Hey there.
So ive been watching HWMonitor to try and find out the bottle neck in my system. In D4 i can clear see where the GPU spikes to 100 and those you get dips stutters etc.
Now for WoW Im just lost. The CPU utilization is never over 54 and GPU maybe 40…all while in Dornogal your stting at 60 fps or 70 if i go stand at a wall. Now in dungeons ive seen DIPS down to 30-40 fps and neither CPU or GPU are stressed. The CPU is a 12700k and GPU A 3080 ti running on a Alienware 3440X1440 monitor.
Anyone out there understand why the PC cant push the game even when its HW is not under any load? Thoughts?
The bulk of WoW’s workload is mostly a single threaded (it will use a few more threads for some of the async workloads and other parts of the engine like sound). It’s basically always under a CPU bottleneck and there isn’t much that can be done to multithread it more, without having to rewrite half of the engine for it.
So let’s say WoW is loading ~4 threads and you have a 20 thread CPU, then you’d likely see HW monitors reporting something like 20% utilization. Note that if you look at the task manager graph of CPU threads, you’ll see activity on a bunch of threads, but that’s just the Windows scheduler min/maxing things and spreading chunks of the threads around to load level.
So i can look at all the cores instead of looking at just the utilization piece. Am i just looking for 1 core to basically be maxed and that would be the bottleneck?
Load leveling doesn’t really work that way, but you will likely see one thread constantly looking a bit higher than the others. You can have a single threaded task that ends up having chunks of the work spread out over all the cores, but it’s still a single threaded task and it doesn’t really speed much up and is mostly just to keep heat equalized on the die. Also keep in mind that some threads are likely going to be hyperthreads, which aren’t real cores and are usually worth ~10-20% of a real core’s worth in real world workloads, and if it’s a newer CPU, some will be e-cores which are lower power cores with some caveats.
Seeing how you’re on a 12700k, you likely wouldn’t see much of a difference in performance even if you upgraded all the way up to a 14900k. Like maybe 15% more fps tops and maybe a small bump up in 1% lows.
So throwing a 5080 or 5070 ti in here will do nothing. Id be better served to just build a 9800X3D and Xfer my 3080ti into that box. At least for wow lol.
Pretty much. Even on with my 7900xt, I noticed that doing the MoP intro(was messing around on an alt on retail timewalk leveling) with maxed out settings, I was getting actual frame rate drops below the 80fps that I cap to. My CPU is a 13600kf and it’s undervolted so that it never runs into thermal throttling even under long max load stress tests. But that MoP intro area has an whole lot going on and with the long draw distances, I’m sure draw calls were eating up a ton of frame time.
Also, there’s very little gain in going for a top model CPU for games like WoW. Like I said, you’ll likely see very little gain, but if you do anything like rendering, they’re great.
I have seen people just sit at 100 fps and more in dornogal with 9800X3D and the AMD 7900XTX i think or something like that. Mindblowing the AMD CPU is that good. Sorry im old and i grew up building PCs and AMD were always hot garbage. How times change.
Oh I normally sit in the 100+ range most of the time, but sometimes there are scenes that have just a hair too much going on and you’ll see the effects of extra heavy CPU bottlenecks. But like I said, I usually just cap to 80fps since it’s more than enough for an MMO and it almost never budges from there. When it does, it’s enough to make me raise an eyebrow and remember, like seeing the MoP alliance intro quest from over a decade ago bring my FPS down like that.