New Multi-threaded Optimisations are coming to World of Warcraft with a planned DirectX 12 update

WOWHEAD has uncovered four new CPU optimisations that are coming to World of Warcraft, all of which are designed to lessen the game’s CPU limitations and increase the game’s performance on modern APIs like Microsoft’s DirectX 12 and Apple’s Metal APIs. 

Today, World of Warcraft is heavily single-thread limited, mostly thanks to the game’s 2004 origins, a time where dual-core processors were new to the market and unsupported by most applications. Over time World of Warcraft has evolved, but never enough to remove the game’s CPU limitations. 

With Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard Entertainment delivered DirectX 12 support to their MMO, an API which is predominantly about increasing parallelism and increasing game performance, especially on the CPU front. 

While the game’s early DirectX 12 support has not been hugely beneficial, especially for Nvidia users, the four new multi-threaded optimisations within World of Warcraft’s 8.1 PTR patch have been shown to deliver some tremendous performance improvements. WOWHEAD has put these performance optimisations to the test, finding that they deliver a 25% performance boost on their 5GHz i7-8700K-based system when using a GTX 1070 at 1080p, with 16% performance boost at 4K, showcasing a tremendous boost on performance over both the game’s DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 modes. 

Right now, only two of the game’s four new CPU optimisations are activated within the game’s PTR servers by default, with the other two requiring a manual activation using the MMO’s config files. This means that World of Warcraft’s 8.1 will deliver CPU-specific optimisations to DirectX 12 users upon its release, but some of these framerate enhancing game tweaks may not make it into the MMO until a later date for stability reasons. 
  

It is great to see Blizzard putting in the effort to rework their ageing game engine to deliver increased CPU performance, changes that will no doubt dividends as World of Warcraft’s development continues. With these changes, PC gamers can get more performance out of their current hardware, especially within demanding raids and highly populated areas of the game world. The question now is whether or not Blizzard has further optimisation plans for their new DirectX 12 build of WoW. 
  
You can join the discussion on World of Warcraft’s upcoming CPU enhancements on the OC3D Forums.