Hey, i got an i7 4790K and gtx 970, 16gb ram pc. And i was wondering what would be a bigger upgrade in terms of fps increase in wotlk classic? Cpu or the gpu? Thanks
Impossible to say, too many variables.
However, that GPU is very old now, and I’m not sure its even still officially supported. But others will advise.
Thanks for the reply, my fps is normally good at 144, but it dips to 55-70~ mostly in big groups of people in cities or bgs etc
The more people the more complex “world state” becomes and the more limited the game becomes to single core CPU performance. If you want more than 55-70 FPS in such cases you would need one of current/upcoming CPUs.
Aside of that depend on location and datacenter lots of people could be Blizzard server/network limitations.
It is, it meets minimium requirements for Dragonflight, too.
As for OP, for WoW alone I’d probably upgrade CPU/mobo/memory first unless you want to wait for eg. new AMD CPUs. Several years ago I upgraded from 3700K to 3800X while keeping GPU (GTX970) and frame rates received massive improvement, especially after one of the BfA patches which improved multithreading.
you wont see any massive upgrade since the engine is outdated and doesnt make full use of your cpu cores.
even if you buy a 3080 / i9 you will see dips below 60 fps in mass pvp or raids.
4790k is a beast of processor i would advice you to buy a gpu with at least 8 gb vram for dragonflight since its reccomended,but if you will only play wotlk even a gtx 950 is fine.
wotlk will never use even half of the 3.5 vram your gtx 970 have.
You don’t mention your storage device - I assume it’s an SSD, but if not I’d recommend you get one as your first port of call.
Faster CPU would help but if the raid/group gets large enough there is going to be some slowdown.
Eg. when comparing your current CPU to the older 3000-series of Ryzens single thread performance the increase in the newer CPUs is quite noticeable and that is the most important factor for WoW especially in raids or other busy situations or when using big addons.
For only Wrath Classic like you asked my priority would be large enough SSD if you don’t have or it is getting full, CPU/mobo/memory and finally GPU. Obviously the best order for you depends on how else you use the computer, available budget etc. If the budget is tight you probably can find used GPUs and CPUs etc. fairly easily.
For Wrath Classic your computer is enough if the lower FPS in big groups is acceptable (and even with the new computer it is likely there would be some slowdowns when the group gets big enough).
That’s not true to be exact. WoW doesn’t really scale beyond 4 cores but scales with single core performance when it comes to combat and “mass anything” scenarios. 4790K is behind modern CPUs when it comes to single core.
not that far behind ,also depends on his motherboard,having a 4790k on a budged mb or a maximus hero is not same thing.i talk for own experience.
a 12900k is only 60% faster than a 4790k in single core performance after 8 years.
also wow never uses 100% of a 4790k single core,so the problem is the engine not his processor,like i said for wow (and its classic!) its more than more than good.
since in df they increased the processor requirement to a 6 core the 4790k will have even more performance since it has 8 and like i said if he has a maximus hero for instance he can push 4.8 on all 8 cores of the 4790k easy making it only 55% diference from a 12900k.
like i said 4790k is a beast of a processor,one of the best ever like the gtx 1080,its a very solid generation and has 8 years allready,they still cost around 300 euros too.
anything above this is overkill for wow classic.
the engine is outdated not his pc.
I mean, I played the original WOTLK with Radeon 7200 SE (64mb) GPU. 
You should be fine with your current one. O.o
60% is a lot. On top of that there are other factors like memory and it tuning. For maxing out raid/combat FPS Hardware Numbers has a lot of examples for top of the line CPUs:
https://www.youtube.com/c/HardwareNumb3rs/videos
In my case in a mass combat benchmark Ryzen 5900X gets around 90 FPS at 3440x1440 while in average dungeon run it’s 170 FPS (with RTX 3070 Ti). i5-9400F and Ryzen 3500X with the same GPU in the mass combat scenario drop to around 66 FPS, TRX 1920X barely hits 50 FPS while ancient FX-8320 is around 28 FPS. I tested quite a bit of them. Of course there is some wiggle room for each CPU with RAM and usually less with OC, especially nowadays.
Oh, it will, it will:
https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/games.rk.edu.pl/images/wowocores_load_dazaralor.png
This was for BfA when Dazar’alor was full of people. Main core handling the world state around you and other cores doing draw calls mostly. If you would go somewhere where there are no players in your field of view and not very close that single core would drop some load.
And if you would go to old instance like Karazan, and pull a lot of mobs in combat to create a complex world state you would also get that single core limit:
https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/games.rk.edu.pl/images/wowocores_load_karazan_combat.png
(And mass mobs in Karazan are quite good to test on as the results are repeatable. In real modern content this is an equivalent to worst case scenario in a raid - Denathrius mass swirls on the ground, that arena WQ in Maldraxxus on some abilities, trash mobs in BfA Uldir when they get to start casting all at once etc.)
And if you limit 9400F to 4 cores all the draw calls and stuff pile up and almost fill a quad core:
https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/games.rk.edu.pl/images/w_quad_dazar.jpg
That CPU isn’t bad but we are talking about WoW. The game is bit paranoid about keeping things consistent so that single core hurts… and it’s not only single core to be exact.
12900K is best for WoW but ONLY if you max it out with top tier DDR5 which is absurdly expensive. With DDR4 or average DDR5 performance drops… and 12400F becomes the gold value. Among Ryzens 5800X3D is best but expensive - here the extra L3 cache helps with the game without the need for extreme DDR5. Hardware Numbers has details on that.
Realistically if you want > 100 FPS in hardest mass player combat (and assuming Blizzard server isn’t dying) you need such bleeding edge hardware. If you are fine with >= 60 FPS then most modern or modern-ish hardware will handle it.
the 4790k is 8% better than a 9400f in single core and 6% in multicore despite being 5 years older…i never saw mine go to 100% in wow…but i play at 1080p maybe is that. and yeah i play with 60 fps fixed.
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