Intro
Resolution Scale is designed so that the game engine can render the scene at either a lower or higher resolution than is output on screen. This is to either (1) Improve game performance by rendering the scene at a lower resolution; (2) reduce aliasing and improve graphics quality by oversampling at the cost of performance.
Issue
The issue with Resolution Scale in WoW, is that it doesn’t actually improve performance when using a lower resolution scale - well, not for me. I’m currently using an RTX 2060, which should be flying to the moon on 1280x720 rendering resolution. It does not.
Whether using 3840x2160 or 1280x720, I am getting the same 44-47 FPS stood in Zuldazar. 720p should be running at a much higher framerate, no matter what other graphics quality settings are set to (shadows, lighting, ssao, AA). Resolution Scale being set to 33% should equate to a potential performance increase of ~900%. In all other games, this is the case. WoW seems to be different with respect to how Resolution Scale works.
Small Rant
Ever since the removal of dedicated Fullscreen mode, performance has been diminshed. Since reducing Resolution Scale doesn’t affect performance any amount, I’m stuck as to what to do, other than dramatically reduce all other settings and squeeze another 10-15 frames per second out of them. This workaround works, but it’s not ideal. There’s still the issue that Resolution Scale is not making any difference when set to a lower resolution.
Thanks for reading.
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99% sounds like a Cpu bottleneck. I have a GTX 1070 and resolution scale at 0-125% is zero fps difference. Put it on 200% (5k) and it becomes a gpu bottleneck.
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GPU is not that important in WoW like your CPU which is probably struggling here and causes low fps. I have GTX 1060 and i have 80+ stable fps on ultra.
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I think the CPU won’t be the issue. It’s an i7 980X (6c/12t) running at 3.48GHz with 6.38GT/s QPI. It’s running approximately 7-15% load [while running WoW], which isn’t too much. Doubt it’s the bottleneck in my system. RAM is Kingston Hyper-X DDR3 running at 1740MHz.
Literally every other game runs smooth as silk - WoW being the sole exception. The GTX780 I had in here before (which has more cores but clocked much lower) ran a higher framerate than the RTX 2060. I’d love Resolution Scale to work properly like it does in other games, to reduce rendering overheads and improve framerate. It seems to be the exception to the rule.
I don’t get why people keep saying the GPU isn’t that important for WoW .
Up to a point that used to be true for Vanilla WoW but the game engine has changed so much over the years , especially from Cataclysm onward .
Even with my i7 7700k and an overclocked GTX1070 Strix setting the resolution scale to 200% (3840x2160) and then maxing out every graphics setting in the menu is still a pretty tall order
Thats true, improvements have been made, but not really significant ones. WoW is still VERY CPU dependent, with a single CPU thread shouldering most of the work. While it does make use of multiple CPU cores, it still doesn’t do so efficiently or effectively.
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I confirm wow scale resolution does not wor k on any RTX nvidia card… so you ae stuck with your screen resolution. With anyone having a 4k screen, it will be impossible to have more than 60-65 fps…
On a 2060, less than 22-25 fps
on 2070, less than 30-35 fps
on 2080, less than 60 fps
no matter what you change. Even using low quality has from no impact to minor impact.
clearly a blizzard bug. I don’t understand what it is not fixed for months… Blizzard, just buy and alienware with rtx graphics,… you will see
I had a AW13r3… i7700HQ 1440p screen oled with 1060 3g… I was able to play between 60 to 80 fps easely.
now with my AWm15… with 8700HQ and 2060 6g… impossible to have more than 25 fps average… rarely I have 30 fps… maybe just in some place in boralus or inside buildings…
it is a shame
UPDATE (IMPORTANT):
If you haven’t already done so, choose to use DX12 in graphics options. This solves all the issues with performance. It was introduced with an update a while back.
Running a previous version of Windows, I was unable to make use of DX12 before the update. The graphics performance was abysmal. Now I can run 2160p resolution with no problem and get 60+ fps in most places where I would usually get only 25 fps before.
Thanks Blizz developers. Much appreciated.
Tried already multiple times… in dx12… dx11… dx11 compatible… same issue. resolution scale does not work… I can reduce to 144p, no change at all
That DX12 mode in Windows7 was amazing in the beginning. Smooth gameplay in crowded areas like Boralus or in raids felt like my pc had the same easy workload as it has when you take a stroll at the Path of Glory in Hellfire Peninsula.
It really sucks that playing in DX12 at this moment causes frequent Nvidia display driver crashes on good day and flat out bluescreens on a bad day. Especially when changing stuff in the ingame settings that takes a bit of computing (like toggling tripple buffering or v-sync) pretty much guarantees a driver crash followed by a blue screen.
I really hope Blizzard, Nvidia and/or Microsoft will fix this because when it works it works SO much better than the standard DX11 Api
Microsoft wants you to upgrade to Windows 10 