WoW runs at 8 FPS when in focus, smooth frames when out of focus

My FPS drops to around 8 when the window is in focus, but if I focus another window, WoW jumps to a normal framerate. This issue wasn’t happening when I played a few weeks ago, so I’m not sure if it’s a Windows update, a game update, or something else.

I’ve already tried disabling all my addons, which raised it from the 5 fps the game ran at before, and I haven’t found any sort of Battle.net overlay to disable.

I scrolled over the game menu button to check if ping was an issue for some reason, and also noticed that there’s a downloading percent progress line. From top to bottom, the screenshot I grabbed shows

Game Menu (Escape)

Latency:
15 ms (home)
14 ms (world)

Framerate: 8 fps

Bandwidth 0 Mbps

Download 0 % complete

Could that download be causing the problem? And what could I do to fix that?

Thanks in advance!

(Accidentally almost included my account information in the screenshot and it was still showing up in the edit of the post, so I deleted it and double-posted)

Can you check your WoW settings to make sure the sliders for foreground and background aren’t reversed? Like you might have foreground set to 8(the minimum) and your background limit might be set to max or might not be on at all.

The options are at the very bottom of the graphics settings page:
https://imgur.com/S4bN60O

You can also force them to change, in case there’s some weird settings issues, by disabling them, pressing okay, then go back into the settings and renable them. Might force it to correct any bugged settings saved in the config.wtf file. Test this out and let me know if it works.

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This is what I’m dealing with, I feel like I’ve literally tried everything even rolling back my drivers, cleaning out everything and still no change. I also followed the reddit and the last answer.

Any luck?

When installing the drivers, are you also installing Geforce Experience? This has been an issue in the past with it. It can automatically detect games and change their settings in the config files, so with WoW, it can change the config.wtf file.

Sorry for the silence, I didn’t get notifications of any replies.

This fixed the issue. Somehow foreground got lowered to 0 fps, not even sure how that happened.

Thanks for the tip!

3 Likes

You’re welcome, glad it turned out to be a simple fix! Do you have Geforce Experience installed? It has caused this issue for others in the past since it can be set to automatically apply “optimal settings” for games. It then goes through and edits the configuration files for the games like WoW’s config.wtf file. So if GFE is setting the variables wrong, it could potentially happen again.

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Pawgwalker’s suggestion worked.

Somehow max foreground fps got set to 0.

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