How I optimised WoW

[Whitepaw]

I bought new parts for my comp some months ago. The upgrades doubled my FPS (from 40 to 80, on average) and I was happy.

Then Legion was launched, and I've had some difficulties getting the FPS to stabilise at 60. Some of that is linked to the fact that a LOT more players are now on the screen (how peaceful my Garrison was!), but my FPS has been stuttering for days now.

I decided to look at apps running in the background (this was after updating graphic drivers etc). I had a LOT running, like Chrome (don't remember I gave that permission), and I cut it down quite brutally. The results were very positive: I now have 60 FPS stabilised, no ability lag and no stuttering.

I have no idea why this is so. My comp has been running all these apps in the background for years now, without problems. But it seems to me that Legion is more demanding (or less optimised) than WoD. It also seems like some of the apps are more demanding. Updates for Win 10 could also be part of the explanation.

 

[Stronghammer]

Apart from Windows 10 still not being optimized at all, evey expansion so far has increased the load on hardware. Moar poly!

Chrome tends to eat away at the RAM, but in general should not really interfere with much. Are you sure you have checked the ingame setting too? Like for- background max fps?

 

[Ayu]

IIRC Legion raised the min specs to run it which hasn't happened in a while, so yeah, more load on the hardware.

 

[Whitepaw]

There's no doubt that legion is more demanding - that has been clear since patch 7.0. But I also suspect windows 10.

I only mentioned chrome because I don't remember giving it permission. I don't think it's a resource hog.

But the real culprits were probably stuff like onedrive, Razer driver, Steam and Dropbox.

I should mention that this cleanup has also reduced my boot-up time considerably.

 

[Whitepaw]

Well, my comp still stutters at times. Restarting the machine helps, so I can reach stable 60 fps.

There are many ppl with the same problem, US WoW forums have a thread with over 200 replies on it. Seems to me it's a combination between a Windows 10 update (the Anniversary update) and possibly lacking optimisation of Nvidia drivers.

Some ppl even mention memory leaks, although I haven't seen that.

 

[Ayu]

I had some stuttering when entering/leaving combat but I had assumed it was addon related. Happens only after playing for a while and a relog usually fixes it. Could still be addon related though, dunno.

 

[Deleted member 3567]

I do have problems on the first loading screen when logging in. It is very very slow.
Also when I hearth to Dalaran the screen becomes a bit stuck for a few moments and appears to be empty....
When entering an instance for the first time the loading screen takes like for ever....

Overally I am stable with fps, with the in-game checked option what Strong said.
Question that I am thinking of now. Will my lag be better if I reduce by background fps to say 70 or 80 fps ?
I wonder....

 

[Ayu]

Background FPS has nothing to do with the actual game performance though. It's just for when you tab out or another program is getting focus (like antivirus pop ups or similar).

The long first loading time is pretty normal on non-SSD drives I think. It just loads all the important stuff into the RAM but only needs to do this once unless you close WoW.

 

[Whitepaw]

Now it's my HDD.

When I look at the Settings --> Apps, WoW takes up 105 GB. When I look directly at the WoW folder, it's 52 GB. Which one is the right number?

 

[Ayu]

Mine is around 57 GB.

 

[Whitepaw]

Mine is around 57 GB.

Any idea as to why Win10 is playing me? Or how?

 

[Jazende]

If you have a very old installation you might still have patch data in there or so?

I have no idea how win10 calculates their app size but if it comes from wow itself it could be related to this

 

[Thorill]

If you really want to know, try Spacesniffer. Free software that maps your entire HDD and shows, what is taking up space. Useful when trying to figure out where all the space has gone.