GPU idling at 20-40% but im getting only 60FPS

[Fadriadh-tarren-mill]

As title says, i was raiding HC Broodtwister yesterday and when adds spawned my fps went to like 5. So i open Task manager on my other Monitor to see what my GPU is doing, and TM tells me, 40% usage on the 3060… wtf?
Can anyone help me.
I have me graphic settings all the way to the low, no vsync on.

[Gráinne-earthen-ring]

What was your CPU doing? WoW is mostly CPU-bound.

Any symptoms since then?

[Fadria-mograine]

CPU was at 40% max aswell. Ram is 22 out of 32 usage.

[Gráinne-earthen-ring]

I want to be careful in what I say here, since I have never studied WoW’s process allocation myself and my hardware knowledge is waay out of date.

But.

Quoting from a Wowhead guide which seems to be written by someone much more current than I:

the game will use up to 4 CPU cores if available. The FPS will scale noticeably when going from a 2 to 4-core configuration and only barely when moving to 6 or more.

…

Even when the game uses 4 cores it doesn’t mean all 4 cores will be used in the same way. You will usually see the “main” core with a higher continuous load and 3 cores with a lower load. If you will be looking on a widefield view of one of new zones the load on the 3 cores will increase (more draw calls sent to the GPU to render the frame) and when you enter combat with multiple actors (lots of NPCs or complex interactions of mechanics) the load on the “main” core will increase, quite often to 100%. The main core handles the world state of your character - what, where, when, and its consistency. The more is happening the more complex it gets and the more load it puts on that single core of the CPU.

That’s why for high FPS in combat like raids and battlegrounds (assuming not limited by network latency, or server dying) you need a CPU with high single-core performance and even then the game can’t handle very high combat complexity (like mass battles or mini battles with Corruption).

What that means is that WoW will never use all of your CPU in a moderate to high-end machine these days, because it will be limited by what fits on 4 cores. 40% could be WoW’s maximum usage on your PC.

I suggest you get an app like CPUID’s HWMonitor, and next time you see something like this, check the utilisation and temps on ALL of your cores individually.

Then again, it could have been a one-off, an occasional glitch of a bit of wonky coding, and maybe an addon that got itself into a loop. But always handy to have a more detailed diagnostic program available, just in case.