BFA is quite a bit more demanding on your system. Upgrade your PC for BFA if needed.

[Deleted]

Got into the Beta last night and was let down by my PCs inability to play at 60FPS in open zones, like I was able to in legion. In every zone with the exception of Vol'Dun I average 48fps, when I was able to play at a steady 60fps in legion. I made sure ALL my settings in Beta matched Legion (live).

Just a heads up for those that have slower rigs.

[Eosia]

I'm doing just fine with my 2700K i7

[Svisalith]

I made sure ALL my settings in Beta matched Legion (live).

You can't really do that

On the beta, fullscreen is gone - there's only a windowed fullscreen which is labeled as fullscreen; notable FPS hit from that.

The minimum levels of shadows & ground clutter have been substantially increased with CPU demand increasing to match

all in all my fps in bfa was maybe 1.4x worse than legion due to the performance downgrades in the open world zones

[Deleted]

You can't really do that

On the beta, fullscreen is gone - there's only a windowed fullscreen which is labeled as fullscreen; notable FPS hit from that.

The minimum levels of shadows & ground clutter have been substantially increased with CPU demand increasing to match

Interesting. Any reason fullscreen is gone? Do they plan to revert that?

Also, how do you know minimum levels of shadows at ground clutter have been increased?

[Regalbeast]

the beta also might not be completely optimized, keep that in mind

[Lightwysh]

As long as the fel-green that causes my 390x to almost catch fire is gone, Ill be happy.

[Deleted]

the beta also might not be completely optimized, keep that in mind

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

[Khallid]

Well, it's not unreasonable that system requirements increase with expansions. I'm pretty sure you can't play Legion with a 15 year old computer that used to run vanilla.

Although not knowing much about it, isn't there also a difference in the quality of the live servers and the beta servers? I might just be wrong, but I'm under the impression that beta servers never work as well as live servers.

[Svisalith]

Interesting. Any reason fullscreen is gone? Do they plan to revert that?

Also, how do you know minimum levels of shadows at ground clutter have been increased?

You can't lower the shadows lower than X setting, doesn't exist any more

ground clutter - you have the sliders at 1 but there is clutter baked into the new zones which you can't turn down or disable

the only thing i've seen blizzard say about any of this was that fullscreen was intentionally removed for technical reasons; i can't imagine what they are since so many games run exclusive fullscreen fine and have done for a very long time. On modern windows disabling fullscreen means that we can no longer play the game without a frame of added lag from the windows desktop composition so it's not just an FPS hit, it's input lag that you can't ever get back.

Well, it's not unreasonable that system requirements increase with expansions.

I think that the amount of decrease in performance is unreasonable - it hurts everyone from the lowest to the highest end hardware because it's impossible to run the CPU part of WoW amazingly. What massive gameplay benefit are we getting to account for a 1.4x performance loss? If there were major new systems it may be worth it but i haven't seen anything to justify having 1.4x less FPS than legion in open world and less than half of the FPS in dungeons.

It's not like we can get more CPU cores or a faster GPU and then run the game as well as before. We're doomed to play BFA with less performance, more input lag, spikier frametimes than we had in previous expansions despite having the fastest system available both then and now because the game is so heavily limited by the performance of a single CPU core which is having load added to it at a much faster rate than it's increasing in performance since 2011. I don't agree with that.

[Nevcairiel]

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

Whats more accurate is that Beta builds contain additional checks and assertions that can slow down processing a bit. How much that is noticeable in FPS (or if at all) is impossible to say exactly.

- - - Updated - - -

On modern windows disabling fullscreen means that we can no longer play the game without a frame of added lag from the windows desktop composition so it's not just an FPS hit, it's input lag that you can't ever get back

On Windows 10 that is actually not true. You can run in Windowed Borderless Fullscreen mode and the OS will recognize that and bypass the compositor, which gives you all the performance and latency advantages of Exclusive fullscreen mode, without the annoying alt-tab behavior.

Of course if you're on another version of Windows, you are a bit screwed.

[Count Zero]

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

Optimized has non-technical meanings as well.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I had terrible performance all through Alpha and Beta for Legion. I was expecting to upgrade my computer out of necessity rather than actually wanting to.

Then, they released the game and suddenly my performance went up and I could use higher settings than I had ever used before, on my same rig that struggled in WoD and parts of MoP...

So, whilst they've said clearly that minimum requirements will be going up, I'm hopeful since my rig (still the same, no updates) is handling the Beta quite well.

[Hitei]

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

Would you prefer it if instead we said that typically the beta runs more poorly and more demanding in terms of computer resources than the final version of the expansion which goes live?

[Nnyco]

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

neither do you apparently, this happened all the time in beta, in legion beta for example you couldnt fight shivermaw in vh without droppin to like 10fps

[BlueRemedy]

I think the BfA upgrades are more like end of Legion upgrades. All the updated spell effects and whatnot. I think the issues in beta will be ironed out pretty well.

They can't stress much more on the CPU side unless they revamp their engine. Walking a fine line as it is with that single thread.

[Kelzam]

Actually I experienced the opposite of the OP. My system has chop and lower FPS in Legion that I didn't experience any time before, and I have no problems in other more demanding games. But in BFA beta much of the weird FPS and video issues that happen in Legion haven't popped up for me. *shrug*

[Regalbeast]

people keep spouting the word optimized without knowing what it means

why don't you enlighten everyone then? you seem to know everything and are pretty quick to throw your weight around

[Deleted]

You can't lower the shadows lower than X setting, doesn't exist any more

ground clutter - you have the sliders at 1 but there is clutter baked into the new zones which you can't turn down or disable

the only thing i've seen blizzard say about any of this was that fullscreen was intentionally removed for technical reasons

So full screen is gone forever? Fuck

[Nebster]

Have you all tried how it runs on DX12? Should be better I hope... :-O

[MoanaLisa]

I'll need a new video card if I want to play BfA. Back in January I could guarantee you that I wasn't about to pay the kind of prices that were being charged then so had sort of written BfA off. Now that prices are somewhat better I may change my mind although I'm not a fan of the theme of BfA and still don't much care for a lot of the changes to SP that were made for Legion.

I'd say it's 50-50 whether or not I'll dump the money into this PC just to play BfA although I'm thinking about having a new box made altogether. Gaming is less of a priority for me these days though and I spend more time fooling around with tablet games and older Steam games that I never got around to. I'm also reading a lot more lately. Which is fine. I like reading.

So, we'll see. I don't mind Blizzard making the requirements higher to play but they may be abandoning more players than they know by doing so. I don't know how many people are actually aware of what's coming.