Unexpected utilization with WoW on 7700 + 1070 rig

Kalm_Traveler · January 19, 2019

Posting here since it seems like the only relevant subforum...

Anywho - so we all know that even now WoW is still pretty much single threaded (gg Blizz keeping the same base for 14 years) and that outside of higher resolutions with all max graphics settings your FPS is generally going to be limited by single core speed on whichever core gets pegged by its single thread.

That being said - yesterday I moved my TV rig from a Silverstone GD09 case (Gigabye H270 atx mb with screwy XMP support, EVGA GTX 1070 SC2 due to width restrictions, Noctua NH-C14S cooler) to a Fractal Design Node 202 itx setup (Asus Z270i ROG Strix mb, swapped back to the MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X since it was able to be shoehorned into the Node 202, Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev. B cooler).

This thing is just HDMI'd through my home theater AVR to an old 1080p/60hz Samsung TV, so no fancy high resolutions, HDR, or high refresh rates to make anything look pretty - just a very basic setup.

I threw WoW on there to hopefully stress the system overall and see if it will be fine for couch gaming, if things will overheat, etc etc and was kind of puzzled by the results:

DX12 mode
Vsync off
graphics settings slider set to 10 for solo, 7 for raid/battlegrounds

max foreground fps set to 120 (to be an even integer of the 60Hz panel hopefully to help with smoothness)

didn't adjust anything else from defaults, so I believe no AA or post processing is enabled.

With hwmon running in the background, ran around Boralus for a bit, then did some questing on an alt outside the city (played for ~ 30 mins), then checked utilization and temps for CPU and GPU.

Surprisingly (to me at least), the CPU core that was running WoW only hit a max of ~ 86%, and the 1070 only about 70%. CPU temps peaked at 60c and graphics card peaked at 72c (my room was 24c ambient).

What I am not understanding is why neither CPU/GPU reached approximately 100% util - I had expected one of them to be an obvious bottleneck (had expected the CPU since it only boosts to 4.2 gHz) but since neither of them ever reached even 90% util does that just mean that the 120fps cap I put is below the capability of the rig with the TV as the display?

Skiiwee29 · January 19, 2019

Thats WoW, its horribly optimized and not needed. If you limited your FPS to 120, it wont ever go past that and your CPU and GPU will only ever use what is required to give what you set. With that said, in patch 8.1 with DX12, I was under the impression they were suppose to finally open up more cores to the care for multi threaded performance to help with a lot of those issues.