WoW, Core count / Multi-threading

[Lody-chamber-of-aspects]

I was wondering if anyone knows how many cores/threads WoW support and utilize.

Some day 2 and some say 4 cores and 4/8 threads, but if possible I would like to know exactly how many it utilizes.

Thanks in advance.

[Kiyuki-dethecus]

Most stuff like the combatlog and addons are still running on one and the same thread.
Afaik audio is on another thread and during loading screens it can utilize more than 2 threads.
So basically 2 with some extra maybe.
More important than many threads is the clockspeed and IPC of your CPU.
The higher the better.

Also fast RAM is really important in CPU-limited games like WoW.

[Bigkeg-twisting-nether (Bigkeg)]

@Lody-chamber-of-aspects

Some day 2 and some say 4 cores and 4/8 threads, but if possible I would like to know exactly how many it utilizes.

Majority of performance is reached on 4 physical cores while increasing to 6 starts to show some minor scaling in some BfA spots.

https://rk.edu.pl/en/analyzing-world-warcraft-multi-core-scaling/

Addons and more so other applications running in the background may increase the amount of cores needed to not get a performance hit. HT helps a bit on low core count situations but when you have enough physical cores it’s not really useful (some “game modes” even disable it so that the game doesn’t end up using logic cores on same physical cores).

[Hoisho-argent-dawn (Hoisho)]

WoW may not support that many cores but the OS will use what cores are available so got background tasks it will be moved to there based on CPU drivers.

The days of one core being the fastest is over, the new things are what can a CPU do per cycle tick. WoW is going to have to move to ARM when Apple moves over to that so there’s work to be done for Blizzard anyways since apple is moving away from x86 now.

But not heard anything from Blizzard on that or any other games developer as most of their games/software will have to be rewritte to support ARM code than x86 code.

But don’t worry about cores on a CPU now, what you can get now is going to be better than what you may have had in the past. Things are always improving with each new cpu that comes out.

[Bigkeg-twisting-nether (Bigkeg)]

@Hoisho-argent-dawn

WoW is going to have to move to ARM when Apple moves over to that so there’s work to be done for Blizzard anyways since apple is moving away from x86 now.

They wont do much as they use Metal on MacOS and DX12 on Windows. DX12 will behave like it does even in ARM macos era. They do offload draw calls to other cores but still there is a single core bottleneck wherever any multi-actor action takes place and that’s related to how data is passed and used between the client and the server. CPU arch can do little for that but it can open new options if it will becomes mainstream and ARM wont replace 10900K or ryzen 5600 anytime soon (but long term x86 can get replaced, not only by ARM)