Low Framerates In World Of Warcraft (GTX 1080)

[imnova]

Hello!

Ever since upgrading to the GTX 1080, I have been experiencing a lot of framerate issues in Legion. In Suramar, for example, at 1080p with the 10 preset (except for view distance, which was set to 7), I was getting anywhere from 50 to 70 frames per second. I've tried everything (Changing power management to performance in control panel, changing power to prefer maximum performance in NVidia Control Panel, Disabling DSR, running DDU and completely reinstalling my drivers, uninstalling GeForce Experience, and doing a fresh re-install of the game with no addons). This has lead me absolutely nowhere. Does anyone know what's going on? Here are my specs:

Intel Core i7-4790k (Overclocked to 4.2GHz)
16GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600
EVGA GTX 1080 FTW Gaming ACX 3.0
Corsair HX650 PSU
MSI Z97 Gaming 7 Mobo
Intel 730 SSD (240GB)
WD Blue 2TB HDD (7200RPM)

I don't believe that bottlenecking is the issue, but I'm open to any sort of possible solution.

[Sheperd]

As far as I am aware the only solution to your problem is to turn down your settings. WoW is a rather old game using a patchwork engine that at the higher end settings just will not run well. I've seen many post exactly like yours in the past and pretty much all solutions are to turn down the settings.

[potis]

There is nothing wrong with your PC its how WoW works.

1)Old engine so mostly single threaded.

2)Suramar has tons of things, just because the game is "old" doesnt mean you are supposed to have 300 FPS in such an intensive area.

3)They keep updating the graphics in terms of polygon count, Suramar has trillions probably so the performance is expected.

Go to a vanilla area to understand my point.

The fact that you add View Distance so far doesnt help also.

Just because WoW is old doesnt mean its supposed to have 1000 FPS.

Suramar has way too many Shadows, way too many polygons, Shadows + AA = Catastrophic.

[Danuru]

Suramar is probably one of the most taxing areas in, if not the most. Especially if you go into the city. I have a GTX 1060 card and in some of the older or less busy areas, I can get to nearly 200 fps. But it'll drop to around 50ish in Suramar.

[Deleted]

As the others have said, just because Wow is a good few years old, it doesn't mean it has not had a few upgrades here and there. Hence the requirements going up each time a new expansion comes out. You will probably be best maybe turning down shadows a notch or two, and again with water effects. You have a great PC setup, the game just cant utilise that power.

[imnova]

Ah, I see. I guess it's understandable seeing as the engine hasn't really been changed since 2004 other than adding support for DX11 as well as graphical upgrades each expansion. I dropped my view distance down to around 5 everywhere else and around 3 in Suramar and it seems to mitigate the drops in FPS I've been getting. My personal preference for games like WoW, Overwatch, CSGO, etc. is to play them at at least 100 fps, as my monitor supports it, so I don't particularly mind the drop in quality, just a little curious as to why I have to resort to that. Thanks to everyone who responded!

[Deleted]

Hello!
Intel Core i7-4790k (Overclocked to 4.2GHz)

overclocked ehh ? out of the box is 4.4ghz not that those 200mhz are going to fix anything, but if u OC ur cpu to 4.6-4.8 depending on ur luck u might get probably 5-10 fps increase

[Kagthul]

Ah, I see. I guess it's understandable seeing as the engine hasn't really been changed since 2004 other than adding support for DX11 as well as graphical upgrades each expansion. I dropped my view distance down to around 5 everywhere else and around 3 in Suramar and it seems to mitigate the drops in FPS I've been getting. My personal preference for games like WoW, Overwatch, CSGO, etc. is to play them at at least 100 fps, as my monitor supports it, so I don't particularly mind the drop in quality, just a little curious as to why I have to resort to that. Thanks to everyone who responded!

The answer to your question has nothing to do with the age of WoW's engine and everything to do with Draw Calls.

Draw Calls have to be issued by the CPU, before the GPU can start rendering a frame. Every object on the screen requires a draw call. Ergo, the further the draw distance, the more draw calls. In crowded areas, this can geometrically increase. (And by every object, i mean EVERY object, right down to individual spell particles and effects).

Suramar (and parts of Val'Sharah) have a BRUTAL amount of stuff going on, particularly if you have Shadows, Lighting Quality, and Water Quality turned up (those add Draw Calls geometrically, as every object now has more draw calls assosicated with it like shadows, etc).

Without DX12 or Vulkan, Draw Calls can only be issued by a single CPU thread. To complicate this issue (I.E. "Why doesn't Blizzard just add DX12 support, derp derp?!) because WoW is a secure client-server application, it has to receive information about what objects are on your screen, outside of the basic world geometry from the server.... so in WoWs case (and almost every other MMO that uses a similar secure connection style) it would STILL be single-thread limited as the thread doing the send/receive on object placement can still only be one thread, without a total rewrite of the entire networking back-end of WoW - so even if Draw Calls could be shuffled off to multiple threads, those threads would sit idle while the main IO thread figured out what it has received from the server and then pass those draw calls to the various threads.

TLDR is, until there is a MASSIVE rewrite of neworking code, even DX12/Vulkan wont produce massive results in alleviating this issue. WoW is, and will continue to be for some time, EXTREMELY single-thread CPU bound. Your 1080 Ti is sitting idle more than half the time, waiting for work from the CPU.

Its not just a WoW problem, either - its endemic to MMOs. Some get around it by massively phasing (ES Online) to keep the number of players in an area low, some get around it by having more of the calculations done on your client side (Wildstar) - but that can cause rubberbanding and positional issues - and some get around it by just having less players around, period - FF14 - where party size is 4 and RAID size is 8 - specifically to keep performance up.

- - - Updated - - -

overclocked ehh ? out of the box is 4.4ghz not that those 200mhz are going to fix anything, but if u OC ur cpu to 4.6-4.8 depending on ur luck u might get probably 5-10 fps increase

4790K is 4.0 out of the box, with single-core Turbo to 4.4 (its what i have in my rig). Setting it to 4.2 and not disabling Turbo would mean 4.2/4.6

Personally, i just OCed mine to 4.5 and disabled turbo. I can get it to 4.7 but voltage begins to become an issue and the performance gains were minimal.

[Deleted]

it has to receive information about what objects are on your screen, outside of the basic world geometry

It has to receive information about what entities are located within your vicinity - but thats not really whats taxing performance (suramar especially) - but rather its the extremely high density of objects like lightposts, banners, foilage, and so on. You'll note performance doesn't improve much even during LD.

Like all games, once the client has been told an object exists - it will permanently exist until the server explicitly says the opposite. No updates on an object doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it simply means its state hasn't changed.
Re-evaluation of what a player should and should not see is only done once per second or so. (less frequenty under server stress)

[anon5123]

Turn down Shadow Quality. It's the biggest FPS-eater. Turning down anti-aliasing can also help...in my experiences, it doesn't really do much anyways, unless you zoom way in and look super close at things. Which you won't be doing anyway!

I'm running a GTX 970 and I'm constantly fps-capped everywhere, so long as there aren't like 30+ people onscreen.

Even so, why exactly do you need to get more than 60fps? Unless you have a special monitor, anything above 60 cannot be displayed.

[Schattenlied]

Not sure refresh over 60 is all that special these days... the cost isn't what it was a few years ago.

It's also highly unnecessary unless you actually need the frame time reactions that higher FPS gives you... 60 for an MMO is plenty, this isn't Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat/Injustice/yourfavoritefightinggamehere or CS:GO where millisecond delays in reaction can be the difference between life and death.


As to the OP WoW is heavily CPU bound because the engine was made during a time when almost everyone still had single core CPUs, until the engine is properly updated (or replaced entirely) the 1080 was a waste of money for WoW... So... I hope you have other games to make use of it on, if not, you might consider returning it and getting a 1060 or an RX580... Unless you're running 4k (and probly even then), both of those cards are far more appropriate for what WoW can actually deliver with it's CPU constraints... maybe a 1070 if you want a bit more power than that.

[Kagthul]

Not sure refresh over 60 is all that special these days... the cost isn't what it was a few years ago.

About half the people playing games still aren't even on 1080p.

Monitors above 1080p are single-digit percentages.

High Refresh Rate monitors are even a lower percentage of that percentage.

[ShmooDude]

I had to update the drivers. Was having like 10-20 fps when I usually had 50+. Try that.

[Baelic]

I love how everyone is like "WoW uses an old engine" but it uses a Differed rendering Engine... which is rather new.

Yes, WoW is poorly optimized for todays hardware. But to suggest that the engine is "old" is asinine.

[DarkBlade6]

except for view distance, which was set to 7

How about Environment detail and Ground Clutter ?! They are as demanding as View distance if not more, especially in the open world. I have view distance set to 9 and the other two at 6. With these settings, you can still see pretty damn far with nice high FPS. I get between 80-120fps (I have set FPS max to 120) in suramar with my sig rig.

[Baelic]

How about Environment detail and Ground Clutter ?! They are as demanding as View distance if not more, especially in the open world. I have view distance set to 9 and the other two at 6. With these settings, you can still see pretty damn far with nice nice FPS. I get between 80-120fps (I have set FPS max to 120) in suramar with my sig rig.

Another tip to add, drop the Shadow quality down one, the highest setting yields absolutely no benefit and just hurts performance.

[dunnommolol]

I only have a 4gb gtx970 with i5 and 32gb of ram. WOW doesn't touch the sides of my computers capabilities but i also noticed some sluggishness. I found enabling vsync really helped. So my frames are locked to 60 but that smoothed everything out alot. I run everything at ultra. Only 1080 res. I have long draw distance but i toned down ground clutter and shadows because i dont really notice them during play.

As a side note, on fights like scorp with many many adds, if you use enemy/friendly/both unit nameplates turn them off for those encounters. Found that a huge burden.

[Fahrenheit]

Suramar city with maxed settings at 1080, 1440 ultra wide, or 4K, even with a GTX1080 or 1080ti is still going to suffer from significant frame drops. It's easily the most taxing zone in all of WoW.