I have tried many, many things to fix this such as,
Changing my power settings from balanced to high performance,
Setting priority of WoW in the task manager to high,
Increasing the available RAM the game can use with large address aware
Changing the settings in the NVIDIA control panel in many different ways
I have also disabled every setting in the video interface to nothing. I have tried many different combinations and still I can only get 30 FPS. I have tried to use the game on my husbands computer with windows 11 (I am using windows 10) and the frame rate is still the same. I have tried using the "ultimate wotlk" expansion and the base expansion on this website and my frame rates are stuck around 30 FPS in high populus areas. I have tried updating the bios of my motherboard. I have tried disabling the gaming modes on windows. I have tried checking if my system is using my integrated graphics card (i strongly believe it is not). I have tried checking if I plugged in my HDMI into my video card (I did). I tried disabling HPET. I tried overclocking my graphics card.
I also have low utilization of my CPU and GPU when playing the game.
I am quite sad about this because I talked to my guild mates and they say that their nvidia 2080 is running everything at 100-150 FPS. I hope someone out there has had the exact same issue and can provide me some peace of mind or any advice helps. Thanks guys
30 FPS is quite the norm in highly populated areas like Dalaran, Orgrimmar and Stormwind.
I haven't edited priority of WoW (don't recall doing so). And quite sure I haven't touched NVIDIA control panel much, maybe some basic stuff.
From in-game settings, I've only edited Shadow Quality to low, View Distance to somewhere in the middle (~6/10), Weather Density to low.
I'm getting about 25-40 FPS in Dalaran where you took your picture. Running around in Dalaran, my FPS is anything between 30-90 most of the time. This is LAA enabled and with WoD model patches.
You can beef up your PC with newest hardware, sadly that won't have much effect on old 32-bit WoW.exe
What you need is a CPU with good single-core performance. GPU won't help one bit. I don't see any CPU mentioned in your post. If you've bought a "Ryzen" or something like that to run WoW you made a mistake.
Wotlk is such an old engine that it won't benefit from new hardware that much. I run the same card 3070Ti + 12600k and they are basically chilling in the middle of Dalaran. I get drops to 30fps like you playing on 1440p ultra. CPU usage 10% and I don't think you could improve anything. WoW just can't utilize those. there have been many topics on this forum where people are complaining that WoW works like crap on high end machines. its normal. unfortunately.
you can get better FPS by disabling some Addons or disable hardware cursor, trying other tricks from topics like this https://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=390882 but I wouldn't expect miracles.
and your guildmates certainly do not run the middle of Dalaran at 100-150 fps. no one does. unless no addons, lowest settings, low resolution but I think barely anyone plays like this.
What you need is a CPU with good single-core performance. GPU won't help one bit. I don't see any CPU mentioned in your post. If you've bought a "Ryzen" or something like that to run WoW you made a mistake.
That doesnt even matter. Wotlk still runs on ancient engine and whatever you have, you will have low fps in populated area due to the limitation of engine, because it cant use more than 2gb of ram, even if you unlock it with "large address aware", it will use only 3gb of ram. Im using ryzen 1600 and rx470, 16gb ram and my game works perfectly fine while raiding, no stutters, no freezing, i just avoid Dalaran because no matter what i have it will still work ****.