I have very stable FPS during combat. My FPS only drops in cities. I don’t use any Weakauras other than gcd-cursor, so maybe that’s the reason. Your plater profile could also be an issue
You have 200 fps in Dornogal ?
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Not in Dornogal, no… that I cannot claim.
Although my Mac can handle >100 at 4K in the open world. 8/10 settings.
Remember, this is a MacBook Pro. Not a PC!
Let’s see what my Linux box can do.
EDIT: Hmm, we’re doing worse than normal. I did just update it. Maybe something broke idk.
Anyway, I hope we can agree that there’s no problem?
Dornogal:
None of this strikes me as particularly unoptimized tbh. Whatever this is, it isn’t the rendering engine.
That’s obviously on the lower side, but honestly no 5-man dungeon or even 30 player raid should be worse than the game’s biggest city. But it brings me to 15 FPS.
Combat really is broken.
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20% on CPU usage is oh SO hard bottlenecking, because 20% CPU usage means that at least one core (depending on total core count) is running at a constant 100% usage. And guess what: That means it is at it’s limit with calculations, which means the game needs to wait for the CPU to finish them before new ones can be issued.
Hence:
the CPU is stopping the GPU.
Again: 20% CPU usage means the Main Core, that WoW uses for it’s Main Thread, is running at 100% capacity.
Yes, even a 7800X3D is not capable of munching down the main thread calculations effortlessly. It is bottlenecking the system, too, but just not as bad as other CPUs due to the L3 3D chache.
CPUs are not designed for such high amounts of single core calculations, that’s a thing that is physically impossible to achieve with how computer technologie is manufactured and working on physical level.
No… no. Nonono.
Windows, stupidly in my opinion, considers 100% usage to be full blast on every core, every hyperthread, low power and high power core available.
UNIX systems like macOS and Linux, by contrast, has two different ways of reporting it, though usually presents the first of these: Core utilization, where 100% is full utilization of a single core and 1200% is full utilization of all 12 cores on a 12 core CPU, and Overall CPU utilization, which is scaled to 100% like Windows.
It looks a little bit like this:
If the CPU core utilization is a multiple of overall CPU utilization, you’ve probably got some trouble.
That is not the case however, and we can actually break it down with some terminal hackery (I’m afraid that’s how it works in Linux when the questions get complex 
):
That looks pretty nicely spread to me, not gonna lie.
Btw you’re look at a 7800X3D. Coincidentally.
Lol I drop to 40-50 fps in dornogal then yo-yo between 90-120 in blitz and 140 in shuffle or arena in general. Dornogal is just the worst its terrible but the micro stutter annoys me the most since df prepatch
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What is causing drops in the city? No way it’s player’s polygons and textures.
Pretty much is. 
There is no LoD or culling on player characters.
Lagaran Shattlag never forgettispaghetti. I wonder what it’s like on AD…
A lot of the tricks that make modern games look so good is actually mostly some pretty clever trickery that involves A LOT of reuse. The more unique assets you need, the harder it gets on the GPU.
If you want proof, I’d point you to the fact that it’s hard for a Steam Deck to run Morrowind. Seriously. Because they modelled every rock completely independently. Almost no polygons but gotta load a ton of 'em onto the GPU. Slows everything down.
But these are player characters and they all look completely different.
Cata client high settings nice fps no stutters in Orgrimmar loaded with players.
TWW client lowest possible settings, not so nice fps in Orgrimmar with a few players.
How?
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More complex character models. It’s that simple.
Look what happens when I turn off raytracing and lower shadows:
Keep in mind that shadows is rendering the entire geometry. The more complex the models, the higher the FPS penalty for shadows.
What Blizzard is doing is using a lot of their quite sophisticated tech very poorly. For example, they have raytraced shadows, but instead of using it for the whole scene with natural light sources and making it look really awesome, they just spawn a light on the north-west of every character and use ray traced shadows only on it for that light source.
It’s absolutely ridiculous really.
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Doesn’t change the fact, that WoWs Main Thread pretty much 100%nts the used cores Single Thread capability for the time it’s calculating.
The Main Thread is just too gigantic for a single core to be fast enough to not bottleneck the rest of the system.
Nah, more the background calculation stuff going on like players positions, movements, the calculations for cast spells, NPC movements and actions, communication of all of this stuff between client and server, incorporating the information that the sevrer calculates and gives the client. That’s heavier than the graphics calculations.
All of this important calculations happen in one single thread. That’s too heavy for any CPU to not bottleneck the system.
Were you actually looking at those images or do you just quote and then ignore them?
This is what the game does outside of combat.
Inside of combat it sends combat log events to different threads, allowing LUA to execute them independently, though if you use a lot of globals things can get pretty messy there.
But little does it matter for there are so many it’s hard to overstate it. Just a single player will generate upwards of 6-20 combat log events PER SECOND. DoT ticks, AoE, etc. and every single one of these needs to roll damage, crit chance, and a massive amount of procs, and many of them also have a visual effect and it just gets massively out of control.
And then you have 80 of them in an AV or whatever.
There is no game engine in existence that can run this. No, not even Unreal. This is the class designers.
In Dornogal? You think these barely active players are causing large amounts of game events? Lol.
Micro stutters and skyriding in general began popping up after DF prepatch. Bottlenecking or not Im saying its not the main issue here related the performance issues as it clearly went worse through df prepatch.
Similar thing how there has always been addons in this game and yet through df prepatch the game started run worse. Theres something else they need to fix aswell which change drastically with df and atleast for me game were fine before df. Maybe cause they altered the whole game ui and introduced skyriding and such in df and whatever else they changed.
It was not a 386. The Intel 386 was designed and released mid 80’s.
I used one. I used an intel 8008 and the 8088.
The first gen texas instruments calculator had more computing power than the CPU that got sent to the moon.
A basic casio watch from the very early 80’s of course had more power than that as well.
The memory of that computer that went to the moon was however bombproof. Hard coded on/off binary switches that had zero chances of developing “ghsots” in the machine. Their calculations were truly based on a binary on/off theory.
The memory was handwoven by pro seamstresses. The memory alone is worthy of a whole separate documentary.
If kids learned DOS they might be able to understand their computers better since many of those commands are still present in windows today. Under the GUI of course. But there.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project…will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important…and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
- John F, Kennedy
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I hope they do something for the next expansion even if they need ask help from NASA to end the stuttering in game.
I remember seeing that woven memory, it’s honestly impressive to see someone come up with that idea and the reasons behind it!
NASA programming rules are very…tedious XD
And probably complicate a lot of things in a project like a game.
Here is the thing about computers.
They are very complex. There are hundreds of processes running, each with their own priorities.
Stuttering can be any number of things. From bottle necks in any number of hardware items to failed/failing USB drivers that will connect and reconnect items that may , or may not, be attached to the system, thousand of times a second. And that is causing your stuttering. Could be. Dont know
If you want to get rid of this you are going to have to be sherlock holmes for a while.
The event viewer in windows can be helpful to see what is going on. For instance it might tell you that you are getting critical errors even though the systems continues to function “normally”. But these errors are bad.
They helped me diagnose a computer that was shutting down at random.
Not heat related.
No dust in case.
Good air flow.
Changed cables. One at a time to make sure it was not faulty SATA cables or power cables or any other cable. Nope, not it.
Memory seated, CPU seated, GPU seated and lockled in place? Yup.
Fresh thermal paste so its not shutting down due to heat? Freash pase applied.
Tried brand new DDR4 sticks. Nope, did not fix it.
Tried brand new motherboard with old CPU. Nope still not fixed but now we are getting really close.
Took power supply to shop to to have them test it. I should have done this first but i had a suspicion that was not it. Shop said it was fine.
Looked in the even viewer again in more detail. Noticed some criticals were related to power.
It cant be some POS 5 dollar power switch. No way.
Yes way. It was the front panel power switch which seemed to open connection at random.
Since power switches only complete a circuit, if if fails it will interupt that circuit. Meanin there is a power shutdown.
MId way through this process i had a funny feeling it was the switch. Even my training should have made me look at the dwitch sooner but us humans like to not think of the easy stuff by default.
I can make a few suggestions.
press windows key +R
type in msconfig then enter
startup tab - disable all if anything is set to start.
Have a printer? No? Then you dont need it polling so turn the service of in the services tab.
Any other hardware no longer in use that is running services? Disable same way.
You can read the descriptions of the services in a seaparatte window by typing
windows key +R then type services.msc then enter.
Anything that your computer does not use and there will be items there you should be able to figure out you dont need. in the services window that has the list use the status button at the top to toggle it so the running services are all lined up at the top. Th atwill make it easier for you to read and to decide of something should get disabled or not.
Not everything in that list needs to run or even be allowed to start up every time you start your computer.
Think of Microsoft turning it all on for you just in case you might want it on. All tha tis not necessary. Some of them even cause issues. But that is another matter.
I can tell you some items you can turn off with nearly no consequences
Themes - this is visual eye candy and uses resources you may not have
Windows Search
Print Spooler if no printer present
Shared PC account manager - if a shared computer obviously leave on
Routing and Remote access - anybody that has this enabled is aking for trouble. Only do so if you are planning on either planning on connecting with somebody else or allowing somebody else to get inside your computer and control it. Dont let anybody ever do that with your computer. I would even go as fas as saying that a remote tech support service should not be allowed to do this and i am in tech support. A work computer? Yeah, fine. Home? No no.
Connected User Experience and Telemetry - Sounds nice eh? Its spyware. Turn that crap off. This is microsoft spying on you. It is worse in windows 11 i hear. Its called Recall and they want the ability to send a picture of what you are doing on your computer every 15 to the cloud. So you can remeber where crap is in your computer is the official line. Believe that? Yeah. Ive got a bride to sell ya.
Remote Registry - off…till you need it on obviously.
Net TCP port sharing service -ancient tech being given modern day support. Off.
I should have prefaced this with this statement. You need windows pro version to do most of that. Home versions wont let you at last count. Might have changed but i doubt it.
So that is a very small list of what you can turn off. Then we can also have stuff with a delayed start or manual start so things start only when needed or a delayed startup. As in they start up, on start up but the start up is delayed.
further software tweaks
get crapcleaner aka ccleaner. Brilliant and very helpful piece of sofrware
Clean your regisrty.
Delete all temp files actually do this before cleaning the registry
If you do not use a sold state disk and still use an older hard disk then defrag your system after all of the above.
If you have a SSD then a trim would not hurt. Most do it automatically but i would not assume they all do this. That will free up free space and truly unlock free space on the SSD.
I think you got your hands full here for awhile. Have fun
I think I know why after sleeping on it, because for me at least disabling raytracing instantly and completely fixes the issue.
What I think is happening has a lot to do with an algorithm called ReSTIR. It is an algorithm developed by NVIDIA and copied by just about everybody else now, and it is famous for enabling real-time raytracing.
Some technical explanation
You see raytracing, which used to be called path tracing the way we’re talking about it these days, is actually a seriously complicated problem. You have to solve the light equation, which tells us that the light coming into the camera at any given pixel is a nasty integral that can only be solved through approximation and recursion - in other words we must find the total light hitting any other light source, and we must do this recursively until we are satisfied with what the camera sees.
What ReSTIR does is it reuses the amount of light hitting each area of the frame by shooting the light rays from the camera instead of the light sources and using normals, and then remembering the light for as many frames until the geometry changes enough that the lighting must be discarded. It also reuses the lighting of nearby areas, assuming that they are broadly similar to those around it through a method of applying a probability density function and importance sampling to determine where to shoot rays in the first place.
It is a very fascinating subject and if you want to know more about it, here’s a pretty good and intuitive start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsZiJeaMO48
What’s important here is that it takes some time before a shadow is ready. Now, I have never seen WoW render an incomplete shadow, and the shadows are simple (just one model), so what I think is happening is that the engine is waiting for the shadow to be sufficiently good before resuming giving you frames.
And on a flying mount which moves very fast and causes the geometry to change rapidly, this is a pretty big problem.
If the problem does not go away for you when turning raytracing off, there’s a secondary reason, which is that shaders must be compiled. That causes a lot of stutter in a lot of games and Microsoft’s compiler is very slow, which means that DirectX games tend to stutter if the developer does not do an unusually good job of precompiling.
Fortunately for me, on Linux we use as different compiler called Spir-V which is much, much faster. It was made with Vulkan in mind but compiles both HLSL (DirectX) and GLSL (OpenGL) shaders.
Microsoft just announced they’re binning their own compiler in favour of Spir-V for Windows games, so you may see less stutter in the future.
Dragonflight’s combat is also notably more complicated than Shadowland’s is. One of my top threads of all time in terms of likes talks about how much confusion there is and how many effects spawn, and this affects both us and the computer in extreme cases. And we are definitely in an extreme case right now.
I’m going to link a video here. There’s a lot of explanation because he’s trying to explain what he’s doing for his rotation, but this is a frost-fire frost mage, and I want you to notice his WeakAuras:
This looks very similar to mine also
You will quickly see that not only does he have the usual insanity of weakauras, they are also changing colours and there’s more rows at the bottom of his screens.
You can of course also see it on the buff frames - not that you’d ever be able to make sense of it.
Note also that this is just his rotation. We’re not even looking at what other players are doing or any of the other things he wants to do.
Clearly, this is not fun. Clearly, there’s too much going on which is not under Manathers control. Now, Manather actually disagrees with me on this, and I do not understand why. I mean just look at it, I swear to God flying a plane is less complicated than that. It certainly is at full realism settings in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.
And of course the game is keeping up with 30 players having all this going on in a raid.
It doesn’t work. And I don’t think any level of engine optimisation is going to fix it, and I honestly don’t care either, because this should not exist. The class should not become rocket science to simply attack an enemy doing nothing to you at all. That should be simple because you’re not fighting anything really.
Now, I realise you’ve all started talking about sending a spaceship to the moon - but I assure you that those calculations were less complicated than what WoW is doing every single second. It’s not an optimisation issue at all. The calculations for Apollo were of course much more precise and needed to be, and there were a whole bunch of other technical challenges.
What that video is showing bugs out all the time, but a single bug in Apollo is a disaster.
But do not for a moment think that WoW isn’t a complicated program. It is a VERY complicated program.
I dont have raytracing on, the stuttering has been in the game since df its in the game 
I see. Well, must be something else then. Could be shader stuttering.
Try Linux? xD
I know, ain’t likely, but hey it worked for me so if you’ve got some time to kill and a spare SSD, might wanna give it a chance.
Or wait for Spir-V to be used on Windows. Should be reaedy in the 25H1 update I suspect.