Sudden huge FPS drop?

For the last couple of days, I've been getting about 20 FPS at best, no matter where I am in WoW.

Previously, with the exact same set-up, I'd been getting 60 FPS consistently - smooth as butter.

Was there an update of some kind in the game or something that's caused problems?

I've tried updating drivers, disabling add-ons, loading one character at a time, etc. etc. with no luck. No other games on my system have a similar problem, and I haven't noticed any performance decreases anywhere else. Setting everything to the lowest settings does nothing, either. I'm at 20 FPS whether my settings are set to max or set to minimum.

Hardware:
6850k cpu
64GB RAM
2x 1080

I've been using this machine for about 6 months with no issues.

Any suggestions? I'm stumped.

Other troubleshooting stuff:
maxfpsbk and maxfps in configs are set to 30 and 0, respectively. When I am in a different window, my FPS will improve to 30. So I'm thinking maybe there's something screwy with that setting, despite the fact that I haven't changed it, somehow?

Have you deleted your Cache folder too? I noticed a bit of a slowdown too last couple of days, but nothing close the as bad as what you're experiencing. I chalked it up to population or lighting effects in the zone I was in.

I was having some problems and I noticed that the Battle Net Update Agent had several copies running. I did some google-fu and people have been complaining about this destroying game performance and eventually their entire machine. A couple times my game has felt lagging and when I checked there were 5 processes running. I killed them in task manager and everything was back to normal. Look for a process called Agent.exe. Don't kill them all, as the parent will just restart in a minute. You want to kill the ones with no command line listed in task manager when you turn that column on in the View menu. Combined those five processes were using about 900 MB and it kept growing. That's a big deal on my machine with a meager 14 GB. I've also seen people complain that it uses a lot of network resources as well.

Oh, avoid wowhead.com when you can. I've seen those pages take from 800 MB to 1.8 GB (more than an instance of WoW!) on my machine.

Let me know if these things help and if not we can try some other stuff. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

- Souca

So it looks like I was somehow switched to use DX 9 instead of DX 11. Changed that and I'm now doing much better. Never even thought of that!

Thanks for the ideas!

Okay, so here's something interesting -

My FPS now seems to be pegged at about 40 FPS. I had, like rapstar, just chalked it up to a lot of activity and something server side. 40 was better than 20!

But now I notice that under certain circumstances - when I cast things that trigger certain lighting effects (the blinding paladin talent, certain DH abilities) or I am standing in the middle of a fel effect (by the scouting table in the DH order hall) my FPS shoots up to 60+!

So I am now back to thinking that maybe there's something else going on and wondering if anyone has had a similar experience. Pretty weird!

Double check your graphics settings. The AA settings can really impact things and there is a combination between the two setting selections that can result in a huge performance hit. One of the settings is on the main page with another on the advanced tab. These will not change when you move the quality slider.

What addons do you have? I know you said it happens with out them; has that changed since you got some performance back?

You should also check combat log settings and if you are logging them to a file and if that file has gotten very large.

Does it change with solo versus boxing after the increase from the DX change?

Let us know what you find.

- Souca

Solution was to re-run the window layout wizard in ISBoxer. Did that and boom, everything is back to normal now. Weird!

You can get weird lag issues if the internal display names (the \\.\DISPLAYx) are out of date. Unfortunately they get out of date for various reasons such as plugging in a new monitor, plugging a monitor into a different port on the graphics card, change graphics cards around, driver updates (although this is less frequent currently but does come and go), major Windows updates, reinstalling Windows, switching between surround and not surround, and it probably can go on....