Hey guys!
I’ll start by saying the reason I placed in the title this is urgent is because I have until Friday to decide before the summer sale on my local PC store ends!
I’m not wealthy by any means, I play WoW on an older PC
(AMD Ryzen 5 3600 + Radeon RX 570 4GB + 8GB RAM)
I don’t play the game on max settings, and I get 58/60 fps on open world (Solid 60fps is enough for me! My monitor refresh rate is 60htz 1080p and that doesn’t bother me at all)
But on raids and battlegrounds (and some Dungeons) I get around 35/40 fps with bad stutters, major city hubs are also a nightmare, sometimes tanking to 25fps.
I have the chance to upgrade to:
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D + 36gb ram ddr4 + A gaming Asus motherboard.
I would still use my old video card as I cannot afford one right now.
Will that improve my FPS in any significant way?
Do you guys know If I can get a solid 60fps like this?
In the future I will also upgrade to a better GPU, what is one AMD GPU (on the budget) that would handle WoW on max settings ? (No ray tracing)
Thanks a (LOT) for any input, I’m really in a hurry here.
Edit: I might be open to Nvidia GPUs as well if there’s is something more budget friendly and efficient for this game specifically compared to Radeon AMD)
From experience WoW don’t need much at all too run decently so you wont need any high-end parts. A wild guess is RX 5700 and 16gb ram with a Ryzen 5 7600X would be more than enough too run it smoothly, specially in 1080p
Hey! thanks for the answer!
I’m really in doubt if this video card is part of the low fps problem =/
and that changing the processor will only do so much, especially considering this is a 4GB card
Thanks for the input!
right now I have DBM, Details! and Threat Plates, do you think these can have a huge difference ?
I am opening the game now and deactivating everything to see.
EDIT: Big improvement without any addons, got 50 fps stable on a raid (Up from 30-ish)
But still no solid 60 even without any addons
I doubt I’ll be more help than anyone else who has already posted, but you may need to learn to play without addons. Maybe DBM as a minimum. Details can be skipped if you party with someone else who has it since you can ask them later for reports.
I suppose you have already checked the following:
Does anything else run in the background besides WoW? A web browser with even just animated GIF can impact performance.
Do you have Power Plan set to Highest Performance from the Power settings in Windows?
Have you disabled Physics from the game settings? It has 3 options: None, your character only, your character and NPCs.
Disable VSync and/or Triple Buffering and use only Double Buffering.
Hey!
Thanks for the answer.
I completely agree with you about addons, I’ve seen the impact it has, I’m thinking about keeping DBM and details only or as you suggested, even only DBM.
I’ve tried everything on the list (I even disabled windows Defender real time scan when launching the game)
The only thing I haven’t tried was vsync off and double buffering.
Do you mind giving me an opinion on something else? do you think I’ll have performance gains upgrading only my processor to the one I mentioned above and keeping my old video card ? Or do you think upgrade the video card and the processor is a must?
I will admit I am not the best (or even among the best!) suited to answer that question, because WoW is massively more CPU-heavy than GPU-heavy. For any other game I’d advise in a glance to upgrade your graphics card, but with WoW it’s more complicated.
The sure thing is that you definitely need to upgrade your RAM quantity. 16GB is the minimum recommended for 2024, and 32GB is becoming the “norm”. At 8GB WoW is struggling even if nothing else is running and on the absolute minimum graphic settings. For me RAM usage skyrockets to 14-15GB (and heavy use of the swapfile) with 16GB of RAM installed.
Between CPU and GPU, if you are on a budget, I’d recommend first upgrading your GPU for future proofing to some card that has at least 8GB VRAM (or even better 12GB). When the time comes to upgrade your CPU, you will need to aim for a new motherboard with newer generation socket (AM5, AM6?) and an even better CPU than what is currently available on the market.
100% this. had 8gb till recently and wow felt kinda sluggish and lagged more. since i upgraded to 16gb it runs so much better. prob recommend getting two 8gb sticks tho over a 16gb one. seems to run better and lasts longer. my 16gb one died fairly quickly for some reason now using 2 8gbs with 0 issues
Unless you’re playing anything else that requires that much ram you can get away with 16gb. My PC has 16GB ram and doesn’t even touch 4GB of it for WoW iirc.
At first I thought this was true as well, but it’s not the reality.
I start up my PC. RAM usage is at 2.5GB or so.
I start battle.net. Barely reaches 3.0GB.
I start WoW while battle.net closes. Ram usage goes to around 6.0GB.
I log in on Valdrakken. Ram usage goes to 10-11GB while Task Manager says that WoW only uses 3GB.
Where’s the rest???
Ok, so I exit WoW. Logic dictates that since WoW is reported to use only 3GB, RAM usage will go down by only 3GB. Well it goes down by 8GB down to 3.0GB!! Either Task Manager doesn’t report RAM usage correctly (and Resource management as well, I’ve checked that as well) or for some reason my PC decides to reserve 5GB of extra RAM for the lulz.
And as you move around in the game, more textures are loaded which take up even more RAM.
-=EDIT=-
Yep, 32GB over 16GB nowadays is a no-brainer. The difference in cost is so negligible and the benefit is outstanding, especially down the years.
The instance of WoW is using that 3GB but the extra “used” will include cached stuff for quicker access, this likely includes WoW related stuff if its a common thing you use on the computer. If the computer needs more memory for programs it will dump some of the cached memory to benefit whatever the computer needs the memory for at that time.
Just FYI I logged into the game and flew around in a few zones before returning to Valdrakken, I was at around 3-3.2GB the majority of the time with it spiking to 3.9 when entering Valdrakken before lowering to 3.5GB and hovering around there.
That is really interesting
This would partially explain the poor performance I have on my current PC, I’m really looking forward to see how it’s gonna be after the upgrades ^^
The delivery should be sometimes next week, maybe Tuesday, I will have to do a clean windows install after that but once it’s done I will come back here and report =))
Might help a bit, for your current PC, if you direct resources towards WoW while you’re playing it.
When your game is running go to Task Manager [Ctrl+Alt+Del], go to the DETAILS tab, right click on WoW.exe and “Set Priority” to ‘High’ or ‘Realtime’.
And while you’re at it, End Task for any nonessential programs running in the back ground, even your browser while playing [use your Smartphone ] – so you squeeze out as much as possible. Do some spring cleaning on your PC while you’re at it clearing out junk and unused stuff - low memory on the drive Windows is installed can also impact performance.
And lastly – use Inky Black Potions [from Darkmoon Faire]… I find they improve my fps while outdoors.
The RTX3060 is perfect, although its an old(ish) card now - 12GB VRAM and they are pretty cheap, got 2 coming my way soon - one for my sons rig and one for mine (we both got 1660 supers atm)
] – so you squeeze out as much as possible. Do some spring cleaning on your PC while you’re at it clearing out junk and unused stuff - low memory on the drive Windows is installed can also impact performance.