WoW: Battle for Azeroth in review: DX11 vs. DX12 and AMD vs. NVIDIA

1 - WoW: Battle for Azeroth 2 - Prüfverfahren und ausgewählte Karten 3 - Grafik- und Renderingoptionen 4 - Leistung mit und ohne SMT 5 - Benchmarks in 1080p 6 - CPU, RAM, VRAM-Verbrauch 7 - Multi-Core-Leistung 8 - Bonus: HBAO++ 9 - Fazit

CPU, RAM, and graphics memory usage

Now let's look at how World of Warcraft and the latest version of the 3D engine available to it manages the CPU resources at its disposal. The minimal configuration requires a quad-core processor, so we can expect our Ryzen to be perfect for this game. We tested this with SMT enabled and directX 11 and DirectX 12. All in Full HD and with the same settings as before.

DirectX 11

DX11_VRAMUse

DX11_CPUFreq_GTX1080

DX11_CPUFreq_Vega64

DX11_CPUUse

DX11_CPUUse_GTX1080

DX11_CPUUse_Vega64

DX11_RAMUse

Whether with a GeForce or a Radeon, World of Warcraft makes an extraordinary use of CPU resources! A vCPU is completely overloaded, while the remaining cores of the vCPUs remain almost idle. Like the clock rates of some cores, which remain at 2.1 GHz or suddenly fall off in the clock. So it is not necessary to have a processor with 32 cores, but rather to use a processor with a high base clock.

DirectX 12

DX12_CPUUse

DX12_CPUUse_GTX1080

DX12_CPUUse_Vega64

DX12_RAMUse

DX12_VRAMUse

DX12_CPUFreq_GTX1080

DX12_CPUFreq_Vega64

We can observe the same behavior in DirectX 12: Forget multithreading, World of Warcraft has unfortunately not evolved since 2004 – at least on this point.