Getting low FPS, my CPU/GPU are not even at 50% usage on WoW

[VeteranoNoob]

Hi guys!

I gonna start with... I just reinstalled my Windows, its a Windows 10 legit, activated. So my OS has nothing besides WoW, Dota 2 and Photoshop installed at the moment.

I know my PC is not a brand new one, but it should run WoW way better than its doing now, so my config:

Asrock extreme 4 z77 - bios 2.90
i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz (I can go till 4.7 stable, just dont like because of the temps).
32gb of RAM Sniper - F3-1866C10-8GSR
SSD Samsung Evo - Main hard drive
SSD Kingstom - Secondary drive
GPU GTX 970 Mini ITX and GTX 1070 Mini ITX (no using both at same time, of course :P)
2 monitors, main monitor is a LG 2560x1080 and another LG 1920x1080


So, I have been using my GTX 970 for about 1 year, and I am not happy with it because I cant keep a fixed 60fps all the time... Set my system configs lower and still not getting those 60 but ok...

This week I got great deal on the GTX itx 1070 and as far as I read, everyone said that 2500K @ 4.5ghz should not bottleneck this GPU and run everything smooth... Man... tried the GTX and I dont know if just in my head, but it seems worse than my 970.

Alright... went to wow, queued for all LFR instances and monitored my temps, cpu and gpu usage on the other monitor, for my surprise, EVEN when I at 45 FPS in game, my CPU is running wow @ 45-50% (with all windows background stuff it goes up to max 60-65% cpu usage) and GPU topping 60% usage.

So how in the hell my game is running at 45 fps and my cpu/gpu are not even in 70% of their maximum.

Do you guys can give me any advice?!

I can provide pictures, videos, info, whatever you guys need me to... pls help, I tried EVERYTHING I knew and its not working.

Extra info, things I tried:

- Tried run WoW on both of my SSDs.
- Pagefile.sys is running now on my secondary drive.
- Disable many background windows services like xbox, skype and things I dont use.
- Tried WoW at low settings and max settings, both dont bring up my cpu/gpu usage.
- I like to run with Vsyinc on cause without it I get some break/glitch lines when I am moving around.

[Jtbrig7390]

--snip--

World of Warcraft is a CPU heavy game. The problem is not your GTX 970 or GTX 1070.

Even on my rig (see my sig below) I don't get 60fps locked in everything. Also what do you have ur WoW settings on? I do not recommend going above pre-set 7 at all because its a broken mess.

Also ur CPU is really old and can bottleneck the GTX 1070, If I recall correctly.

Edit: Those CPU/GPU uses are normal by the way. Even more so if you are running stuff in the background.

[VeteranoNoob]

World of Warcraft is a CPU heavy game. The problem is not your GTX 970 or GTX 1070.

Even on my rig (see my sig below) I don't get 60fps locked in everything. Also what do you have ur WoW settings on? I do not recommend going above pre-set 7 at all because its a broken mess.

Also ur CPU is really old and can bottleneck the GTX 1070, If I recall correctly.

Edit: Those CPU/GPU uses are normal by the way. Even more so if you are running stuff in the background.

I am not an expert BUT if game is running at 45 FPS and my CPU and GPU are running at 50% of their usage, WHY game cant get more FPS?

Makes sense to me if I am getting 45 FPS and my CPU or GPU are at 100% usage, that mean, they are giving every juice they have to the game and cant go any higher... but with 50% usage, thats really strange!!!

Its just like WoW is not using either my cpu/gpu all way.

[Jtbrig7390]

I am not an expert BUT if game is running at 45 FPS and my CPU and GPU are running at 50% of their usage, WHY game cant get more FPS?

Makes sense to me if I am getting 45 FPS and my CPU or GPU are at 100% usage, that mean, they are giving every juice they have to the game and cant go any higher... but with 50% usage, thats really strange!!!

Its just like WoW is not using either my cpu/gpu all way.

Once again its because WoW is a stupid heavy CPU game. Even on my rig (and better) rigs it can drop in fps and not be using the CPU 100%. Also make sure your drivers are updated.

Also what settings are you trying to run it on? Don't run above pre-set 7.

[Denpepe]

Your CPU usage is the average for all the cores, the main thread of the game runs on 1 core and can not be split, this is what limits your performance, this core will at times be at or near 100% usage. This is an engine limitation for a lot of MMO games and not much you can do about it. You can turn of shadows to help a bit, reduce draw distance etc.. but on whenever there is a lot going on you will see drops in fps (use the raid tab in graphics options for these settings if you want)

[VeteranoNoob]

Was playing with my settings now... just went to a place that I can get a constant low fps... garrison!

I set all my configs to top quality, and set my cpu with default speed, 3.3ghz. So I am getting around 40fps.

Right now, with all settings at max, my GPU went from almost 0% load to 90% load!

Back to BIOS, set my PC to 4.2Ghz OC, my FPS went up from 40 to around 47 fps.

CPU load remains the same, around 50%, I guess that what you guys said above, so no matter what speed I use, it remains 50% because seems that WoW only use one of my 4 cores, however I can see a increase in FPS ingame.

So, maximum settings CPU at default speed 3.3Ghz, 40fps, GPU at 90% usage, CPU 50% usage.

Changing only render settings at wow advanced menu, will not change any FPS, however, at 200% scale = 90% GPU usage, at 150% scale = 60% GPU Load and 100% scale GPU goes to 40% usage.

So seems that my GPU have more than enough room to give me more quality and the FPS will not decrease increase, at least with that setting, only my GPU load will change.

No much I can do it seems... the only settins that really affect my FPS are shadow quality and view distance, the rest, almost makes no difference.

Ahhh this is using the GTX 1070.

Gonna turn my PC off and check my FPS with the GTX 970.

Seems that I will need a new PC after all, too bad AMD has not released Ryzen yet, bad or not, it might make intel prices goes down a bit :P

Thanks alot for all your info guys!!!

[LCDArcade]

I have a 6800k clocked at 4.1ghz which is a 6-core processor combined with 32GBS or ram and 980ti and I can't even get locked 60fps in most places unless it's desolate. WoW is just an extremely unoptimized 12+ year old game engine that needs Vulcan or DX12 badly.

[VeteranoNoob]

I have a 6800k clocked at 4.1ghz which is a 6-core processor combined with 32GBS or ram and 980ti and I can't even get locked 60fps in most places unless it's desolate. WoW is just an extremely unoptimized 12+ year old game engine that needs Vulcan or DX12 badly.

Jesus! Dont know if I feel good that I am not alone or bad cause seems that this has no cure :/

Thanks for that info man

[bigbleach]

I have a 6800k clocked at 4.1ghz which is a 6-core processor combined with 32GBS or ram and 980ti and I can't even get locked 60fps in most places unless it's desolate. WoW is just an extremely unoptimized 12+ year old game engine that needs Vulcan or DX12 badly.

I may need to read more of the thread but... All I have is a 960 2gb gpu and an i7 4790k (4 ghz) with 8 gigs of ram and I run wow on ultra no issue, 60-100+ fps. Depending on the area I'll get bogged down to 50-60 and some fights in raids I'll dip low for a moment or so, but my system stays consistent. The only thing I have turned down a bit is the texture sampling and antialiasing, but other than that everything is on ultra. That may not be true ultra, but I do not have the best of best setups and I can't tell much of a difference with them turned a bit down. Hopefully you figure something out though

[Kagthul]

I have a 6800k clocked at 4.1ghz which is a 6-core processor combined with 32GBS or ram and 980ti and I can't even get locked 60fps in most places unless it's desolate. WoW is just an extremely unoptimized 12+ year old game engine that needs Vulcan or DX12 badly.

It has precisely NOTHING to do with the age of the game (the underlying engine, at this point, bears no resemblance to the launch engine) or optimization.

It has to everything to do with certain aspects of secure client server MMOs requiring serial operations. I.E. operations that MUST be done in the order data is received. Since it MUST be done in order, it CANNOT be farmed out to other cores, and runs in a single thread.

Almost every MMO is the same. Try going into some RvRvR in GW2.

Set the settings as low as you like, itll still turn into a slideshow when there's 50+ people on the screen.

Its why a lot of MMOs after WoW went to dynamically instancing/sharding even world zones (and WoW adapted this tech, too, eventually).

The primary determiner of FPS in WoW is single-thread CPU performance. ALL of the GPU settings can be maxed out at 1080p on a GTX 1060. But CPU dependent settings (Draw Distance, Ground Clutter, Particle Effects, Shadows past a certain point, Dynamic Lighting, Soft Lighting) are governed by your CPU's single-thread performance. Period.

You might also want to check and make sure that putting in the 1070 doesn't have you running at a higher render scale (you might be playing at 4K DSR and not even know it).

Try turning Draw Distance down, in particular. At setting 7 (the pre-Legion "Ultra") you will see no appreciable difference and your framerates will stabilize a lot in most zones (crowded areas will still fluctuate. Even people with 5+ Ghz liquid cooled rigs dont get a stable 60 at all times in WoW).

[Kokolums]

You need to tell people what the settings are in your GPU software before we can diagnose. There are reports for example that the nvidia geforce experience / 3d experience can kill your fps. Do you use that? What are the settings? Did you try uninstalling "experience"? What wow settings does your graphics card have. You never told us any of this and its essential.

[Deleted]

If you wanna put load on your GPU then set render resolution up

[Kokolums]

Try running wow in fullscreen with render set to 100% and NOT "100% auto"

[mfdoom4ever41]

With WoW open go to task manager, details, right click WoW.exe, set affinity to use all cores besides for core 0 to force it to use the rest of the cores. I went from stuck under 100 fps to over 180 fps constantly at max settings. CPU usage went from 3% to over 30% which also helped with GPU usage. Thank me later <3

More: Also, right above set affinity, set your priority on high so your cpu prioritizes WoW over all other programs. I may be crazy but I keep Titanfall 2 on in the background as well and that seems to wake my cpu the hell up.

[kaelleria]

Could be any number of things...
What's your view distance at? Do you have any misbehaving addons? Etc... For example I had a custom weak aura with custom lua to detect artifact experience and that was tanking my FPS on characters without an artifact equipped.

Are you running Windows 10?

Honestly, at this point your 2500k is a bit old and is only 4 threads. For WoW alone this is fine, but I definitely noticed a pretty huge difference when watching streams/Netflix while playing wow and not. Does your CPU sit around 80%-100% load while playing wow?

I've since built a new machine with a 7700k and a 1080 and haven't really had many issues playing at 4k.

[McFrotton]

World of Warcraft is a CPU heavy game. The problem is not your GTX 970 or GTX 1070.

Even on my rig (see my sig below) I don't get 60fps locked in everything. Also what do you have ur WoW settings on? I do not recommend going above pre-set 7 at all because its a broken mess.

Also ur CPU is really old and can bottleneck the GTX 1070, If I recall correctly.

Edit: Those CPU/GPU uses are normal by the way. Even more so if you are running stuff in the background.

I am just jumping here quickly to say the 2500k is still a really good cpu, OC at 4GhZ it is still almost on par with newer intel cpu (intel did not imporved much cpu wise for the last 5-6 years) a new i5 OC at 4-4.5 Ghz will give you maybe 5-10 more fps. 2500k hardly bottleneck anymore than any new i5.

[Barnabas]

Hi guys!

I gonna start with... I just reinstalled my Windows, its a Windows 10 legit, activated. So my OS has nothing besides WoW, Dota 2 and Photoshop installed at the moment.

I know my PC is not a brand new one, but it should run WoW way better than its doing now, so my config:

Asrock extreme 4 z77 - bios 2.90
i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz (I can go till 4.7 stable, just dont like because of the temps).
32gb of RAM Sniper - F3-1866C10-8GSR
SSD Samsung Evo - Main hard drive
SSD Kingstom - Secondary drive
GPU GTX 970 Mini ITX and GTX 1070 Mini ITX (no using both at same time, of course :P)
2 monitors, main monitor is a LG 2560x1080 and another LG 1920x1080


So, I have been using my GTX 970 for about 1 year, and I am not happy with it because I cant keep a fixed 60fps all the time... Set my system configs lower and still not getting those 60 but ok...

This week I got great deal on the GTX itx 1070 and as far as I read, everyone said that 2500K @ 4.5ghz should not bottleneck this GPU and run everything smooth... Man... tried the GTX and I dont know if just in my head, but it seems worse than my 970.

Alright... went to wow, queued for all LFR instances and monitored my temps, cpu and gpu usage on the other monitor, for my surprise, EVEN when I at 45 FPS in game, my CPU is running wow @ 45-50% (with all windows background stuff it goes up to max 60-65% cpu usage) and GPU topping 60% usage.

So how in the hell my game is running at 45 fps and my cpu/gpu are not even in 70% of their maximum.

Do you guys can give me any advice?!

I can provide pictures, videos, info, whatever you guys need me to... pls help, I tried EVERYTHING I knew and its not working.

Extra info, things I tried:

- Tried run WoW on both of my SSDs.
- Pagefile.sys is running now on my secondary drive.
- Disable many background windows services like xbox, skype and things I dont use.
- Tried WoW at low settings and max settings, both dont bring up my cpu/gpu usage.
- I like to run with Vsyinc on cause without it I get some break/glitch lines when I am moving around.

Get a 3770k and drop it on your motherboard. It's an upgrade without having to buy a new motherboard and ram.