Hey!
I have been playing the beta for about 2 hours now and I feel like we need to talk about performance.
I have an RX 9070 XT, 9800x3d and 32gb DDR5 Ram on an SSD and i am averaging about 80-90 FPS in Deathknell.
This is quite a bit worse than both retail and classic, and I dont think the visual upgrade (while great) is enough to justify this kind of performance on what is essentially the highest end hardware for AMD.
Scalability is quite poor aswell in my opinion. Decreasing View Distance, Environmental Detail and Ground Clutter from 10 to 1 offers me a whopping 10 FPS increase combined. In retail changing these settings from 10-1 would give more than a 100 FPS.
Only Shadow Quality, Compute Effects, Resolution Scale and Secondary Lighting offer substantial performance improvements at a massive cost to visuals. With these settings set to their lowest I am averaging about 300 FPS which is more or less a third of the FPS I would get in TBC at about the same settings but at native 4K instead of 720p, but the game now looks like WoW Classic and not WoW Forever.
If this is the kind of performance we can expect at launch we need a better upscaler available. FSR1 does not cut it visually or performance wise.
On another note: Enabling Low Latency Mode halves my FPS. This is using the built-in option. I can’t speak on the performance impact of NVIDIA Reflex as I can’t use it.
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Try to repair game files through battle.net. For me it helps to run it normally. Nevertheless I am not sure who is the responsible for that performance issues due to on Linux, game run much better without stutters, low fps…
Yeah, I am seeing pretty much the same thing on my 4070 Ti. The difference between Retail and Forever is quite significant, especially in terms of GPU load and power consumption.
I did some testing at the same 200 FPS cap. In Retail I was around 20% GPU usage, 83W and 2610 MHz. In Forever I was around 51% usage, 134W and 2820 MHz. When I uncapped Forever, the GPU went up to 96% usage and 235W at around 324 FPS. Retail uncapped was giving me over 500 FPS while using considerably less power.
I also started getting noticeable coil whine specifically in Forever, while Retail is completely silent at 200 FPS. I eventually made an undervolt/profile at around 2175 MHz and 0.900V, which brought Forever down to around 100W while still maintaining 200 FPS, and the coil whine is now almost completely gone.
I also noticed that Compute Effects, Secondary Lighting and Shadows seem to have a disproportionate impact on performance. The problem is that lowering all of these obviously comes at the expense of the visual improvements Forever is supposed to bring.
I understand this is a beta and optimization is probably still ongoing, but I really think performance should be one of the main priorities right now. It is difficult to properly test everything else when the game itself is pushing the GPU significantly harder than Retail for what does not seem like a proportional visual improvement.
Hopefully they address this relatively early during the beta so we can properly test the rest of the game. That is the whole point of the beta after all.
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