Toon freezing

[Rhand]

I just upgraded from a 6700k to a 9900k because the 6700k was just not keeping up in 8.1. I'm running a GTX 980 4Gb vs. your GTX 1060 and all of my system related lag, delays, stuttering, freezes, etc. were alleviated with the processor upgrade. The reason your 2 & 5 slot toons always take longer is that they are essentially sharing the same CPU resources. It was the same with my setup and using the default CPU setup of dedicating 1 CPU to slot 1 and sharing the other 3 between the other 4 clients.

Now it's entirely possible that the lock ups are unrelated but the CPU would be my first guess. Previously if I switched my settings from DX 12 to DX 11 it would hang all of my WOW sessions and I'd have to Alt+F4 out and re-launch, though the setting change took effect. Now I can make the same change with no negative impact and all clients accept the changed settings without issue.

Just my $0.02 based on my recent experience

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I just upgraded from a 6700k to a 9900k because the 6700k was just not keeping up in 8.1. I'm running a GTX 980 4Gb vs. your GTX 1060 and all of my system related lag, delays, stuttering, freezes, etc. were alleviated with the processor upgrade.

Just to chime in here, I have a 6600K non-OC, 32GB RAM and a 980Ti. My system does not stutter running my 5 WoW clients at 1080p.

[Rhand]

Just to chime in here, I have a 6600K non-OC, 32GB RAM and a 980Ti. My system does not stutter running my 5 WoW clients at 1080p.

I'm sure there is work that I could have done to reduce the CPU load and clean it up a bit but I was not thrilled with any of the compromises. I went through lots of iterations with my slot swap macro as well as lots of potential render scale %'s which did improve performance but I wasn't happy with the quality. I don't know if it's the norm or not but I run a 1 x 4 client 2-monitor setup so my slave clients are not small windows, which looks like crap with render scale below 90% or so. I also usually have a fair bit of other activity going on the 3rd monitor while I game so there are other processes competing for CPU resources.

For reference, in my testing with my setup I'm consuming a base 1.5Gb VRAM for the first client and 700Mb-900Mb per additional client with about 3.3Gb of system RAM for each client session. That by itself puts me over my GTX 980's 4Gb capacity but it seems to do ok even if it's swapping out to shared memory in system RAM. Even with my clients configured to quality 1 on the slaves and quality 3/4 on the main my CPU load across all 4/4 cores was regularly 80%+. 20 man content (warfronts) got really choppy on the slaves during any big fights and the 2 of the 4 slaves went to slow slide show mode during world bosses, all of which was because the CPU load was more than my system was able to handle.

After a LOT of tweaking and copious system monitoring I determined that for my play style and preferences I needed to swap the CPU first and then determine if a GPU upgrade was necessary. I'm still not thrilled about still running at VRAM capacity but with the current market I just can't justify a new card. RTX cards are stupid expensive still and I wouldn't run an AMD GPU if you paid me to do so