I’ve been having some serious trouble playing WoW for the past few days since installing my GPU (GTX 1060 3gb) (I previously had AMD Radeon Vega 8 integrated graphics). I’ve done everything that’s been suggested to me so far on Reddit in terms of troubleshooting my computer; I have my GPU directly connected to my monitor through both HDMI and DVI, I’ve installed the correct NVIDIA drivers through GeForce Experience as well as manually downloading them from the website and they are all up-to-date, I’ve used DDU to uninstall the integrated drivers, and I’ve updated my BIOS. I don’t have many other games installed on my computer so I can’t check if it is a WoW-specific problem but I’m beginning to suspect it might be.
When running a GPU test (Heaven Unigine) I average around 50-60 FPS on the maximum settings possible, but in WoW I experience severe stuttering and 3-5 FPS when moving at times (especially in major cities like Stormwind), the game takes a very long time (10+ minutes) from the character select screen to actually entering into the world, and I am playing on the lowest settings possible. I have all addons disabled and I’ve done all of the troubleshooting for WoW that is suggested on Battle.net, I have disabled V-Sync, set the Graphics API to DirectX 11, and selected the ideal graphics card in the WoW system settings.
I’d greatly appreciate any help here as I’m really all out of ideas otherwise.
Severe stuttering is likely an effect of some applications conflicting - do you have any overlay active while playing WoW? (Discord, benchmarking overlays etc?) and then when WoW is stuttering check Windows task manager if there is some app or process that is trying to use a lot of CPU (there were cases where things like Windows wallpaper rotator went crazy and wanted all of the CPU).
And if there are no clear indicators what is happening - run “Userbenchmark” benchmark before running WoW and then while the game is running and having problems alt-tab and run it again. Post both result URLs here using preformatted text.
When playing WoW I only have Task Manager and Voice Meeter open. My CPU usage remains below 30% but my disk usage goes all the way to 100%, the main culprit being World of Warcraft fluctuating between 2-6 MB/s. Everything else remains below 0.5 MB/s most of the time, only ‘System’ and ‘NVIDIA’-related processes exceeding it occasionally. WoW was never this slow until I installed the GTX 1060 3gb graphics card.
This is it with WoW running and experiencing stuttering/low fps. It does say “incomplete” for Gaming, Desktop, and Workstation, due to “high background CPU”, so not totally sure if I did this correctly.
The HDD seems to be hit quite heavily by this. It could be some leftover addon files (WTF folder) that should be cleared or WoW is trying to do something weird with it assets.
The top part is pointless, the component percentiles is where troubleshooting happens (and WoW is running so it sees that CPU utilization).
With your CPU only being a 4 core/thread variant with WOW running CPU usage should be well over 70%. Low CPU but maxed HD usage makes me think your system is paging due to low memory. While I know benchmarks don’t always report system info correctly:
Both of those are reporting only 1 4GB stick. If your system really does have 2 then you might want to reseat them since you may have accidentally bumped one loose while installing the GFX card.
And if you really do have your monitor connected with DVI and HDMI, unplug one of them.
Also make sure the ram sticks are in the right slots. Check your motherboard’s manual, but if your board has four slots, almost every board will need them installed in either odds or evens, as in 1/3 or 2/4.
You are an absolute legend, this seems to have been the problem. My brother was showing me how to install RAM when we were putting in my GPU and he must not have put it back in correctly. Thank you so much.
