Why do they say that WoW is CPU Heavy and GPU is not heavy. My CPU Load is saying it is 15-25% and GPU Load is at 55-60%. To me it is saying that the GPU is heavy compared to the CPU
System
AMD Ryzen 7 2700x
MSI 1080
DDR4 3000 - 32gb
I went from my 4 year old i7-6700K to Intel’s top notch i9-9900K, not only did my load times improve, but so did my frames per second.
See, the processor has to work on basically everything you see in the game, objects, NPC’s, other players, mechanics, scripts, phasing, you name it, although beautiful in many areas, WoW is not as graphically intensive on the level of say, Crysis 3 or Battlefield V, so as a result your CPU does more work than the GPU.
Not widely known either is that Patch 8.1 FINALLY brought multi-core optimizations to the game, which has been needed for a decade and some.
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Ok then why is my CPU Load lower than my GPU. And i was in Boralus when it took these measurements
If the game were GPU limited you wouldnt be stuck at 25-50% GPU utilization, it’d be at 100% and your fps would be higher. The engine is literally unable to utilize your CPU fully to draw more frames than it is. The GPU is instructed by the CPU.
WoW is very clearly a CPU bound game.
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They’ve made improvements in 8.0 and on to offload more of the load to your GPU as well as use multiple cores on your CPU. it could still be better though.
Yea like Sorelai said they changed it up quite a but but it used to use just one core? If I remember correct, so that was the problem! It was only using a small fraction of what your computer can output and if the cpu cant keep up then the gpu cant be used to its full potential either.
The CPU load is spread out over 8 cores on your processor. Go to task manager and view your CPU cores at work while in game, alt-tab at intensive moments and you’ll see the graphs move about.
Your CPU load isn’t higher because you are likely looking at total load across all cores. Even with multi-core optimizations, no game uses 100% of all cores. I’d bet one or two of your cores are at a much higher usage %.
If you’d like to see how the game isn’t GPU limited, simply go somewhere with high draw distance and mess with AA settings. Those are entirely GPU driven, but I’d bet you won’'t see much difference in FPS between them. I know I can stand at the great seal and look over zuldazar on 10 settings and get the same fps with SSAA on and off, because the GPU is basically idle.
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I have a 1080 and I can definitely push my 7700k to 100% with modern AAA titles.
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Also, WoW’s load is spread out over 8 cores but it’s still only utilizing ~44% of my CPU and 52% of my GPU. I literally have to run the game at 4k if I want to come close to 100% GPU utilization.
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World of Warcraft runs fine on my Pentium 4.