Just wondering why my game cripples when too much shit happens.

[Cows For Life]

DirectX11 performance in WoW varies wildly with non-DX11 cards. Sometimes it gives boost, sometimes not. I can say from personal experience that during Cata beta when I still had Radeon 4850 (DX10.1 card) I saw around 10-20% fps boost in all new cata zones, but also 10% loss in the old unmodified vanilla zones when DX11 mode was forced on. DirectX does software emulation in CPU if you have lower version card if you force the DX11 mode on, so yes, it's possible to run it. If you gain from it or not is uncertain, but it's definitely worth trying.

Is this verifiable and repeatable? I can't imagine software emulation being faster than the non-DX11 code path. This is even before considering the slow CPU the OP has, I'm not sure I would try giving the CPU more work when it gets busy in-game.

[vesseblah]

Is this verifiable and repeatable?

As I said, some people get notable speed boost for their maximum and average fps while using DX10.1 cards if they force DX11 mode on. Some people see no change whatsoever. There are just too many variables to make it repeatable and verifiable to make sure if it depends on driver version or the exact chip generation used, but Radeon 4850 was one card that benefitted from it. People on this forum have also reported increase of framerates with Geforce 250GTS.

I can't imagine software emulation being faster than the non-DX11 code path. This is even before considering the slow CPU the OP has, I'm not sure I would try giving the CPU more work when it gets busy in-game.

This is pure speculation, but would explain it:

80% of the new graphics tricks (pixel shaders) that Cataclysm client uses were actually included in DirectX10 already, and 20% are in DX11. Now, if your card has full and proper support for DX10, the gain from doing that 80% in hardware massively outweight the loss of 20% in software. On the other hand if the hardware support of the 80% shaders used by WoW is poorer, the software emulation part evens out or outweights any gain from the partial hardware acceleration.

If you discount tesselation, the differences between DX10 and DX11 are really tiny, and WoW does not use tesselation, so it's entirely possible that even more than 80% of the new graphics features run on DX10 hardware natively.

[Enola]

Overclockit a bit, if I'm not mistaken you CPU can be overclocked a decent amount, you may want to think in a good cooler, for not much a CM H212+ can give you together with a oc a performance boost, while not throwing money away has you can still use it in a future upgrade. Just don't expect miracles, without spending some more money.

[qw4]

That would be amazing since the card doesn't actually support DirectX 11.

Well, it does, dick.