Trying to unserstand some performance issues

[Master Guns]

Trying to understand some performance issues. During single player games I am getting astounding fps (Shadow of Mordor 90-100 fps on full Ultra, 120 FPS on a heavily modded and visually enhanced Skyrim) but when playing WoW I dip into 50's sometimes just in my garrison..this makes no sense. My average FPS in zones questing is around 75-100, but even that seems low considering what a powerful rig I have. Here are my specs:

EVGA GTX 970 4GB Superclocked
Watercooled (H80i) Quad Core i5 OC'd @ 4.2GHz
8GB DDR3 1866 RAM

Yet I see people boasting of 150 fps at all times in WoW with much lesser hardware? What is the issue? How am I getting such high FPS in single player games yet such low in WoW when others say they double my FPS? My hardware seems pretty solid.

[chazus]

Yet I see people boasting of 150 fps at all times in WoW with much lesser hardware? What is the issue? How am I getting such high FPS in single player games yet such low in WoW when others say they double my FPS? My hardware seems pretty solid.

It's called lying. Or simply giving you BS results to make them look cool. Or not understanding the request.

My system is marginally better than yours (4.5ghz), and I get about 120-150fps in many places (When I turn max frames off). But not in raids, or highly populated areas.

Your results are pretty normal. Single player games, especially the ones you notes, are GPU bound. Having a better GPU = better frames. Wow is largely CPU bound still.

Nothing is wrong and your result are normal. Getting a better system or fixing 'something' won't help.

[Master Guns]

Are your settings full ultra? Nothing turned down at all? I can get 120 FPS sometimes in various questing zones, but it's rare. It's usually 90-110.

[Arbiter]

Chazus is right, anyone claiming that kind of fps in raids and other crouded/intensive areas is completely bullshit.

10man raids can bring you higher fps, but what you have is fine. I'm sitting at about ~60-70 fps in my Garrison atm with SLI GTX 770 Classified and a 2500k@4.2Ghz and it'll dip to ~50 quite often. There's a lot going on in Garrisons with NPCs and I'd like to believe the phasing has a lot to do with it. There's a phased zone for each player in the exact same spot. As soon as I leave my garrison into Frostfire Ridge I get ~100fps.

WoW only takes advantage of 2 cores so the other ones just sit there doing nothing unless you are multitasking while the game is also quite CPU intensive in high populated areas. My GPUs never hit max load in WoW, only the 2 CPU cores that power it.

[Master Guns]

Yeah as soon as I step into Shadowmoon valley I'm at about 90-100 FPS. I guess I'm average then. Thanks guys

[Zerroth]

My i7 3770k @4.5ghz gets about 70-80fps in Garrisons with it unlocked and all max. Maybe the 2 core thing is just BS.

Also that's with a GTX 760, my GTX 980 I'm getting on christmas.

[chazus]

The Garrison is a pretty poor benchmark of performance, since every person's garrison is going to be a different size, with different buildings, and a different number of people in it.

[Arbiter]

My i7 3770k @4.5ghz gets about 70-80fps in Garrisons with it unlocked and all max. Maybe the 2 core thing is just BS.

Also that's with a GTX 760, my GTX 980 I'm getting on christmas.

The 2 core thing isn't bullshit. If you're CPU is at 100% load across all 4 cores then you're either doing some SERIOUS multitasking or something is seriously wrong with your PC because WoW isn't using them all. (lol trust me we all wish it did)

And Chazus is right. It's a pretty poor benchmark and to add to Chazus's reasoning I mentioned above about the phasing likely being a huge factor. You're not technically the only person there. It's kind of like stealthing, which is a type of phasing technique in WoW. If 300 rogues stealthed around you, you'd still take the performance hit as if you were there despite not being able to see them.

Also, the 760 isn't why you're only seeing ~80 fps in that area. The 970 will make no difference. The ~70-80 fps is more than likely a bottleneck of the CPU which means the GPU isn't the factor limiting your frames.

[Sanguiris]

So lemme get this straight i think of my system as pretty good. I run on mostly everything on high. And if im shadowmoon valley alone i can get to 100 fps easily but sometimes in sw or sharan i can dip to 50...so thats normal? Most of thw time having battlenet app open curse client open and around 6-7 google chrome tab open (1 of it being twitch strea.) And my mom is always on netflix btw

[Arbiter]

So lemme get this straight i think of my system as pretty good. I run on mostly everything on high. And if im shadowmoon valley alone i can get to 100 fps easily but sometimes in sw or sharan i can dip to 50...so thats normal? Most of thw time having battlenet app open curse client open and around 6-7 google chrome tab open (1 of it being twitch strea.) And my mom is always on netflix btw

Precisely. Although, what your mom does on her computer has nothing to do with your fps. If Netflix is capping your bandwidth you can see latency spikes and increases, but it won't change your fps.

Look at this way, considering you're not capping RAM usage there are 2 sources of your FPS. CPU and GPU. One is going to be capping it's usage at any point in the game. When I'm by myself questing in old world zones, I may easily see 150-200fps (I'm throwing numbers based on the past, It could be less or more with the changed hardware as well as game changed) because that's how much my GPU will permit as my CPU isn't being worked hard enough to cap it's usage in that area.

If I walk into a crouded area such as 25 man raids or Warspear, those frame rates will drop down to 40-60 depending on time of day (I'm on Zul'jin so highly populated) and I've seen as low as 30 in Warspear. This is due to the high population increasing CPU loads and hitting a bottleneck. The GPU won't hit it's max usage due to the CPU bottlenecking in that zone and will limit the frames to whatever the CPU is able to achieve.

Think of it like a coop race where 2 people have to finish the race together to receive credit. You have a professional track star being your GPU (at least in intensive situations) and a fat out of shape guy as his partner being your CPU. The track star has plenty of energy and would love to just finish but he has to wait on the fat guy to catch up because he just simply doesn't have enough energy to handle the race. Bad explanation probably but all I could think of.

And this is also assuming your GPU is more than capable of WoW (ATLEAST a 750ti/R9 270 or better). A 4790k running WoW paired with a GT 710 GPU running at Ultra settings will obviously be bottlenecked by the GPU pretty much at ALL times. You'd have to crank settings down to avoid GPU bottleneck if the GPU was low end. Which you're seeing 100fps in that zone so yea this doesn't apply to you.

[Deleted]

On stock i5 4670, 8GB of 1333Mhz RAM, an SSD and a GTX 970 OC'd to 1500/7750, I get ~90FPS in my garrison, barely not hitting the 100's. In big fights during ashran it dips to the mid 30's though, but that's the deepest dip I've seen.

All Blizzard games are CPU bound, and especially SC2 and Heroes suffer from this problem (frametimes aren't constant, such a great engine, thanks blizzard) thankfully WoW has this problem a bit less, but still suffers from it. The limiting factor past a GTX 750Ti is always going to be the CPU. A friend of mine is getting 120FPS average on the same system except he's got an OC'd i5 4670K running at 4.5Ghz (I think)

[SpaceDuck]

since the latest nvidia drivers, i have noticed my fps drops to 50ish when my camera points at a specific area in frostfire. i believe when the camera is pointing towards to east