My current PC runs retail and classic versions of WoW well, but WoW Forever performs terribly in populated cities. With secondary lighting set to High, movement causes severe hitching, and lowering settings only partially helps. Cities often run at 25 FPS or below, with 1% lows between 1 and 9 FPS. Characters and movement appear to stutter or teleport even when nearly every setting is reduced to Low or disabled. The GPU frequently sits at 100% usage while the CPU is only around 10–15%. I also experienced shader-related crashes while loading into cities, although clearing the shader cache mostly helped.
The game is still in beta and may not be fully optimized, but running it smoothly is important to me. I am considering an Intel Arc B580 for roughly $500–550 CAD, and I would also consider other reasonably priced options since higher-end cards are out of reach financially right now. Would the B580 be a meaningful upgrade over my GTX 1080 for WoW Forever and 1080p gaming over the next few years?
My system has an X470 Aorus Gaming 5 WiFi motherboard with PCIe 3.0, a Ryzen 7 5700X3D, 32 GB of DDR4 memory, an Asus Strix GTX 1080 8 GB, a Corsair RM650x power supply, and SSD storage. I realize the power supply and PCIe 3.0 compatibility may be relevant to the upgrade.
1 Answer
The B580 should be a substantial graphics upgrade over the GTX 1080, especially since you are seeing the GPU pinned at 100% even with the settings lowered. Your 5700X3D is still a very capable gaming CPU, so replacing the graphics card makes sense based on those symptoms.
However, the B580 uses a PCIe 4.0 x8 interface. It will work in your PCIe 3.0 motherboard, but that can reduce performance somewhat. Your RM650x should generally be adequate for a B580 as long as it has the required power connector and is in good condition, so you may not automatically need a new PSU. The city-specific hitching and extremely low 1% lows could also be caused by the beta game's shader or asset streaming, meaning a new GPU may improve the average frame rate without completely eliminating every stutter.
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