically intensive area that will push your GPU usage and saturate the four threads that WoW will use (in my case, 50% usage, or 4T, since this CPU has 8T). Try a stable area with a lot of NPCs or players(Not an area like the Org AH with tons of people constantly coming and going, you’re looking to keep the number of things on the screen consistent). In my test here, it was a bunch of NPCs playing their training animations, in a zone with a lot going on visually.
- Observe with a frame time monitor like RTSS and notice spikes
- Open Throttlestop
- Go into the options
- Ensure that “Windows Defender Boost” is checked on the right column
- Press okay
- Press turn on
- Wait a second
- Press turn off
- You can close TS and this operation doesn’t have to be performed again until you restart the PC
- Go back into WoW
- Observe the frametime graph not having the constant spikes and dips
- You can also repeat the whole test again, as in restarting your PC, but without the “Windows Defender Boost” option checked and notice that the spikes don’t go away; to ensure it wasn’t just tweaking some CPU clock profile or something.
Here is the before:
https://imgur.com/R8IyVlz
Here is the after:
https://imgur.com/1AUSAet
As far as I know, this is mostly just an Intel related issue and doesn’t affect AMD CPUs(they have their own issues with fTPM if your motherboard’s bios is out of date and doesn’t contain the fix). I’m not sure what generations of Intel CPUs it affects, but I know it affects the 10th generation for sure.
Here are some articles talking about the counters that are apparently still relevant today:
https://www.techpowerup.com/295877/windows-defender-can-significantly-impact-intel-cpu-performance-we-have-the-fix
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/337620-new-utility-fixes-windows-defender-hogging-cpu-time-on-intel-cpus
I know that WoW has been finding itself pretty CPU bottlenecked lately, so that’s why this counters issue becomes a problem and becomes noticible. That’s also why it doesn’t show up in all games, if they don’t push the CPU enough, but then in some games it does.