Weird issue appeared with WoW classic during the week end. My computer is a bit old now, got i5-4460 with Radeon R9 290. While leveling, my computer fans started to be louder than usual and indeed both CPU and GPU were at quite high temperature (CPU cores 50+ GPU near 90 degrees). Now my system is pretty old and I haven’t touched the CPU since 2014 and decided to reapply thermal paste and clean the heat sink. After I was done, GPU fan went ballistic after a while and temperature rose over 90 degrees. Well I did the same treatment for GPU aswell, no help, even reapplied the paste another time.
Now comes the weird part: due to this I started again to monitor CPU and GPU usage and now my CPU is allways below 20% and GPU goes straight to 100%, at times cycling between 0 and 100% every second or two. Settings don’t really matter, unless I go way down to “Classic” and turn every special feature off. Then GPU use is somewhere between 0 and 70%. Now look at all the other similar threads and instead it’s allways “WoW uses 100% cpu and 0 GPU” and in my system GPU is much better than CPU and should be the bottle neck.
I tried deleting addons and interface folder etc, removed and reinstalled drivers, nothing. And yeah, checked inside the case, every fan that should is rotating.My question here is, can a poor thermal paste application (or old paste?) explain the weird cpu/gpu usage percentages? I did not check how WoW classic used my CPU/GPU before the problems, so there’s no old data for comparison. Anyone got similar problems/suggestions?
Quarantines don’t really feel all that bad to a gamer, until your system starts acting up. I felt the cold grip of death for a moment today.
CPU temperature looks normal even before you reapplied the paste. GPU temperatures are normal for that particular series of card as they ran hot. I’d suggest you limit your FPS in WoW to some reasonable amount based on your display type: no point having 200+ FPS if your monitor is 60 Hz for example.
Is it a graph chart? Numeric reading will be inaccurate.
This also.
Run a synthetic benchmark like Unigine Superposition or 3DMark Time Spy. If the GPU is overheating due to some failure it will be noticeable there with very low clocks and score
Run userbenchmark before running WoW and look on the detailed results (not the top summary) - what’s your GPU/CPU and other component percentile. Then run WoW and when it makes problems alt-tab and run userbenchmark while the game is running. Percentiles will go down but if GPU percentile drops dramatically then it has thermal or other problem
Run latencymon and then run the game. When it start making problems alt-tab to latencymon and check what it says. If it’s all red and all with problems it may indicate drivers conflicting each other (like Nvidia sometimes can conflict with audio driver after an update that wasn’t clean, AMD - not sure but either way driver updating and cleaning is needed).
Thanks for the answers! I forgot to add all the necessary details as proper customer should! I failed to demand to get to speak with the manager tho.
@Grelier: My card has AIO water cooler so the temperature was way too high. I bought new paste today and reapplied, turned out I forgot the golden rule “less is more” and had used too much of it. Now the GPU runs cool again. The percentage issue still persists tho. My ingame fps was allready capped at 60 btw.
@Bigkeg Thanks, I shall try those programs as soon as I can and see what they show me.
I briefly tested playing with MSI afterburner’s GPU graph on and it was mostly 0 to 100% sharp spikes in exactly equal time intervals of 1-3 sec most of the time. Tried playing Witcher 3 and GPU was at 100% most of the time (no surprise) and CPU cores somewhere between 50 and 80 I think.
I thought something at work too, is it posible that my RAM is the bottle neck? If both processor and GPU have to wait constantly? I have seen a lot of threads about people complaining that WoW uses a lot of memory. I got 8 GB, but I’ll be damned if I remember the specs tho. Mother board supports DDR3 1300-2400 MHz, so gotta be some of those.
At 8GB you are pretty much fine unless other apps are running too. RAM frequency scales your CPU performance a bit.
As for the usage it’s possible to have the game being limited by how it works and not by purely CPU/GPU. And if you have 60FPS limit on then it will be even more idle.
Check one of my screenshots from benchmarks without FPS cap: https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/games.rk.edu.pl/images/wowb_kara.jpg the GPU isn’t fully utilized and even the main CPU core isn’t 100% loaded.
That was it indeed, I unchecked the fps lock and immediately CPU usage increased some 5-10 % and what’s most interesting, GPU graph now looks “normal” like CPU grap, now reaching 100% only now and then. Turned out the only problem was a problem created by myself and I learned some useful things as well! Big thanks to both of you again!
PS. I think I’ll check the fps limiter again tho, fans went on a rampage along with the fps!
