PC/WoW gets slower in each expansion

#1 - July 16, 2013, 7:35 a.m.

Well, not sure if this post fits best into general or into technical support, but since there is no bug, I decided to post here.

One of the things I always liked about WoW is that it could run on old crappy hardware, if needed. Well, when I started playing back in 2007, my box was nothing too special, but it was quite new, only few months old. Video card was relatively weak even by those times (Radeon X600). Of course, we all experienced lags, slow loading, etc. But in general game was quite playable at medium settings.

During the years I upgraded my PC a bit, leaving most things intact and adding more memory. I believe I can say this PC still managed in Cata. However with MoP I started to face issues. Settings are already moved to low, but it doesn't help much. In raids things are really slow, it's like permanent lag. What still helps me in this situation is disabling of sounds. After things change raiding becomes normal again. Although it's quite strange to hit big boss without him screaming :)

I wonder if anyone had similar problems and perhaps made some investigations. Is it so that MoP just added more graphics, efects and stuff? Perhaps some other reasons? Or my PC is just too old and needs to go to the west? I fully understand that computers get outdated very fast these days. However, as I mentioned, Blizzard used to do good work in giving wide range of game settings for players with different hardware.

Taepsilum

Community

#66 - July 22, 2013, 3:29 p.m.

Whenever someone is having really low performance in WoW, it’s usually either because their computer is very old or because the game or the computer needs some tweaking.
If you lowered the settings as much as you can, you can try to tweak some other areas, like the console variables for example.
Here’s a link to an old post where I talked about 2 somewhat important ones:
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5967338478?page=3#60

Another very common cause of reduced performance is the use of out-dated addons, or even updated ones that aren’t well optimized or that are just very cpu intensive by nature.
Anything that deals with combat log parsing is typically a resource hogger, so, damage meters, scrolling combat texts, and the like. Threat meters used to be intensive as well, but threat can parsed in a different way now so I assume they don’t have to spend so many cpu cycles as before.
Rule of thumb is, if you have low performance, and have done everything else like updating drivers and lowering graphics, you should remove all addons, and add them 1 by 1 until you see a drastic change in performance.