Yo, I’ve got some technical questions regarding game’s performance. During rush hours in Ironforge my framerate drops to around 30fps when looking directly at the crowd hanging out in front of the bank what is pretty… bad. My laptop is a bit dated but still capable of handling games like GTA V in 1080p with high settings, so it seems a little weird that it can’t handle WoW (I didn’t even max out the graphics, just left it set to “Classic”). I opened my task manager and turns out that WoW uses like 35-50% of my GPU power at most. My drivers are up to date, I’m not mining any bitcoins while playing, Nvidia is set to performance mode, GPU is not damaged in any way, generally everything should be wild and free.
Is there any way to “force” WoW to put a lil bit more pressure on the GPU? Or is the game just incapable of using more resources?
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If your hardware is up to the task, turning graphics options up can actually (marginally) improve FPS simply by making your GPU boost a bit higher.
Sadly WoW, even the retail version with better Multicore support etc is just starting to show it’s age and is really bad at taking advantage of new hardware.
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Your limiting factor is single thread CPU performance. WoW Classic is game from 2004 year. Don’t expect it to put any significant load on GPU which can handle GTA V.
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As said above, WoW is a very cpu heavy game which doesn’t use multi-core.
When there’s a lot of spells or players in a zone, things tend to get messy.
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So upgrading my hardware wouldn’t improve things that much? Anyone with RTXes out here?
Could be, it won’t use any more than 25% of my CPU. But I’ve always thought there aren’t that many things that CPU can be utilized for here. WoW doesn’t have any kind of physics, AI that needs to be calculated client-wise, etc. Merely just “stupid” simple graphics.
Well the engine certainly differs from the 2006 version. I’ve had much more problems running it properly on my current hardware so they improved it in some ways… maybe not enough?
Actually, the way wow uses the cpu was announced to change around the end of legion, i didn’t really follow up afterwards.
But tie that in with use of the modern API and updated graphics, and a crowded zone becomes a lagfest.
I got a 2070 and I saw barely any upgrade(In WoW) from that over a 970. So…
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Hmm, I’ve switched to my Intel HD Graphics for a sec and that guy is being pushed to almost 100% easily. Also the framerate dropped just by like 30-40% despite the fact that the integrated card is multiple times weaker. And there are no groundbreaking differences when looking at the crowd (like 22fps vs 30fps). Interdasting.
Meh, perhaps I should just count that as part of the nostalgic experience Blizz is trying to recreate.
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The game is just badly optimized and it is based on the Legion client which did not have as good multi thread cpu usage, BFA client is better at it.
Intel HD is absolute garbage for gaming, sorry for being so blunt.
If it’s really bugging you, there’s a setting in your BIOS most likely, which enables or disables Hyperthreading.
Disabling usually improves performance on older games.
This can have downsides on whatever else you’re doing though.
It’s probably limited by your cpus single threaded performance. Just because it says 25% cpu usage does not mean that the cpu is not the limiting factor, because Classic will hardly take advantage of more than one thread.
You could try oveclocking if your cpu supports that. Even on a laptop you probably have some temperature headroom to play with when you don’t do anything that actually taxes the whole cpu.
Make sure your dedicated graphics card is being used and not the integrated one. That’s usually an issue with laptops.
Have fun in wpvp, when u almost lag just from being in a city.
yeah it has nothing to do with your computer.
Low fps has everything to do with the computer. Latency doesn’t though and that is something we are all dealing with. I can lag like crazy with a 20 second latency but my fps is still locked to 144.
that doesn’t mean that classic wow badly handles resources when there are manny players in 1 spot. No matter how strong your computer is from top fps it would still go down with 40% up to higher dpending on the amount.
Have u ever checked your fps while 3 guilds are waiting for oni buff in 1 spot in sw. ???
Plz enlighten me with that exp
Well yes of course but the cause for actual low fps is still the computer. I play Horde on Gehennas so I bet that I see even larger gatherings than you do. At worst I get to 60 to 70 fps in Orgrimmar if I zoom the camera out and look at everyone. Sure it is a big hit to my fps but I wouldn’t call it low fps, and that has to do with my computer.
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I perfectly know that mate, just did a little testing out of curiosity.
It’s just slightly annoying but practically impacts just the city centres with lots of people or big wpvp events. Gonna test that out too anyway, thx.
I guess it’s massively limited on laptops to prevent manufacturers from being flooded with lawsuits. Will look into it nonetheless.
The bigger issue is that laptops usually set the dedicated GPU to some kind of power saving mode by default, especially when unplugged from the power source.
I also do have some network related lags when staying in the IF centre. But that is to be solved on the server side I suppose. Or maybe it’s just my mobile internet being totally overused.
When you get latency in crowded areas it is almost always a server issue and nothing to do with your connection. Of course a mobile connection can lag too but that would happen on every occasion in the game. The amount of bandwidth used by Classic is never going to be enough that it matters with any connection these days.
Which is not true since long time. Even with DX11 they can and do offload some work to second core. With DX12 (which Classic don’t use) they can do it even more efficiently. But still good single threaded performance is important. In this case game infrastructure is the limiting factor.
That’s the nature of a MMO game. The server must sync you with all the players you see. The more - the slower. You would have to upgrade WoW servers and then network connection from the server to everyone you see. In edge case - if you have a slow network connection to Blizzard server then it may be the most limiting factor.