My current PC runs retail and classic versions of the game well, but WoW Forever becomes extremely difficult to play in populated cities. I get severe hitching when secondary lighting is set to High, city frame rates around 25 FPS or lower even on low-to-medium settings, and extremely poor 1% lows that can drop to 1–9 FPS. Characters and movement often appear to stutter or teleport, and the game has occasionally crashed while compiling shaders when loading into cities. Clearing the shader cache helped with the crashes, but not the performance problems.
The GPU is often at 100% usage while the CPU sits around 10–15%, which makes me suspect that my GTX 1080 is the main limitation. Lowering shadows and secondary lighting improves the average frame rate somewhat, but the severe city stuttering remains even with nearly everything disabled. I understand the game is still in beta and may not be fully optimized, but getting it to run well is important to me.
I live in Canada, where graphics cards are expensive, and I can find an Intel Arc B580 for roughly $500–550 CAD. Would that be a meaningful upgrade for WoW Forever and general 1080p gaming over the next couple of years? My budget is tight because of recent unexpected housing expenses, so a high-end card is not realistic, although I could spend somewhat more if there is a compelling reason. I also realize that my power supply may need to be replaced.
My system consists of an X470 Aorus Gaming 5 WiFi motherboard with PCIe 3.0, a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, an Asus Strix GTX 1080 8GB, 32GB of DDR4 memory, a Corsair RM650x power supply, a 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus gaming SSD, a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro work SSD, and a 2TB hard drive.
3 Answers
The symptoms in crowded cities could still be caused by the game's beta state rather than simply a weak graphics card. A GPU at 100% usage suggests the card is being pushed, but that does not prove it is responsible for every hitch or terrible 1% low. Try reducing resolution or render scale as a diagnostic: if average FPS improves significantly, the GPU is likely the bottleneck. If the stutter and frame-time spikes barely change, the problem may be engine-side or related to streaming and shaders. I would only buy the B580 if you also want a general gaming upgrade, not with the expectation that it is guaranteed to fix this one title.
The B580 should be a noticeable improvement for 1080p, especially because it offers much newer hardware and more VRAM than the GTX 1080. Your motherboard's PCIe 3.0 connection should not prevent it from working, though it can slightly reduce performance in some situations. I would not automatically replace the RM650x just because you install the card; check the B580's recommended power requirements and connector configuration first. If your power supply is healthy and the card's total board power is within its limits, it should probably be fine.
Before buying a new GPU, I would verify that the game is actually GPU-bound and not running into an engine or shader-compilation problem. The 5700X3D is still a strong gaming CPU, and your 650W RM650x is a good-quality unit that should be adequate for many cards in this class. A B580 would be a substantial upgrade over the GTX 1080, but it may not eliminate city stutter if the main issue is poor optimization, asset streaming, or shader compilation. Try monitoring GPU power, VRAM usage, frame times, temperatures, and clock speeds, and test with a clean driver installation. Also make sure the game is installed on the SSD and that no background process is causing storage or memory spikes.
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