I’m not sure it’s just the textures, though they certainly don’t help, but for sure Retail is horribly optimised. My usual line is the the dev team must have their shares in nVidia rather than Activision-Blizzard, because they seem to be working for the people who want us to buy hardware more than the game itself.
There is nothing “incredibly weak” about the RTX 3060. Even my GTX 1650 does a pretty good job in rendering. For Render software like Blender, it doesn’t really matter how good your GPU, but how you set up your rendering process is and how much model/texture optimization you did before the rendering. The Cards only define a fixed modicum of render speed on default values.
That being said, from my current Laptop GPU this is still a 300% upgrade AND (this is the clue btw) since the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G has an integrated GPU is, I can ALSO use it for rendering ALONGSIDE the RTX at the same time, hence why I have so much RAM space, that I can use to make the CPU use more resources for storing temporary render data while rendering, making the rendering procedure faster.
I happen to use Blender for my day to day work, and this is just objectively false. Cycles render performance scales linearly with the compute power of your GPU. The more rays it can cast in a cycle, the faster your scene will render accurately.
Material optimization is important for everyone of course, there’s loads of tricks to reduce render time, but in the end, at some point, you will hit the limits of your GPU. A 3060 is a woefully inadequate card for any 3DCGI professional. You are never going to throw a 128 GB RAM requiring scene at a card like that.
That is true. But wasn’t the point of my statement. Sure, a better GPU processor speeds up the process, but that only makes it faster. More VRAM on the other hand means that more complicated models and textures can be rendered at the same time due to less strict memory limitations.
Oh, you bet I will.
Those 128GB are mainly for scenes building, big scenes with lots of polygons (pre-baking) and sculpting in general, alongside of having a large puffer for all sorts of software running in the background.
Very focused expertise you have there if you think it’s RAM, especially since you can just take a look at the system monitor.
Even more sighworthy is the first commenter’s clichée claim it’s the internet connection speed.
Much better guesses would have been SSD/HDD or single core performance, or GPU if it is weak.
And those who understand this specific case will know that it’s the game code, especially since realm phasing was added to the whole thing. When you enter a populated zone quickly that is relatively small and thus has to initialize activity across maybe dozens of clients and sync them all, there is little time to smooth that out, although it’s not impossible but might create synching issues in edge cases.
When performance still suffers when not moving, that would be game code not being very optimized for highlevel activity. That then would be related to world boss fights and such, where even if I turn the usual suspect, the name badges addon, off, it barely makes a framerate difference.
WoW’s game code has apparently been partially overhauled several times to adapt to modern tech, while it also has to provide good legacy compatibility.
Interestingly, I am running on Windows 7, and WoW’s DX12-for-W7 implementation (provided by Microsoft because big business made it convincing enough) results in significantly higher framerate than DX11 Legacy mode, while the regular DX11 mode I previously used under that name doesn’t even work anymore.
Personally I think that legacy compatibility is holding the game back. There could be done so much probably if Blizzard would be willing to take the step and say “ay, guys. Yeah your PC from 10+ years ago might be still ok, but we are holding back this game development by still supporting your hardware.”
Raising the hardware requirements would be holding profits back. This is a game that depends a lot on old machines, on mass accessibility, and with graphical setting on low it still looks quite alright in part due to its artistic visual style, and so people can more or less run it on a toaster, and probably do because it’s MMOcDonald’s, and there might be plenty of retention of really old customers.
Now imagine the drama ensuing if people are forced to either spend money on new hardware, with all the hassle that might ensue, or not being able to play anymore.
This is related to why Steam also still needs to run on Windows 7 and such. It’s a DRM system, so if you cannot run it anymore, you are locked out from your game library. That’s always an ugly situation, and it is much easier to provide legacy support, also because choosing to dump that would actually constitute considerable effort to actually utilize the opened potential for optimization, if that is even dependent on not having legacy support as an alternative.
The reason why the game has been making small scarce technical advances might be because this is the decision made by management to be best for the business scheme overall. This just isn’t a game to push into the new generation. The game itself is kinda legacy in its nature. And Blizzard has other products to cover the modern gaming mainstream that caters to gamer kids with expensive rigs or a new cheap latest-tech one every other year or so.
This will still give you bad FPS in Valdrakken. I have a 5800x and it is bad. The only real way to get better FPS right now is a 5800x3d because of how the caches work in the 3d card.
I have a 3070 and that’s already not strong enough for proper rendering
