Poor performance and frequent microstutters in Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Poor performance and frequent microstutters in Warcraft 3 Reforged.
Hello everyone, seeking additional ideas while my options seem limited. I believe a Blizzard update would be necessary for a proper fix, though it's hard to predict the timeline. I purchased the Warchest on discount earlier this month and completed the W1 & W2 remasters, but I'm only just beginning with the third version now. It appears I may have missed any chance for a refund. If I don't move the cursor, my FPS stays around 90. Once I start interacting, it fluctuates wildly between 40 and 100, accompanied by frequent micro-lags that happen almost every second, along with noticeable dips as new areas appear. My system specs are a 7800X3D CPU, RTX 4090, running at 3440*1440 on Windows 11 23H2. I have 64GB (2x32) of 6000Mhz DDR5 RAM and use a PCIe 4.0 NVME drive. Initially, I checked for updates—Windows, drivers, BIOS—and found nothing pending. I attempted a repair followed by a full reinstall, even removing saved settings. I lowered graphics settings to the lowest, but performance didn't improve. Switching to original HD options also didn’t help. Running the game as administrator didn’t change anything. Using HW Monitor showed the CPU only uses 40W while the GPU runs at 1% load (about 80W). This suggests the game might be leveraging the integrated graphics. Disabling the GPU in Device Manager had no impact, so I removed Radeon drivers with DDU, restarted, and turned off the iGPU in BIOS—still no results. I changed to windowed mode, adjusted v-sync, turned off overlays (including NVIDIA’s), but performance remained unchanged. I’m at a loss. Are there any other steps I haven’t considered? Thanks!
Based on what was discussed, those steps appear to be similar to what I would do. The patch 1.36 (https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcra...6/30496/26) seems to be the point where this problem started for various users. I’m not familiar with W3, but if possible, you could try downgrading the game to a version lower than 1.36. Of course, this won’t help if it’s a multiplayer game. It looks like the issue is mainly coming from the game itself.
I checked the forums and found limited assistance—no developers or technical staff seem active. Users without iGPUs reported similar issues, with some experiencing problems only after the latest 2.0 update just over a week ago. There doesn’t appear to be an option to roll back the game version, likely because of the multiplayer feature (which I don’t want). I tried disabling the Nvidia overlay but it didn’t help. Since I still had the old NV Control Panel, I added the game executable to my software list and tried using my 4090, but no improvement was noticed. I also considered turning off SMT, planning to test that next. I’ve shared a sample video to illustrate the issue.
I played the game recently and started it, getting around 10 frames per second consistently. That doesn’t make sense—previously it worked. It feels like the game is using an integrated graphics card, but after checking drivers and settings, forcing a dedicated GPU didn’t help. The problem seems much worse now. They haven’t fixed it for me.