Unusual performance issues occurred with WoW on the 7700 + 1070 rig.
Unusual performance issues occurred with WoW on the 7700 + 1070 rig.
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I started posting because it looks like this is the main topic in our subforum...
Anyone, we all understand that even now WoW remains largely single-threaded (Blizzard has kept the same base for 14 years), and outside of higher resolutions with maximum graphics settings, your frame rate will mostly depend on the speed of a single core, which is limited by the one core that gets restricted.
That said, I recently changed my TV setup from a Silverstone GD09 case (Gigabye H270 with ATX motherboard and XMP support issues, EVGA GTX 1070 SC2 due to size constraints, and Noctua NH-C14S cooler) to a Fractal Design Node 202 iGPU (Asus Z270i ROG Strix M1, which was swapped back to the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X because it fit into the Node 202).
This rig is connected via HDMI to my home theater AVR and linked to an old 1080p/60Hz Samsung TV, so there are no high resolutions, HDR, or fast refresh rates—just a very basic configuration.
I launched WoW on it to test the overall performance and see if it would work well for casual gaming, especially if it overheats. I was also curious about the results:
- DX12 mode
- Vsync turned off
- Graphics settings adjusted to 10 for solo play, 7 for raid/battlegrounds
- Maximum foreground FPS set to 120 (to help with smoothness)
I didn’t change any other settings beyond defaults, so it seems no additional graphics acceleration or post-processing is active.
With the hwmon running in the background, I tested Boralus for a while, then played some quests outside the city (about 30 minutes), and finally checked CPU and GPU usage and temperatures.
Interestingly, the CPU core used by WoW only reached around 86%, and the 1070 graphics card about 70%. The CPU temperature peaked at 60°C, and the GPU at 72°C (my room was around 24°C).
What I’m confused about is why neither the CPU nor the GPU hit 100% utilization. I expected the CPU to be a bottleneck since it only goes up to 4.2 GHz, but since neither reached even 90%, it seems the 120fps limit might actually be limited by the display setup rather than the hardware itself?
That's WoW, it's extremely optimized and not necessary. If you capped your FPS at 120, it would never exceed that, and your CPU and GPU would only ever use what's needed to meet your settings. Speaking of which, in patch 8.1 with DX12, I thought they were supposed to finally unlock more cores for better multi-threaded performance to address many of these problems.