Low fps low hardware usage

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1

So I’ve been searching for an answer for my problem for a long time but all I can find is “its the game” but I can’t find an actual fix and I know wow can run better so I’ll just post my problem with some extra details and hope for the best.

So I am getting very low fps all the time, Currently sat in Boralus at around 35-45 FPS using my own optimized settings to get max fps without looking like garbage, close to default setting 7.
This is the absolute max FPS I can get inside a city or with more than 4 people on screen, in open world about 40-50 Sometimes 60 but never more than that and very rarely.
Inside dungeons I drop to about 30-40, in raids about 25-35 and in epic battlegrounds 20-30fps apart from Ashran which is more like 10-25 so not a big difference between all situations minus epic BGs and dropping 10-20 frames going from Boralus to a raid is understandable but the main problem is that my CPU and GPU usage is very low around 60% max with my daily settings, I’ll add more detail below.
If anyone has any ideas please let me know.

What I’ve done so far

  • Full UI reset (no change in fps)
  • Removed all addons (+5fps maybe)
  • Tried all different preset graphics setting and recommended
  • Updated graphics drivers (no change)
  • Rolled back graphics driver (no change)
  • Overclocking CPU and GPU (+5fps)
  • Total reinstall of WoW (no change)
  • Complete system reinstall (wipe every hard drive clean and a full new install of windows) (no change but slightly faster loading times)
  • Tried putting WoW on SSD (no change in fps, faster load times, no duh)
  • Turned off shadowplay (+5fps)
  • A lot of other things I forgot about

For comparison I moved around the same spot in Boralus with my usual settings and recorded data, then I changed settings then closed the game, opened it, loaded in fully, waited a couple minutes for all the loading to be done and then recorded data and rinse repeat.
I know wow mostly only uses 1 core so all the CPU readings below will the the highest of every single core available I wont bother listing the lower % as its irrelevant.

Lowest settings possible
With advanced settings all disabled or on their lowest setting got me an average of 56 fps with a range of 43-61.
CPU usage never went above 60% averaging about 49% on the highest core
CPU Temperature stable at 47-52 degrees Celsius
GPU usage never went above 47% averaging about 34%
GPU temperature average of 46 degrees with a max of 51 degrees

Maximum settings
10/10 settings most advanced settings turned on got an average of 38 fps with a range of 18-51.
CPU usage never went above 75% averaging about 65% on the highest core
CPU Temperatures stable at 48-55 degrees
GPU Usage never went above 71% averaging about 55%
GPU temperature average of 52 degrees with a max of 56 degrees

My own optimized settings
Got an average of 43 fps with a range of 38-55
(I’ll list the major changes I have under the results)
CPU usage never went above 70% averaging about 65% on the highest core
CPU Temperatures stable at 47-54 degrees
GPU usage never went above 62% averaging about 50%
GPU Temperature average of 52 degrees with a max for 55

My daily graphics settings are set to 10/10 but I change the following:

  • Texture filtering 8x Anisotropic
  • View Distance 7
  • Enviroment Detail 7
  • Ground clutter 7
  • Shadows low
  • Liquid detail good
  • Sunshafts disabled
  • Particle Density high

These are all the most effective changes for performance/quality

I have not tried all these settings inside raids but my own results are at the top of the post and I tried overall settings of 5 and only gained about 5-10 fps compared to my settings with similar hardware usage and lowest settings gained me another 5-10 so a max of 20fps boost from my setting which look pretty good to absolute potato graphics.

My Hardware specs

Operating system: Windows 10 Home
Processor : Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.00GHz
CPU Cooler : Corsair H80i GT Hydro Cooler
Graphics Card : GeForce GTX 970 iChill Herculez X4 Air Boss Ultra 4GB GDDR5 PCI-Express
Motherboard : ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. B85-PRO GAMER (SOCKET 1150)
Power Supply : 850W XFX Pro Black Edition-Full Modular
RAM : 16GB Corsair Vengeance (2x8GB) DDR3 2133 Mhz
Hard drives/SSD : -120GB SanDisk SSD
WoW is currently on the SSD but was on a HDD beforehand (Was a clean reinstall to the SSD did not manually move)

That’s everything I can think of, thanks for taking the time to read it all, as you can see there really is not much difference in FPS between my setting and max everything, low settings did give the best results obviously but I can’t play like that I know my PC specs are quite old but should still be able to run at 60fps+ which currently it can barely do on lowest settings, the main issue is the CPU and GPU usage being so low when it clearly has more room to pump out more fps, it just is not doing it, also just for anyone wondering it’s not a ram problem I never use more than 75% of my RAM.

TL:DR, never getting more than 60 FPS stable on any graphic settings with CPU and GPU usage never going above 75%

Any ideas or help would be much appreciated, thanks again!

Edit Ok just read that wow now has multi thread support with dx12 but that just makes me more confused, I am running dx12

2

I was running a gtx 970 for a long time, and I had pretty much the same experience you describe here. It just doesn’t cut it anymore i guess… Upgraded to 2070, no issues, everything is extremly smooth. Consider upgrading GPU, cause I don’t think you can get much more out of min-maxing settings on outdated hardware. :slight_smile:

3

If it were a hardware issue something would be maxing out usage but 60% usage shows that it is not using all the resources available, not even close and BFA recomended hardware is a 960, the 970 is a 50% improvement over the 960 and im still getting sub 60fps that’s not right at all. Plus WoW is not very GPU intensive

4

hmm, well… If you want more fps, I guess it will come at the cost of graphics quality. If you want to keep the graphics quality, I don’t know what you can do to improve it with your current hardware setup :slight_smile:

5

Ok not to be rude but you clearly don’t know what you’re talking about in this, if my hardware usage is at 60% and giving me 45 fps something is wrong, lets say it should be hovering around the 90% area giving me a solid 60. There is nothing wrong with my hardware and the “get a better PC” argument is invalid, im not going to shell out to get a new PC for a game that recommendeds hardware well well below what I have, if my usage was 100% all the time and I was getting low FPS then yes, that is a hardware problem but when I have 40% more power just not being used that is not a hardware problem.

6

This sounds to me like the CPU is most likely a bottleneck here.

Again an indication that the CPU is the bottleneck

Considering you have an i7, is this 50% of a core/100% of a thread or is this 50% of the thread and 25% of the core? Have you tried without hyperthreading?

This is very CPU intensive afaik, not sure if CUDA does anything here, perhaps it’s configured?

In raids/crowded areas I also get a big drop in FPS, so I use raid settings where everything is very low.

I have a ryzen 2600, which should be about the same performance and I don’t have any bottlenecks here. Have you made sure that windows is running in high performance mode and not balanced?

I believe this is more towards rendering and specifc calls being multi-threaded, rather than CPU being used multi-threaded, could be wrong though.

10/10 sounds way too high for your system to be honest. Figure out which settings are heavy on your CPU and try to lower them, of which ground clutter and view distance can for sure make a difference.

7

Try changing the API to DX11 the 900 series cards tend to perform worse in DX12.

8

Thanks for the helpful replies I’ll answer in order posted

Im pretty sure the only reason I got an fps boost from removing addons is my RAM, I use a a few high memory addons, I switched them out today and things are maybe slightly better.

It is 50% 1 of the 4 cores, looking at each individual thread 6 of them are around 30-40% and the 2 are hovering around 60%

I’ve messed with particle density a lot as that was my first thought but I get almost no difference between lowest and highest settings maybe 5fps difference but thats the most it does, I also tried using raid settings lower but I get around the same fps and my hardware usage just goes down even further.

Windows is on High performance I have also set high performance in the bios

10/10 is way too high for my system which is why I turn down some settings, I get a good FPS boost from lowering view distance, enviroment detail and ground clutter but only to a point, anything below 7 and I get no performance increase,
Shadows are the worst so they are set to lowest, water is also pretty bad so that is turned down but apart from that no other settings give a reasonable boost to my fps while the hardware usage stays the same maybe dropping by 5-10%.
but unless there is something wrong with my hardware or the game I dont see why all my hardware usage is so low, not a single bit of hardware is maxing out, not even close to maxing out and yet trash fps

I tried using DX11 and dropped another 5-10fps, its back on dx12 now

Thanks for the replies.

9

Increasing the resolution scaler will increase GPU load with no affect on CPU. Try 133% scale. You can use GPU-Z to monitor this.

The view distance slider mostly depends on your CPU. If you like high fps, anything over 4 will start to give you problems on that tier of CPU in new zones.

Having said this, you should be getting more than 40fps with a 4790K/970 combo. My i7-920/970 system gets 60-75fps with an optimized setup similar to the first post.

10

Increasing the resolution scaler will increase GPU load with no affect on CPU. Try 133% scale. You can use GPU-Z to monitor this.

The view distance slider mostly depends on your CPU. If you like high fps, anything over 4 will start to give you problems on that tier of CPU in new zones.

Having said this, you should be getting more than 40fps with a 4790K/970 combo. My i7-920/970 system gets 60-75fps with an optimized setup similar to the first post.

Ok this did actually boost GPU usage which is nice to see, I get no fps increase but no decrease either, one thing I did just notice is that I get more FPS with vsync on, its actually playable in almost every single situation minus epic battlegrounds, not sure why though as this never had an impact before so I guess it must be 2 or more specific settings that have to be right for my system.
I don’t really care to find out what the issue is all I care about is I am getting a solid 60 in all cities and open world and 50 in raids so that is absolutely fine for me, I will post my exact graphics settings for others to try if they have similar issues.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions and help I really appreciate it!

These are my graphics setting that work the best, solid 60 in cities and openworld, 50fps in raids 40fps in epic BGs

[Graphic settings]

Display mode: full screen
Window size: 1920x1080
Resolution scale: 133%
Monitor: Primary
Anti-Aliasing: MSAA 2x
Vertical sync: enabled
Graphics quality: 8
Texture resolution: high
Texture filtering: 16x
Projected textures: enabled
View distance: 7 (turn this down by 2-3 on enable raid settings)
Environment detail: 7 (turn this down by 2-3 on enable raid settings)
Ground clutter: 7 (turn this down by 2-3 on enable raid settings)
Shadow quality: low
Liquid detail: good
Sunshafts: high
Particle density: Ultra (turn this down on enable raid settings)
SSAO: ultra
Depth effects: high
Outline mode: high

[Advanced]

Triple Buffering: disabled
MSAA: color 2x
Multisample Alpha test: enabled
Post Process AA: none
Resample quality: Bilinear
Grahpics API: DX12
Physics interactions: player only
UI scale: 1.0
Max fps: 60 (on both sliders)

Hope this helps someone

Thanks again for all the help everyone