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WOW performance issues making me sad
Great Scott
King of Wishful ThinkingParagon City, RIRegistered User regular
King of Wishful ThinkingParagon City, RIRegistered User regular
I've recently replace my failing Intel I7-920 with a new AMD A10-6800K. Other than the new CPU and motherboard, everything seems to work well *(since I discovered that BIOS CPU options were downclocking my new CPU to 500MHz and fixed that!). My current resolution is full-screen at 1680x1050 with a AMD Radeon HD 7850.
However, World of Warcraft runs at 60FPS until my viewpoint moves (turning left/right/up/down) at which point it drops to 30 and returns to 60 after about 4-5 seconds. Note that this is in a deserted area of the blood elf starting zone with no other players around, so best-case-scenario for framerates). At the same time as the FPS fluctuates there is severe screen-tearing.
I've seen bad performance in a lot of 3D games, but this is very different.
1) Reducing resolution - does not affect framerate
2) Reducing various graphic settings / overall graphic settings - does not affect framerate.
3) Turning off Vsync - improves framerate by ~5 FPS but makes the screen tearing worse.
I've also noticed that neither the CPU (all 4 cores stay under 33%) or the video card (roughly 45%) seem highly utilized or stressed.
I have no addons running in WOW currently. I've also checked that the drive isn't failing and defragged it (it's a WDC 1TB Black).
I'm at a loss for what else to optimize or check, does anyone have any ideas?
I've done Internet searches for other people having problems with this CPU and not come up with anything. I also think this PC is overspecced for WOW as I can run it in Ultra mode (at the same wildly changing 60/30 FPS as every other setting).
However, World of Warcraft runs at 60FPS until my viewpoint moves (turning left/right/up/down) at which point it drops to 30 and returns to 60 after about 4-5 seconds. Note that this is in a deserted area of the blood elf starting zone with no other players around, so best-case-scenario for framerates). At the same time as the FPS fluctuates there is severe screen-tearing.
I've seen bad performance in a lot of 3D games, but this is very different.
1) Reducing resolution - does not affect framerate
2) Reducing various graphic settings / overall graphic settings - does not affect framerate.
3) Turning off Vsync - improves framerate by ~5 FPS but makes the screen tearing worse.
I've also noticed that neither the CPU (all 4 cores stay under 33%) or the video card (roughly 45%) seem highly utilized or stressed.
I have no addons running in WOW currently. I've also checked that the drive isn't failing and defragged it (it's a WDC 1TB Black).
I'm at a loss for what else to optimize or check, does anyone have any ideas?
I've done Internet searches for other people having problems with this CPU and not come up with anything. I also think this PC is overspecced for WOW as I can run it in Ultra mode (at the same wildly changing 60/30 FPS as every other setting).
I'm unique. Just like everyone else.
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EDIT: I forgot to mention in my first post, my A10 CPU is locked at 4.0 GHz with a small undervolt, so it should be performing similarly to a fast Sandy Bridge i3 in games, and for the most part that's how it seems to perform.
What graphics drivers are you using? Ones from a disc or downloaded? Beta drivers?
I would reinstall/upgrade drivers, see if that does anything. Did you reinstall WoW or copy the installation folder over?
AMD drivers are notoriously bad at handling them and this is likely the cause for it.
If either of them are at x8 or x4, drop them down a notch or two.
Also, if you're overclocking, don't.
I've had nothing but trouble with AMD cards and that's mostly why I've moved away from them. I remember wow having an unnoticeable client side lag that would cause you to move about 10% slower than other people while running or mounted while using AMD with vsync enabled in windowed mode.
Also windowed mode might be an issue if you're using that.
what I would do is run the game at fullscreen native res (i.e. turn off vsync) and dial sampling down to 1x. If that gets rid of the issue go back to vsync+whatever your desired window/resolution is, then take multisampling back up to whatever you have it at, and see at what point it crops back up.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I am running the Catalyst 13.12 drivers, I have reinstalled them (I did a full removal beforehand). I got them from AMD's awful new website.
Note that I can't be 100% sure of the removal because of AMD processor software that integrates with the CCC.
As far as I'm aware hard-locking an A10-6800K to 4.0GHz is a mild underclock; I'm also undervolting slightly (and stably - 36 hour Prime95 run) which is a good sign for this particular CPU.
EIYNP: I've give that another run tonight just to double-check. I'll also get a newer driver, although I think the 7800 series is pretty old now and shouldn't have too too many bugs. I'll update tomorrow with what happened.
Disable the CCC if you can and try to do it straight within the game. Check the forums if your version of the driver is having issues.
You may need to rollback to an iteration earlier than what you're using. If you haven't updated, maybe try that.
It's also possible that there were some issues from my 6870 -> 7850 upgrade late last year, I didn't update the CCC or the drivers since the PC recognized the newer video card right away (I didn't even need to reboot once).
Now that the weird texture-lagging is solved, I'm seeing framerate changes when altering video options in WOW as would be expected.