Strange GPU Usage

So, pre 9.1 or even possibly pre new NVIDIA drivers to fix the stupid flickering bug. My GPU NvidaGTX 1080 never ran hotter than 50c, but since the patch in certain areas my fan goes mental and my GPU gets very hot very quickly.

This was mostly noticeable in Spires of Ascension, where just before the 2nd boss it jumped to 70% power usage and started rapidly spinning the fans to cool itself, now I’d ran that dungeon plenty of times on plenty of characters and it never used to skyrocket my fan usage or force my GPU to use its full clock speed.

This problem persists no matter what settings I run at, I can run at the preset 8, or the preset 1 and the issue is the same, full clock speed, high power usage in these spots

Have blizzard changed how the game renders certain lighting effects or what, because it’s quite concerning for my PC to suddenly turn into a jet engine.

Actually I don’t have any problems on my 1070. Did you check if anything is running in the background?

There is still a bug in SoA and possibly other places where GPU is flooded with pixels to shade on an absurt level - this kills performance but if the GPU is good enough player may not notice it (aside of GPU on high load having fans ramping). If this happens only in SoA then it’s likely that bug. If not also check other options:

Check task manager to see if there isn’t some app that is using a lot of the hardware - somethimes things like even Windows wallpaper rotator can go crazy and eat a lot of GPU/CPU.

Also check without addons. Sometimes old or misbehaving addon can flood the game with errors or trying to render some UI constantly.

Then in the end - Nvidia drivers sometimes during update or Windows update can conflict with other drivers. This can be checked with latencymon third party app but the solution is to remove Nvidia drivers with DDU, update all other drivers if present (like motherboard audio drivers) and then install Nvidia drivers fresh.

I’ve checked background apps and addons, all of them are barely using the GPU, the closest was Chrome and that was only 1% usage, I can see on MSI afterburner that it’s only when wow’s open so wow is definitely the culprit

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If it’s in specific locations like SoA then it’s likely that known WoW bug, if it’s general then it’s either driver conflict or things like addons or settings got reset and you have no frame limit set and the GPU is rendering way more frames than needed (your display refresh rate).

I have frame limit set to 60, but it did seem to either be after 9.1 or after a windows update two days ago, so I’m trying to figure out whats making it go nuts

  • Try other game that wasn’t spinning GPU that hard

  • Run latencymon
  • Run wow while latencymon is running
  • When GPU spins hard alt-tab and see if latencymon is all read and screaming about nvidia driver

If so remove Nvidia drivers with DDU and then install them fresh. And if not try wow with no addons (not only disabled but also removed). If that doesn’t help we can go deeper…

Oh I also ran latencymon for 30m, doesn’t seem to have shown any faults. I’ll do SOA with it active now and see.

Hi, I have been expirencing this fps/flickering since 9.05 atleast. Been desperate. Today I found a link which helped me so far atleast. I only did the Fix 1.

I’ve seen u in many threads Bigkeg, maybe u can spread this around if it works for other ppl.

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/solved-world-of-warcraft-low-fps/#:~:text=Your%20device%20drivers%2C%20especially%20the,updates%20on%20a%20regular%20basis.&text=You%20can%20update%20your%20drivers,Pro%20version%20of%20Driver%20Easy.

Theres a few areas causing issues right now the left area of Korthia as an example, I wouldn’t waste your time with reinstalling nvidia’s drivers just yet.

I’m running a AMD RX9800xt and still getting my frames drop to between 30 and 40 (usually sit around 110-120 anywhere else. Spires is also causing some more gpu usage will have to monitor it more closely next time I’m there.

Just tested windswept aerie in Korthia, ur right there is a fps drop there still.
But I had huge problems in Oribos, bastion, the new arena etc. they seem stable.

Just went to spires, suddenly i hit 70% GPU usage and it shot up to 73c, the only way I could get it to go down was to cap my FPS at 40 instead of 60

That’s the WoW bug and you can’t really do anything about it:

https://rk.edu.pl/en/analyzing-wow-shadowlands-spires-ascension-905-performance-regression/

Flickering was on Nvidia side. They fixed it in one of the latest drivers.