I’m not a “back in the days in Vanilla” player, but I remember friends who started playing at Vanilla told me WoW was meant to be played on a potato, so more people can join and play, regardless what their machines are. That’s why for years and years WoW retained the choppy graphics where rabbits were a few triangles glued together. From a fanbase and profit perspective - this is the best business decision a company might ever take. I do not know what happened later.
Now I need minimum £1000 gaming laptop to run it. I still drop into the 30fps alot of the time in raids. I have settings on 5 and my laptop pumps out larva just to run WoW retail.
Thing is visually , I can’t see much change since WOD ? I know wow brought in HD visuals in 2015 but damn the Xbox 360 and PS3 could do HD. So it’s not like it’s a hardware pumping thing.
My laptop is a Lenovo pro 5 , 3 years old got a 3060 , 16gb and it’s just struggling to run WoW. Sure I can get 144fps if I’m in a vanilla zone doing absolutely nothing.
Just flying around Hallowfall herbing or fishing , the screen tearing and fps drops are insane.
I’ve had to stop raiding because I get so many micro delays , like standing in stuff I shouldn’t be a second or two longer than I’m supposed to. This is with a 14 man group only.
I am playing at higher specs than minimum specs required according to the Blizz website and I still can’t play wow the way I want to. It’s so frustrating and then Addons , some are so memory hungry it’s insane.
I don’t think I can play midnite or beyond without throwing another grand or two at new hardware to play the game I’ve spent decades on.
Vanilla- cataclysm I used to the same PC and I was absolutely fine. Game looked great , ran well. Could raid 25 man , no issues. Wintergrasp - tol barad. No problems. No SSD either just an HDD
Wintergrasp in 2025 on a 3060 urgh
Running undermine on 3060 I would say some fights are unplayable.
You can set raids to have a different level of graphics detail compared to other content under the settings/graphics (Or video, one of the two) menu, and maybe slightly dialling down graphics detail in general might help.
Modern flying is already a pretty big change compared WoD and that is just the most obvious one.
A lot of changes were applied retroactively, so what you see ingame now, is not exactly what you would see in a WoD or even Legion client.
3060/4050 is still good for wow.
Maybe lower graphics settings a bit, but I have multiple friends with 3060/4050 laptops (and not something as fancy as a Legion Pro, but trash like Acer nitros) and they never mentioned any performance issues.
That is not something you can solve with hardware.
WoW simply does not work well with so many players.
This is why dornagal often causes 60 or worse fps even if nothing really happens there.
Apart from the world boss?
It should not really cause any problems to a 3060, unless to many players are in the phase like in case of the world boss, which again is not something you can solve with hardware.
There is a misconception about playing WoW on low-end PCs back in 2005. We weren’t experiencing what today we’d consider “playable” performance. Those of us with potato PCs were playing at at sub-30fps on 800x600 resolutions. The only reason we didn’t have as much issue back then was because the game did not require fast reaction times so even unstable framerates was not an issue, and simultaneously the majority of players did not participate in content where you needed a strong PC to ensure adequate performance.
The earliest screenshot I have found saved from WoW was taken on 16th November 2008. It’s a 1280x960 screenshot where just having my bags open takes up 33% of the interface. There are no shadows enabled.
You can still play like that today. Set resolution to 1280x720. Set rendering resolution to 640x360. Lock framerate to 20fps tops with all graphic settings set to their absolute lowest. Disable all addons (since the majority also didn’t have them back then).
I second this !
It’s all about the CPU , and not the cores or threads , but raw single core power !!!
my GPU barely goes above 20% usage , and my CPU is like at 10% use but that’s because only 1 core is being used at 100% usage and the rest of the cores are not being used ,
CPU bottlenecking and some optimization issues and even some underlying bugs that cause micro stutter among fps dips. Related hardware, there is performance issues reported since dragonflight pre-patch varying from top end builds to mid level builds and we know that there has been bugs on code causing interference with addons and api but Im not certain if its fixed yet or not as its not something that is found in patch notes. Some issues were even from win 10 with some nvidia drivers that played part in some performance issues as stutters.
Its multiple factors thats causing performance issues, the 3060 build and other builds in general mid level to top what I see ppl listing, I dont think is likely it would be hardware related with these, they are more than capable components on any comparisons for modern games and wow. Anything between 50-90 fps in high demanding situation is fine, and 120-144fps (when capped on 145fps on 144hz monitor) on less demanding situations is more than fine. If you have 15fps standing in town or in world then I would look in lowering some graphic settings or there is some other issue that is causing it and need to try figure it out.
and it’s still tbh
just idk, open stalker2 or rdr2 or cp77 and check your potato performance there
wow veeeery potato-friendly but ofc have a bottleneck in CPU performance sadly, so even with best GPU, if your CPU is weak - you’d be suffering
The matter that its found on so many varying hardware speaks of it being on the game end more than on some specific dozen gpu cards and peoples cpu and whatnot I see listed. If could pinpoint it to something like “card x nönnönnöö is causing this type of issues” then that would be out of blizzards hands naturally but that I see so many varying builds from mid to top end tell me its likely on games end. And related that I think op hardware with the card he listed would be fine to run wow and multiple other games according comparisons Ive looked.
based on mentioned gpu i suppose his lapton model variation goes with ryzen 5 5600h which is the exactly bottlenecked with it limit at 4.2hhz at max since wow still can’t use properly multicore/multithreading, also from descriptions I see that there are two GPUs and probably OP have game running on integrated one, at least need to mention that to be sure that it isn’t the case
Surely one of the biggest issues still, even still they could affect a lot by doing better optimization and less cpu demanding designs I think, frostmage is terrible with its design example in high demand situations with the amount of procs and cpu heavy tasks that it creates. One is likely to experience most spikes on frostmage in battleground or raid if would pick one class as example
Lol I can relate that so well, I just cant play my frost anymore. I noticed that arcane runs better, I guess cause its orb dont slow or some effects are less demanding, not certain but I see noticeable difference in less stutter. I cant stand the constant 0.5-1sec spikes my frost creates in bgb once time anomaly procs haste or icy veins + water elemental and there is orb and dozen other procs from hero talents popping
You do say some truth there. And I cant really give you an answer. But I can give you a “educated guess” of the possible cause.
WoW is a 20 year old game. Since 2004 there have been many “revolutions” in game graphics. Including, changes in the coding language, the renderers, ect…
Once you make a game, it is extremely difficult to change all that. Because it implies re-coding and re-making the same exact game from scratch.
But wow cant do that. They cant just stop maintaining the game for 3 years to launch a WoW 2.0 that would be exactly the same game as we have right now.
And that is why you see what you see. Its 20 years of “patching” old outdated code.
To be fair, WoW can still run on a potato rig (not a salad potato rig that can run Classic, its more a Maris Piper potato these days for Retail). My rig is about 5 years old, so pretty outdated but can run retail without issues (bar the occasional lag).
I’m using a 1660 super which aint much better - the 1060 is still good though
, and my CPU is like at 10% use but that’s because only 1 core is being used at 100% usage and the rest of the cores are not being used ,