[New PC] 10-20 Box WoW

[MadMilitia]

From my experience WoW still puts a huge load on one or two cores. Graphic quality is one such weirdo with the game engine. Set view distance to 1 and you see a noticeable relief on core 0 and 1 but the GPU doesn't budge. To me this represents that the CPU is actually rendering a lot of assets in the world. Renderscale is another. Renderscale 1 or 0.05 has about 10% utilization difference on the GPU. I'm honestly not sure what role the GPU has in rendering WoW frames these days but I'm fairly sure asset loading is something on the CPU. Maybe the GPU is tasked with various jobs like shading, shadows, lightbeams and such effects like portals but all models are CPU.

Currently I'm on an older system. I 5 box presently.

I7 6700K
1080 ti
32GB DDR4
SSD OS and WoW.
DX11 - legacy

I'm also thinking about a TR build but I am being super cautious. With the release later this year and the potential impact on WoW. Basically I don't want to spend 3k USD and find out my gains are meager.

Besides I get close to 50FPS in the capital city if I set slot 1 to view distance 1 and the slaves to 1 quality / 0.05 renderscale. So simple adjustments are making 5 boxing pretty manageable already. Still thinking about that 10 man build though.

[MiRai]

From my experience WoW still puts a huge load on one or two cores. Graphic quality is one such weirdo with the game engine. Set view distance to 1 and you see a noticeable relief on core 0 and 1 but the GPU doesn't budge. To me this represents that the CPU is actually rendering a lot of assets in the world. Renderscale is another. Renderscale 1 or 0.05 has about 10% utilization difference on the GPU. I'm honestly not sure what role the GPU has in rendering WoW frames these days but I'm fairly sure asset loading is something on the CPU. Maybe the GPU is tasked with various jobs like shading, shadows, lightbeams and such effects like portals but all models are CPU.

I just ran a quick test on a single game client at 3840x2160, using DX12, and here are my results:

Setting         GPU Usage
RenderScale 100% — 67%
RenderScale __5% — 24%
~40% Reduction in GPU, with little to no affect on CPU

ViewDistance 10 — 68%
ViewDistance  1 — 43%
~20% reduction in GPU, with an additional reduction in CPU

Note1: RenderScale test was done with a View Distance setting of 8.
Note2: When testing with DX11 Legacy, results were very similar, except more CPU, overall, was used.
Note3: Results will likely vary depending on where you're testing.

[MadMilitia]

I just ran a quick test on a single game client at 3840x2160, using DX12, and here are my results:

Setting         GPU Usage
RenderScale 100% — 67%
RenderScale __5% — 24%
~40% Reduction in GPU, with little to no affect on CPU

ViewDistance 10 — 68%
ViewDistance  1 — 43%
~20% reduction in GPU, with an additional reduction in CPU

Note1: RenderScale test was done with a View Distance setting of 8.
Note2: When testing with DX11 Legacy, results were very similar, except more CPU, overall, was used.
Note3: Results will likely vary depending on where you're testing.

Interesting. That's a pretty big chunk out of the GPU. I suspect your view distance might have been the reason. Can you try with view distance at 1? Thanks!

Also I am using DX11 Legacy still.


More interesting details.

I switched to DX12 and ran just one client. Here is what I saw.

VoS (DZ is dead)

My GPU never got over 50% utilization. I flipped view distance between 1 and 8, tried changing the renderscale, nothing. CPU constantly went to 90% once I was in VoS.

So then I did two things. I kept 1 slot online and the other 4 offline / exited app. I then bumped the allowable FPS in isboxer for slot 1 to 200. Then I bumped the quality slider to 10 (ultra). I gave slot 1 access to all the machine cores.

Interestingly the CPU remained 90% in VoS, the GPU around 40-45%. This didn't make sense to me. So I left VoS (just flew away to the outskirts of Ogrimmar towards Azshara).

Now this is interesting. The CPU was no longer bogged to 90% and my FPS were climbing. GPU now went from 40-45% utilization to 70%!

I am firmly of the belief now that my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU. That the CPU role in rendering assets and probably some other calculations is bottlenecking the work of the GPU. If the GPU only has to render 30 frames in a place like VoS then it never gets above 50% usually hovering around 40%.

[MiRai]

Interesting. That's a pretty big chunk out of the GPU. I suspect your view distance might have been the reason. Can you try with view distance at 1? Thanks!

Also I am using DX11 Legacy still.

Testing it just a moment ago...

Using DX11 Legacy and a VD of 1, I see a drop from ~44% to ~11% in GPU usage when changing Render Scale from 1 to .05. The same occurred in DX12, but, again, CPU usage is different between the two APIs.

I am firmly of the belief now that my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU. That the CPU role in rendering assets and probably some other calculations is bottlenecking the work of the GPU. If the GPU only has to render 30 frames in a place like VoS then it never gets above 50% usually hovering around 40%.

That's entirely possible, and it's my bottleneck while playing solo and using DX11 Legacy mode, but I've got a 10C/20T 6950X and I play at 4K (or near that when multiboxing x5).

[MadMilitia]

Testing it just a moment ago...

Using DX11 Legacy and a VD of 1, I see a drop from ~44% to ~11% in GPU usage when changing Render Scale from 1 to .05. The same occurred in DX12, but, again, CPU usage is different between the two APIs.


That's entirely possible, and it's my bottleneck while playing solo and using DX11 Legacy mode, but I've got a 10C/20T 6950X and I play at 4K (or near that when multiboxing x5).

Definitely seems you're less CPU bound and so your GPU is being worked harder than mine.

This is promising for a TR 10 account build with renderscale of 5% for followers. Also even when I gave slot 1 access to all cores, predictably not all of them were fully utilized. Just one or two at a time hit max utilization. Which probably means the model renderer is CPU bound and is limited in the number of cores it leverages.

[MiRai]

Definitely seems you're less CPU bound and so your GPU is being worked harder than mine.

This is promising for a TR 10 account build with renderscale of 5% for followers. Also even when I gave slot 1 access to all cores, predictably not all of them were fully utilized. Just one or two at a time hit max utilization. Which probably means the model renderer is CPU bound and is limited in the number of cores it leverages.

The game is limited to about 2-3 cores or 4-6 threads, but the multi-threaded DX12 improvements that 8.1.5 included, help alleviate that. DX12 obviously comes with its own drawback of using a large amount of VRAM, which is why we've been telling a lot of people to steer clear of it, since, I think, most people would find themselves hitting that ceiling unless they have a large amount of VRAM on their GPU.