FPS Issues in large scale events

Support Technical Support
1

Hello. I’m so very curious and would love some input from other players to rule things out.

Do people play this game with solid FPS during large scale encounters ?
I’m talking about raids, superblooms, battlegrounds etc, where there’s a lot of players and a lot of things happening at the same time.

I’ve got a good PC which runs most current games on high end settings with solid FPS.
In World of Warcraft however I’m having issues whenever there’s a lot of things going on.

One example is Ashran battlegrounds where I’m just basically constantly dropping down and staying in the 20-30 FPS area.

Another one would be like a superbloom I go down to the same FPS drops.
Guild raids with anywhere between 10-25 people I get down to 30 FPS in fights.

This is with absolutely ZERO addons active and RAID/BG Graphics active and turned down to “1” Where the game literally looks something more like minecraft.

What bothers me I guess is that I’m overwatching this with MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner statistics. While I’m at 20-30 FPS in World of warcraft my GPU and CPU Usage is just chilling at around 15-25% usage. Like how does that add up ?

In other games - for example if I play Cyberpunk my GPU usage will go up to 100% and CPU to anywhere around 70-85% and I’ll be having solid 100-110 FPS. That just seems more fair to me ?

I have reinstalled WoW 3 times. I have reinstalled windows entirely because of this issue just to rule things out, without success. I have the latest drivers.

I know WoW is a CPU heavy game and I’m not asking to have 144 FPS in a BG or raid fight. But going down to 20 FPS as soon as the core features of an MMORPG is happening seems unrealistic to me.

Quick question to guildies regarding this and most of the players are having fps issues in large scale encounters. So is this just the reality of WoW or am I having some issues on my end alone is I guess what I’d love to find out and would appreciate any input and help. Thank you

2

GPU usage in WoW overall is low aside widefield views in newer areas. For CPU you have to look at each core load. The game will use 4 cores with one having higher load than the other three. In mass combat scenarios (raids, big BGs) that single core will quickly reach 100% and be limiting performance.

What are your system’s specs exactly? (RAM, CPU, GPU, Storage).

3

Without actually knowing your computer specs there is no way to know if there is a problem or not. Personally I haven’t had major issues during DF in the raids (usually 15 to 25ish people). At first I had 3800X with GTX970, later upgraded to RX6600 and then CPU to 5800X3D.

I am currently using lower resolution scale with FSR 1.0 (80% I think) after I got 1440p monitor though performance was acceptable even without it.

4

Hey. I was carried away by other things, forgot to mention my specs.

I’ve got a Ryzen 5 5600X
32 Gig RAM.
Geforce RTX 4070 Ti Super (I had as 3070 before this with the same results)
I had a chance to get this GPU for a fair price so I bought this and thought I’d just use this in my machine before I upgraded the rest to an AM5 rig. I know the bottleneck is my CPU. I just thought I could last with this CPU like another year before upgrading to AM5.

It’s really only WoW I’m having issues in. As said I’m down to 20 FPS in crowded situations while my CPU usage is at 20-30%.

5

In major cities or main cities of on-going expansions are usually dropping the FPS yes. Also raids and dungeons are like that.

For cities, it is all about density of graphical things around. Houses, grasses, shadows, mounts, people running around, people flying around, some NPCs are RPing etc. If you are using all of your settings at the highest, yeah, it is pretty certain that you’ll see major drops in cities. I usually have 140+ with my 3080TI + 5800x3D + 990evo 2TB m2 SSD rig in the wilds but in cities, it is usually dropping under 30. (1440p) It is set on highest graphic settings for sure. I like bit dragon butts and I can not lie…

On the other hand, raids, dungeons and pvps (not that much in arenas but usually gets worse in bgs) are usually about the sheetloads of spells being thrown. Good thing that they added a separate graphic settings for the instances as you can see it in graphic settings. You can lower every unnecessary, cosmetic things for the raids for example. You don’t need to change it in general, set those settings just for raids, bgs, arenas and dungeons for example.

My trust level is not enough yet for sharing links for this forum but you can easily find some settings on Youtube with correct keywords and can tweek them up, optimize totally for your PC.

As I said, outside of any instanced part of the games my all graphical settings are at max but in my raid/dung settings, I don’t need too much spell beuty, unicorns dropping rainbows to the toilet, lightnings etc. Optimum is enough for the upcoming boss spell cues. Or I don’t need to see soooo far away in instances, or that much FOV in a small space, etc.

You don’t need to worry about it that much IMO. It is normal for most of us… Don’t forget beside those things I have mentioned above, WoW is an online game, your character is appearing on a live server with other people and it’s engine is so damn old.

My other suggestions/check list can be as below but I don’t think neither of those will be necessary, but still, if you want to give them a shot (in case you haven’t yet) then take it at your own risk.

  • Be so sure you can check out your CPU’s optimal gaming settings in BIOS. AMD cpus are usually sucks with stock settings, needs some adjustments for almost max. performance with lowest source usages.

  • You can also check your GPU settings too. There are a lot of GPU test softwares for free, and MSI Afterburner to OC/undervolt GPU’s. Maybe you can pull out more performance out of your card, maybe it needs a bit adjustment if you are using them both on stock settings.

  • If you have another GPU or if your cpu have integrated graphic module in it (as far as I know 5600x does not have) you can set your 4070ti as your graphic card in WoW settings. It is usually on automatic detection and can cause issues.

  • You can also check some NVIDIA panel settings for your card.

6

Because most people don’t have a high-end CPU.
WoW is very CPU-limited, especially since it’s basically a singlethreaded game with some extra like audio on other cores.

Renderscale is massively broken since S3, you will actually lose FPS by lowering the %.
For example, lowering to 33% i lose about 20 FPS with my 4090… that says it all :smiley:
Can’t even use supersampling (going above 100%) to improve image quality because of the same “bug”.

Obviously, because you are CPU-limited as has been explained above.
I am still running at mostly settings 7 (draw distance and environmental detail) with no RT shadows even though i upgraded to a 4090.
Why? CPU-limit, even with a 5800X3D, yes even with the fastest gaming CPUs like the 7800X3D you will still be very CPU-limited.

Get a 9800X3D, don’t get the non X3D since WoW and similiar CPU-limited games benefit alot from the extra cache.
I went from a 3900X to a 5800X3D and literally doubled my FPS in WoW.

Unless you are talking about Superbloom on a reset day, that sounds too low even for a 5600.
Don’t forget that addons have a very big impact on performance and scale extremely with the amount of players/NPCs since they are calculated on the same CPU-thread that does everything else :smiley:

I got more than double that with my 5800X3D in Valdrakken on a full server, something is wrong with your settings or addons.

Turn of RT shadows, lower distance and lod to 7 and double check addons and weakauras.
Oh and make sure your RAM is running with XMP enabled and in dual channel mode.

7

I’m looking at an upgrade path.
I can’t find any 9800X3d , is that an upcoming AMD CPU that have not been released?

I was thinking about upgrading to AM5. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D to be exact.

So basically even with this type of CPU I will be limited in WoW with FPS because of the outdated engine ?

How much would the difference be in FPS compared to my current 5600X - Are we talking 10 more fps or something more like 50 fps ?

Thanks

8

Yes, they just announced the non-X3D 9000 series Ryzen.
X3D will be later but worth the wait if you can.

If you want to have good FPS now, then do it, AM5 will be supported for several generations.

Yes we will always be CPU-limited by this engine. A good GPU is only needed for high resolutions and some settings (funny enough, RT shadows are killing the CPU even more, so i have them off with my 4090 because i hate frametime stuttering and insane drops on superbloom etc, will only turn them on for TWW leveling experience :slight_smile: ).

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/World-of-Warcraft-Dragonflight-Spiel-73654/Specials/WoW-Dragonflight-Benchmarks-Anforderungen-1408516/2/

As you can see the 5800X3D would already be a big upgrade and then about 25% extra on top with the 7800X3D + DDR5 RAM.

9

Thank you for the in-depth answer.

I guess I’ll just have to consider my options at the moment. If the new Ryzen X3D series will arrive within this year I sure would think that would be my best option.

But if it’s something more than 1+ year until that is releasing I think I’ll consider a midground with the 7 7800X3D.

I don’t mind the 20 FPS superblooms. It’s just like the mythic raiding which I’m doing with my guild where I’m reaching 20 FPS with raiding/BG graphics turned down to setting “1” - makes me miss important queues and mechanics basically just because of my low FPS. It’s impossible to follow a high haste rotation cuz everything is just in so much delay. And any form of battleground I can just forget about participating in.
I use very minimal addons. I’ve tried with the little addons I use both on and off and it doesn’t do anything towards my FPS.

10

Interesting, I hadn’t noticed it, but seems like there is something wrong, as I was getting about 100-110 fps with 80% renderscale vs about the same with 100% renderscale in Valdrakken on fairly quiet server.

11

Probably late this year as usual. They want to sell the non-X3D first ofc :smiley:

You don’t have to turn down settings in a raid if the CPU is the bottleneck, won’t do anything if the GPU is bored and just makes the game look ugly.
The CPU relevant settings like draw distance and lod don’t apply to raids.

You can optimize your addons and weakauras for sure though.
Nameplates for example are a huge FPS hog.

Yeah i totally get it… i’m annoyed if my FPS is sub 90 in WoW already :smiley:
Just feels like slow motion.

Test something, do a superbloom on a reset day with as many players as possible, then just press V (default button) to turn of nameplates and compare your FPS (obviously with many NPCS on the screen) or shift-V for friendly players.

12

It’s kind of bad that a light client for an MMORPG requires the most bleeding-edge hardware to run efficiently. FFXIV doesn’t have such issues even when having lower FPS in Limsa due to the cat girl population…

It still should work fine. I would blame the game if it has a massive FPS drop on such hardware.

With 5900X or 5800X3D I had no problems:
https://rkblog.dev/posts/wow/dragonflight-cpu-comparison/
Although you can see how mass combat and Valdrakken is lower than anything else :smiley:

1 Like
13

There is nothing wrong with my CPU. As I mentioned in my post, I’d prefer max. setting in the open world, which applies to FOV, view distance, environmental details, etc. Only RT is turned off as I find it super useless.

Yeah, RAM is totally in XMP mode and dual channel.

I am again looking at my fps in Valdrakken, it is around 55-60. Maybe I wasn’t checking properly and estimated the numbers were lower than that. Seems like it is way better lol.

14

Valdrakken is problematic location to compare as traffic there heavily depends on the server, time etc. More players = more demanding the scene is and more work for CPU.

Raids or BGs with same amount of people would probably give better numbers, but would obviously be far more time consuming to arrange.

15

Alright so just wanted to update and maybe help someone else who’s having issues.

I decided to upgrade my system - went with the R7 7800x3D. Obviously new MB and DDR5.

Went back into Ashran immediately to test my new system out.
As my initial post said I had around 20-30 FPS in here with my old R5 5600X during fights. Without Addons and all settings turned down to the lowest.

My new system was idling around 120FPS with addons turned on and all settings maxed during heavy fighting and tons of stuff going on. It never went below a 100FPS. So that would be around a consistent 100FPS increase…

Fully crowded Valdrakken I’m around 120-143FPS with no stuttering and just really smooth gameplay.

With that said.
I really didn’t think my 5600X was bottlenecking WoW so hard.
As I said I never had any issues with any other games on that CPU - Only WoW.

so if anyone is looking to upgrade or having game issues I’d highly suggest making the upgrade if you are able to. With the 9000-series 3D around the corner, I’m sure it’ll be even better but you can’t go wrong with the 7800x3D, probably better price to performance as of now anyways.

Thanks for all the help and inputs guys, made me test all possible things before I made the decision to upgrade.

1 Like
16

x3D CPUs can provide huge boost to game performance in certain type of games besides WoW. For example Factorio, Paradox strategy games like Stellaris etc. Basically any game which likely requires heavy CPU processing in addition (or instead of) GPU demanding tasks.

17

Good to hear that the upgrade gave you the results you wanted.
Though i have to say that there was definately something wrong with your old CPU/RAM setup.
The 7800X3D is not 4x as fast as a 5600X in WoW… more like 2x at best and that includes the added benefit of faster DDR5 RAM :slight_smile:

I’m still quite happy with my 5800X3D, so i’m gonna stick with it at least for TWW and maybe longer.
Then i will build a new system with a 10800X3D or whatever they will be called after the 9800X3D :sweat_smile:

18

Wish they fix the issue with the intel and nvidia cards…

19

What issue are you talking about?

20

Raids, Rated BGS, Valdrakkan etc - CPU at 20% and GPU at 25% and my fps sitting at 20-40fps constantly… Open world is fine tho//hiting my fps cap, but when it comes down to working my PC for higher frames, game doesnt do anything… Tryed 1080p - 4K and nothing… Tryed all fixes…
Watched a clip with a i9 and a 4090 and had same issue…
Thing to mention before the patch 10.0 in valdrakkan full popped and maxed out settings i was seeing well over 300 fps…