WoW has to be one of the worst optimised top games

Kaurmine-area-52 · July 15, 2020, 4:41pm

I have at least 100 addons including Elvui and WeakAuras and my game runs fine, no lag or fps drops, everything is baby smooth Though I also don’t play on 10/10 In fact, I remember reading somewhere that you shouldn’t because it’ll rek any computer

Diceplease-old-blanchy · July 15, 2020, 4:41pm

Have to recommend an m.2 SSD. Loads times are like lightning. I don’t know if this helps with frame rates though.

Look for item N82E16820167462 on Newegg.

Also, WoW is still very CPU intensive. I have an i5 and it’s at 60-70% CPU usage for WoW, while my GPU is at 13%.

Another edit: A couple settings that help a lot on my rig.

Keep the liquid detail set to low. I pickup 20-30 frames by having this on low.
Triple Buffering. Keep this enabled. I lose 50 fps if this is disabled.
Probably don’t need to mention keeping vsync off. If it’s a new rig, just make sure it’s not being forced on in the 3D settings for your card.

Rhythalia-stormrage · July 15, 2020, 4:46pm

Running Level 10 at 2560x1440 . No issue for Ryzen 9 3900X, 32GB RAM and GTX 1080 Ti. Just disappointed with CPU usage. Especially on crowded areas and raids where FPS drops.

Brochetar-area-52 · July 15, 2020, 4:47pm

Wow is based on an engine that was developed almost 20 years ago. They have done alot to optimize it but speaking as a senior software developer, it is extremely hard if not impossible to fully optimize any application that is that old that has passed through as many dev hands as I’m sure WoW has - in most cases my teams will rather opt to spend the 1-3 years fully redeveloping a piece of software rather than try to optimize it. The truth is technologies and skillsets have changed so much in the last 20 years that maintaining and optimizing software as old as WoW doesn’t really make much sense usually

Kaurmine-area-52 · July 15, 2020, 4:49pm

I believe it, we shouldn’t be using any technology that was current when geocities web pages were popular

I wonder what Blizz would use if they were interested in switching the engine Because it would still have to be something that could run on potatoPCs

Jessail-terenas · July 15, 2020, 4:51pm

It would take longer than that. I can speak as a senior software engineer and devops engineer that if someone proposed that to me I’d laugh them out of the meeting. Rewriting is almost always the wrong move. They’ve been doing continual improvement in various systems, but they have to maintain compatibility for older assets currently. That would actually take longer than everything else. Add on the single thread addon/ui scripting pipeline situation and it just compounds. Fixing old content to meet modern standards would be at least two years of core game dev time alone not counting engine work and regressions.

Then you’d best stop using your computer… because it’s still the same basic technology ;p

So the core things that cause frame loss in WoW are how the server interacts with the client and Addons. Everything else isn’t that different from other engines fundamentally.

Kaurmine-area-52 · July 15, 2020, 4:53pm

lol you know what I mean Not implying we shouldn’t be using software written in C or anything crazy like that

Jessail-terenas · July 15, 2020, 4:55pm

Well to be fair… they aren’t DX11 is far newer and they are trying to get everybody on DX12. That’s all relatively recent. There are a lot of other things between the client and the server that cause slowdowns than the rendering pipe. As aforementioned the addon and UI design architecture being one of them. At the same time it’s “good enough” for most cases.

Hamstar-draktharon · July 15, 2020, 5:23pm

He said he gets it only when he has that box open and tries to move around. Not generally get lag from add-ons.

Caelin-boulderfist · July 15, 2020, 5:28pm

No, my point is that this context menu reports the the top mods according to their memory useage. The more mods are you running, the more this menu has to poll to determine this and if it updates often it will cause even more issues if you keep the menu open.

Hamstar-draktharon · July 15, 2020, 5:35pm

This is a completely separate issue then what you are complaining about. All they agreed is that they also get lag when hover overring this while moving.

Caelin-boulderfist · July 15, 2020, 5:39pm

Wait, I am not complaining about a damn thing?!? Whatever, I have better things to do them waste more time on this.

Sephrinx-blaumeux · July 15, 2020, 5:41pm

Idk man it’s pretty decently optimized imo.

I run at max settings on 2440x1660 and get around 144fps at all times, outside of raids, which is around 100 or so.

Hamstar-draktharon · July 15, 2020, 5:42pm

My bad I got you confused with the OP there for a second. Sorry about that.

Caelin-boulderfist · July 15, 2020, 5:43pm

No problem, I assumed it was something like that. Have a good day

Aiyako-moon-guard · July 15, 2020, 5:51pm

I have a potato (i7, 1070ti, no SSD) and WoW runs fine with tons of addons.

World Bosses tank everything but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they wouldn’t.

Worst case scenario I need to lower draw distance a bit which is meh.

edit: Maybe it’s Dugi? I use ElvUI and WeakAuras without much trouble.

Jonjustice-lightbringer · March 21, 2025, 2:38pm

My computer is way above average when it comes to a PC as I use it for work and gaming. One workstation has 512GB Ram and the other 256GB Ram -both have dual cpu and an RTX 24GB graphics card and 56 Cores on 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 - SSD M.2 - running on Windows 10 Ent. and W11 Ent. - and yet the loading screen still takes a while to finally load between 20 seconds to under 1 minute with minimal addons mind you. It shouldn’t take this long for the game to load at all. However, sometimes it loads pretty quickly lol. While it doesn’t really bother me much, it’s ridiculous for the load time to take this long on any high end PC system. All drivers are up to date as well. As you might imagine all of my other games and graphic design apps run smoothly, very fast and without any issues.

However, once the game is loaded it is very smooth and the game runs great with graphics set to ultra and high custom with a 4k Monitor at 144hz.

Hopefully, Blizzard will eventually upgrade the graphics on WoW, which happens to be one of my favorite games of all time, and still is. WoW never gets old and the epic music is unmatched compared to other games.

My only suggestions are: Keep your PC up to date including your graphics driver. Don’t update the OS immediately after any new update comes out though. Always wait a few weeks after any new OS updates come out, and ALWAYS flush the DNS weekly for better online connections. To flush your computer DNS, simply run via Admin on CMD app - type: ipconfig/flushdns

Soon after, you will see a message saying: Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

This keeps your online connections fresh, so I recommend for everyone to do it at least once a week on their PC. Happy Gaming all! - JJ -