Love it or loathe it, World of Warcraft remains one of the most successful MMOs of all time, however as far as hardware goes, it’s always had one massive limitation, and that’s CPU utilization. Unfortunately it’s a game that has forever suffered from a lack of multi-threaded support, and it’s only recently in Battle For Azeroth, WoW’s latest expansion, that we’ve finally seen improvements occur for those with more than four cores.
Indeed patch 8.1, Tides of Vengeance, has substantially improved performance for those gaming at 1080p, particularly on Ryzen processors. AMD reports that you can see anywhere up to a 35% improvement in frame rates at 1080p at lvl10 image quality settings, when using DX12 in the latest patch.
Pre-patch, AMD recorded an average frame rate of 43.2 fps with a Ryzen 5 2500X, and 42.7 fps with the Ryzen 7 2700X, those figures increasing up to 58.1 fps, and 58.2 fps respectively after the patch. The test system included 16GB of DDR4 3200 MT/s, a GeForce GTX 1080, and a Samsung 850 Evo SSD, all running off of a Windows 10 x64 bit install.
According to AMD, this improvement even translates across to your gaming experience inside two of the major faction city hubs, both of which are locations notorious for frame rate dips due to the excessive number of players.
Although CPU optimizations typically don’t affect those playing at 4K, in our testing, taking advantage of a Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB of DDR4, and a GTX 1080 Ti, we saw frame rates increase from 33fps, to 41 fps as well (roughly a 24% increase), when running around the capital city of Boralus.
