Underwhelmed by R9 380 performance in WoW

waldaize · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:20

Hi,

So after deliberation and posts on here the Sapphire R9 380 popped up on special, so i grabbed one.

I only really care about playing WoW and so hoped/wished to be able to bump up to Ultra + some form of AA and get a solid 60fps (sync'd). Well that hasn't quite happened, I even struggle to maintain 50fps on High with CMAA in the garrison. At the moment I would say that the performance boost over my old 6870 1Gb is 30 - 40%. So underwhelming/disappointing to say the least.

I tried Crimson 16.1 but that resulted in WoW throwing exceptions/freezing within seconds of entering the game. I also completely uninstalled using DDU and reinstalled, no help. So I am running the ones before 16.1 (15.12) which seems stable for me at least. I have noticed that the GPU never runs at full clock speed, seems to bounce between 600 - 1010

My rig is

"Ultima Viper" Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz @ 4.00Gz
Asus Rampage II Extreme Intel X58 (Socket 1366) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 (1600MHz) Tri-Channel
Corsair TX650 PSU

I might be missing something or I've bought a lemon/been unrealistic...I did do my research and given what people advised/other peoples FPS I thought I was golden.

Any thoughts?

Dave2150 · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:27

WoW is still a very CPU dependant game. Blizzard made some improvements with WoD, though you CPU is very old and thus has poor IPC.

The Garrison isn't a great zone to test in, as it's quite poorly optimized on any system.

I upgraded 5-6 months ago from a I7 920 @ 3.8Ghz to a 6700k @ 4.8Ghz and saw a massive performance increase in wow and other titles, especially to my minimum FPS.

WoW wants 2-3 high speed high IPC cores to shine.

Marine-RX179 · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:29

WOW and mmos in general can be very CPU demanding. The issue of dipping in frame rate is often more to do with CPU side of things. You can throw a 980Ti into your system, and you still won't get solid 60fps due to CPU bottleneck...the same apply to other mmos as well, including the likes of Guild Wars 2 for example.

It is fundamentally to do with our current directx versions are not using the CPUs efficiently...it is one of shortcoming that dx12 is said to attempt improve on.

Howling · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:45

CPU and likely your HDD - SSD and decent CPU have a greater affect on MMO framerate than GPUs tbh. MMOs aren't usually made to be graphically demanding, to allow a greater playerbase.

kration · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:52

Marine-RX179 said:
WOW and mmos in general can be very CPU demanding. The issue of dipping in frame rate is often more to do with CPU side of things. You can throw a 980Ti into your system, and you still won't get solid 60fps due to CPU bottleneck...the same apply to other mmos as well, including the likes of Guild Wars 2 for example.

It is fundamentally to do with our current directx versions are not using the CPUs efficiently...it is one of shortcoming that dx12 is said to attempt improve on.

It can also depend on the brand of cpu. I moved from AMD to Intel because Guild Wars 2 seemed to run much better on the latter chips...

waldaize · 16 Jan 2016 at 11:56

Well that is a potentially mid priced mistake

I do have an SSD (evo) so it looks like I'm.not missing anything...********.

fs123 · 16 Jan 2016 at 12:01

I think it's the cpu that will be slowing you down. In the TPU test an R9 380 gets about 72fps @ 1080P running on an i7 [email protected] (Ultra settings) and an i7 950@4GHz will no doubt drop the fps by around 20% if not more.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_Strix/20.html

A cpu scaling test here shows quite a difference between equivalent clocked 3.3Ghz cpu's:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20

N19h7m4r3 · 16 Jan 2016 at 12:54

Man WoW is mental. I can get everything from my FPS capped at 144, to dropping to below 20 FPS depending on what's going on, on the screen with the system in my sig.

At least in most Mythic raids I tend to stay above 60fps because it's so enclosed.

The game is Entirely CPU dependant, and your GPU is actually More than up to scratch.

Blizzard have stated they're making massive graphics improvements for the upcoming Legion expansion though, and they've always been quick to jump on a new version of DirectX if it gives a performance increase, so hopefully DX12 also comes with Legion.

Even with my rig the Alliance Garrison can drop my fps to the low 40's at times simply because of the shadows everywhere.

What you really need to upgrade at the moment is your CPU, the game loooves 1-2 really fast cores. It also likes SSD's to loading things in quicker, although even with my Samsung 850 EVO, I can have load times be slow for NPCs and items something.

Here are a screenshot from a massive PvP battle where even my System FPS tanks into the ground due to the WoW engine being ancient. You can see in the top right of the image under the minimap that even my FPS can tank to 10 at times.

The second image is WoW being slow on loading NPCs and assets due to drive speed being slow.

flopper · 16 Jan 2016 at 13:50

as stated, game is a dx9 engine and CPU bound first and foremost.
solution one, OC the CPU if doable or down the line upgrade.
when a game is cpu bound the gpu becomes idle as it has nothing to do while it waits for the cpu to feed data.

Dave2150 · 16 Jan 2016 at 14:26

flopper said:
as stated, game is a dx9 engine and CPU bound first and foremost.
solution one, OC the CPU if doable or down the line upgrade.
when a game is cpu bound the gpu becomes idle as it has nothing to do while it waits for the cpu to feed data.

Err, Wow has been a DX11 game for many, many years. 2010 if I remember correctly, in the Cataclysm expansion.

Dave2150 · 16 Jan 2016 at 14:28

waldaize said:
Well that is a potentially mid priced mistake ��

I do have an SSD (evo) so it looks like I'm.not missing anything...********.

The best CPU you could upgrade to for WoW is Skylake. If you mostly play wow, you could get away with an I3 and clock it to 4.4-4.6 easily. If you want to spend a little more, then an I5 Skylake will last you longer.

Gregster · 16 Jan 2016 at 14:38

Well with your CPU clock, you should be golden in truth and I know WoW has never really been great on AMD but still, I expect it should be better than what you are getting. Here is various CPU's running on a crappy 680 at 1080P

Rroff · 16 Jan 2016 at 14:48

Never played it myself but from what I've seen the game seems to just run better on nVidia (albeit you are never going to get away from the API bottlenecks) - its been an ongoing saga with someone I know IRL who persists on going AMD but is a big WoW player and they keep swinging back and forth - I ended up acquiring a 970 from them when they ditched it on principle over the VRAM thing but factually it ran the game with less problems and less slowdown than the 390X they have in there now.

shankly1985 · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:03

CPU is very old now tbh Thing to remember about PC hardware is your system is only as fast has your slowest component.

Here is a 290 only video I could find were they show the setting used. and a i5 4670k... Frame rates 100+

Rroff · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:05

With DX9 the slowest component is often a single threaded API bottleneck :S

shankly1985 · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:09

Rroff said:
With DX9 the slowest component is often a single threaded API bottleneck :S

CPU Core speed will always be effected. Reason a older AMD CPU will be no match because there slow single core performance vs intel.

His CPU is going on 8 years old... Its single core speed will be lacking way behind with an up to date GPU. Plus the fact MMOs want fast CPUs wont help him either..

All them players the CPU his working very hard I bet he locked 100% CPU load.

Gregster · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:10

shankly1985 said:
CPU is very old now tbh Thing to remember about PC hardware is your system is only as fast has your slowest component.

Here is a 290 only video I could find were they show the setting used. and a i5 4670k... Frame rates 100+

Off topic so apologies but how the hell did/do so many people play that lol

Poneros · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:11

Actually, AMD does WoW better than Nvidia, hell CF worked for a long time with it while SLI has been forever borked. I played it with cards from both, since 2004 (or w/e it launched in Europe), and both have been more than fine. As others have said, this is about CPU as well as the simple fact that the game is ancient and has issues with optimization due to it (and just being an MMO..)

The thing is, you gotta play with the settings and do some tests, I know last time I played it some settings made the game come to a crawl but with minor tweaks it was smooth as butter. In particular also, some zones are annoyingly laggy, like Felwood. There's a lot you can do, but if you just push sliders to max and hope for the best - yeah, that's not gonna work.

Off topic so apologies but how the hell did/do so many people play that lol

Because some people actually play games instead of just benchmark them.

shankly1985 · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:11

Gregster said:
Off topic so apologies but how the hell did/do so many people play that lol

Agreed! I dont follow WOW or any MMO tbh and watching some of that I was thinking same.. What the hell is going on? haaa looks bad tbh

Gregster · 16 Jan 2016 at 15:17

Poneros, I was joking and it clearly is popular and fair play to all who play it. Just not my cuppa in truth and I can't remember the last benchmark I ran. For the record, I am glued to Elite Dangerous and I am sure people watch and think "wtf is that crap?"