Hello, when I’m leveling I experience lags when moving, however the game is playable (10-17fps, even with high res. textures - when was ghost, not seeing mobs - even 30fps). The game becomes very, very laggy when I’m in city and battlegrounds. I have everything on lowest possible settings, however I feel no difference between low and high res. textures when no players around.
What I know is that my graphic card is capable (intergrated), however processor is weak. Even though processor is weak, I see only 30-40% usage on processor, so for intergrated it seems ok (I think?).
In task manager, the overall RAM usage is 84% (I mean all processes, not only WoW), so it seems way too high, but I’m not sure if increasing to 8GB from 4GB would make the game way less laggy. Also in minimum requirements it’s 4GB RAM, however for intergrated graphics it’s 8GB.
All in all it seems many players around makes the game unplayable, moving around the world makes it laggy (objects, npc’s?). In battlegrounds CPU usage is the same as when questing without players around (30-40%), however RAM jumps to 88% from 84%, also disc usage can jump from 16% to even 90 sometimes, but it’s only for few seconds when I see many players on the screen, then it becomes again 16%.
My question is if it’s worth to spend money to upgrade RAM or it’s not worth it?
What you are describing says ‘processor bound’ to me. Handling many objects in busy capital cities needs a lot of processor ‘oomph’.
RAM will help a bit - as Grelier said, 4Gb is not a lot any more - and should be a fairly cheap thing to try. Blizzard do say 4Gb is the minimum and 8Gb is recommended.
Processor usage at 40% may simply be referring to the number of cores in use. WOW is not very good at utilising lots of cores AFAIK, so it may simply be that you’re seeing 1 or 2 cores maxed out and the rest sitting fairly idle.
But as Grelier also says, without knowing the exact specs of your machine, all of this is so much speculation.
I am running wow in the office on an old I3-4170 on the IntelHD just to start some missions now and then
It runs like garbage on settings 1 at FullHD (1920x1080), but if i lower the resolution scale to 720P ish it runs at around 30 fps (i would not recommend playing the game like that, but if you have no choice at least the fps are higher).
Integrated graphic units use your regular system memory instead of RAM dedicated for graphical tasks, hence the increased requirement.
But, I doubt that is your main bottle-neck if it doesn’t get fully utilised anyways. In the end RAM is there to be used, having a lot of unused RAM is pretty much a waste.
Do also check your temperatures. If those get too high your CPU clock-frequency scales down to use less power and thus generate less heat.
That doesn’t help either.
It’s hard to say what the main culprit is, since you seem to have several but overall WoW seems to be quite CPU intensive.
Sorry forgot to edit, my specs:
Processor with intergrated graphics: AMD E2-2000 (1.75 GHz)[2 cores] with Radeon HD 7340 Graphics (1920 MB video memory total available, 384 MB dedicated)
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1600 MHz
Disc: HDD, 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache, SATA III
Dunno how this video memory works. When changed from normal Directx 11 to legacy, the game feel a little smoother and uses ~200 MB RAM less. I wonder if more RAM would change something or just the processor is that bad. Thanks.
So yeah looks like I have several problems. Hopefully will get monster in few months, just wanted to have better experience until I buy new one.
Sadly your machine doesn’t meet minimum requirements
If you plan/expect to get a new PC it’s not really worth upgrading anything.
Yes your RAM doesn’t meet the minimum 8GB needed for playing on integrated graphics but even if you solve that you still have below minimum CPU and GPU so it’s not guaranteed that performance will improve.
I’d say unless you can get more RAM for free or almost free it’s not worth it.
CPU was underpowered even when it was new. Upgrading that computer is not worth it unless you get free or very cheap parts. New DDR3 modules are probably somewhat pricey by now as production has switched to DDR4 quite while ago (and will soon start switching to DDR5).
So, a) CPU bound, b) GPU bound, c) mechanical disk, d) little RAM.
Adding SSD is probably safest bet as you can move that to a new computer as well. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother upgrading that system (laptop I assume) if you even can upgrade it.
Thank you all, today fresh after turning on pc so that CPU wasn’t heat, I opened wow this time with administrator rights (heard allows more cpu/ram usage). RAM usage jumped to 95% overall, WoW’s CPU sometimes to even 70. First battleground was “playable” this time except moments when disc usage jumped to 100 but then was “ok”.
Anyway I came to conclusion that the main issue is CPU getting overheated, more CPU and RAM usage didn’t change anything tbh, it was just that CPU wasn’t overheated, thus performance was way better. Disc would be on second place, and RAM upgrade is a roulette.
WoW requires a quite good CPU and the game still runs fine with 4GB of RAM with slight improvement on 8GB. Your performance is limited by the CPU and no upgrades will help you.
Look on the logical core usage. One core will run the main process of the game and will be limiting the overall performance.
New player = new assets to load so short HDD usage peak is typical. Also a lot of actors (players, NPCs) increases game state complexity which is a highly CPU bound task.
but overall WoW seems to be quite CPU intensive.