Played SW, FF14 and Wow BfA on an external ssd and all ran fine with no FPS dropped. Now in SL wow is only one that plays like crap and drops FPS. What changed in SL - don’t know but something did that made wow unplayable and intolerable. It seems like wow and blizzard changed something that are catering to more high high end GPU since SL. This might cause a lot of problems and people to potentially quit if nothing is improved alienating lots of players.
I have tested a 3.1usb 240ssd thumb drive setup. I can say it is indeed 75% slower than my SSD 240 sata3 inside.
USB one, Pushes 100% draw and still puts the a drain on my sata3 at about 45%.
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BfA on an external ssd and all ran fine with no FPS dropped. Now in SL…
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Broomba,
We can’t really take feedback on the game engine here in Technical support, but we do typically increase our system requirements with every patch. What have you tried to troubleshoot your FPS so far? Have you checked to see if you meet the system requirements?
If you meet the requirements, what are the exact FPS drops you’re having? We’ll also need a copy of your DXDiag. You can create a copy of your DxDiag using these instructions. Once you have that made, open the file. Copy the code below, then copy/paste everything from that DXDiag file between the rows of tilde (~) marks where it says “DXDiag goes here.”
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DXDiag goes here
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If the file’s too large to submit, you can upload it to a file hosting site like pastebin and post the link in the code above instead.
Classic and TBC classic: run fine and smooth with no FPS both with graphics up to setting 5 recommended and same addons as Retail. Both classic and tbc are installed the same way on the same pc as retail.
I am thinking graphically speaking, classic and tbc are better optimized or something different than SL graphically. Something was tweaked from bfa to SL that makes SL just a big lag fest when a lot of shimmering lights and stuff go off at once. Never experienced this much even on a 60 MHz monitor and my new 144 MHz
Monitor.
I even tried SL on my C drive both at setting 1-5 with and with no addons: same problems since SL
Broomba,
I unfortuantely can’t really help you unless you provide the requested information. That said, there are SIGNIFICANT differences in the game between WoW Classic, Burning Crusade Classic, and Shadowlands. For an example of this, look no further than the sheer difference in the model details for your characters. Every expansion, things have improved in terms of quality of particle effects, number of polygons, etc. You’ll note that the system requirements for WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic are much lower:
This is not simply a matter of optimization. The level of detail in modern builds of wow is leaps and bounds higher than the older versions of the game. Naturally you will have worse performance, especially if you are on older hardware.
Again, does your hardware meet the shadowlands system requirements I posted above? if not, there’s unfortunately not much we can do here. If so, we’re happy to see if we can help - just provide all the info I requested previously.
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Based on what I see online, that should have sufficient hardware, but just to be sure let’s get that DXDiag. Here’s the instructions I sent to send a DXDiag. This file helps us see what your PC is actually doing, check your drivers, etc.
I installed WOW on my C drive, installed the addons i used and tried it out. Talk about LAGGING OUT and Stuttering in new area, Torghast and other areas of WOW including a very slow loading and loggin in for characters. Graphic settings to 1 with everything disabled, low, or none on settings. DX 12 set and other settings that i appear would make gameplay better or improve – but nope.
Did you test without the addons first? Perhaps they are the cause of the issue. Also, check out the end of your Dxdiag in the error reporting. Some of the apps you’re using are reporting errors in the background.
YES! I played before installing addons on C drive
Broomba,
I don’t see any clear reason why you should be having this error, especially on your C:\ drive since that’s internal. I’d expect some longer load times since WoW Shadowlands does recommend putting the game on an SSD. Your external drive is a slow exFAT formatted drive however, so I would not suggest that you put the game on that drive at ALL.
You mentioned you installed addons after you installed the game. Can you try temporarily uninstalling all addon managers (Overwolf, Tukui Client, Raider.io, TSM app, etc) and resetting your UI? Even if you tested without addons, those programs I mentioned can sync data to your game folders, so the full reset is needed to double check things. If that works, you may just need to manually reinstall the latest version of your addons one by one and see which one is breaking it.
If that doesn’t work it’s likely overheating or something like that, since Shadowlands is way more CPU intense than the older games. We can test for that. Grab hwmonitor and install it. Then, launch hwmonitor and play a game until it crashes. Once it does, check the “max” column of your test for CPU/GPU overheating. If those are getting too hot, clean the PC and take it to a PC tech if that doesn’t fix the overheating - that’d probably mean some of the heat hardware needs maintenance or replacement.
If you don’t see anything, let’s snag some screenshots:
- Maximize the HWMonitor window and expand all the nodes on the left
- Scroll all the way up
- Take a screenshot with the Print Screen (prtscn) key
- Open up the program Paint and press ctrl+v to paste in the test
- Crop the screen if you want to only show the test, then save it as Test1.JPG
- Scroll all the way down, then repeat steps 3-5. Save this as Test2.JPG
- Upload them somewhere like imgur and link us to the results. We’ll use those to look for more options.
If you have link errors, copy the code below, then copy/paste your link between two ` marks, it’ll break the link and let you post it. You can just copy paste everything in the box below and replace “Link goes here” with your link.
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Link goes here
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When I installed wow on the C drive, there was no addons. Loaded up fine and then acted up when I entered SL trying to finish up new area and going to Aredenwald, but fps dropped.
Broomba,
There was a lot more to my reply than what you responded to. Please re read the entire post and provide the requested information if it doesn’t help. You’ll want to take note of the information I mentioned about what Addon Managers can do and why just starting without addons isn’t necessarily enough.
Installing wow on C drive in windows folders and then try it again with no addons and run the HWMonitor and take screen shots. Ran HWMonitor before now and all temperatures were below 65. Dazzled and frustrated. None of my other games since buying this pc doesnt do this – on both C drive and external drive – not one problem – smooth as butter.
Hope this helps! It doesnt lock up, crashes or locks up, just stutters, lags, delay in game play and movement.
These were screen shotted when i running and playing wow – nothing else running but wow and the hwmonitor – no add on – setting at 5 default after installing on C drive in main folder on C
Okay perfect, this is what I was curious about. Great info, thanks!
Checking this out, it looks like your GPU is BARELY being used. If you look at the second screenshot you sent in near the bottom, you’ll see that your GPU was only using 2% of its power. Your CPU’s also not being maxed out, and neither are overheating, so we know it’s not a CPU throttling or thermal issue.
This doesn’t particularly make a lot of sense since you’re on medium settings, to be honest. I’d start by seeing if reinstalling your graphics drivers helps. Something may have been corrupted. To do that:
- Download, but do not install the most recent driver for your graphics card from Nvidia
- Download Display Driver Uninstaller from The Wagnard Mobile Forum (Click Official Download Here near the bottom of Wagnard’s first post. It will automatically download)
- Run the Display Driver Uninstaller file you downloaded and extract it to desktop
- On your desktop, click Display Driver Uninstaller and run it. Do not run in safe mode.
- Click Clean and Restart
- After restart, install the driver that we downloaded above in step 1.
When you do the reinstall, use the custom installation option and install just the Graphics Driver and PhysX driver if you can. After you finish it, reset the game settings to pick up the changes and retest.
If it doesn’t work, I would assume something else is blocking us from accessing your graphics card. I’d disable background programs and temporarily uninstall security to see if something else on your PC is fighting us.
Let me know how all that goes.
Problem is I cant do the DDU for my GPU since its tied to my MB. I tried to do that step each and every time a new driver update is for Nvidia. If I can work around this, that would be great. My downloads for drivers for GPU is through nvidia geforce experience and its updated to current driver released in the last 2-3 days.
As for security - i use windows and microsoft – nothing fancy
Broomba,
DDU should still be usable even in this case. Nvidia drivers are separate from the drivers you’d get for any build in graphics card on your CPU.
I can’t support any errors you have that program much specifically since it’s not ours, but basically we need to try to get a clean install of the Nvidia Drivers and purge everything. There IS a clean install option if you manually download the drivers from Nvidia, but it doesn’t always get things done. You can try just getting the drivers from nvidia, using the custom installation, choosing “Clean Install” with the custom installation, and hope that works, but I can’t make any guarantees. Still, it’s worth a shot. Give that a try and then test the other steps I sent in the last reply if it doesn’t work.
Uninstalled using ddu and now waiting to install latest driver custom option