Terrible frame drops on NVIDIA cards after installing newest driver.
To whom it may concern,
After doing some testing, I noticed that the newest driver, version (460.89) released 12/15/2020 from NVIDIA, causes massive instability in all regions of the game on WOTLK. I rolled back to version (27.21.14.6079) released 12/03/2020, and it had seemed to all but disappear. A little while later, I noticed that whenever I would move my mouse, the screen would freeze, drop from 144 to about 3 frames, and then stutter back to normal. I did some research and decided to rollback my razer mouse driver as well. The problem seems to have stopped. The mouse driver version that "cleared" the problem is (10.0.15063.0) released on 02/18/2020. I have a very good PC, and I can run games like RUST on full ultra graphics at 2560x1440 with consistent 144 frames. This issue occurs across all WOTLK realms, tested both on WOTLK- old models and WOTLK - WoD models. Fullscreen/windowed/maximized/different resolutions, unplugging monitors, setting priority to high for WOTLK process. I will continue to update this as I exhaust all possibilities client-side.
As someone who has spent everyday of the past 11 years on Warmane, and Molten-WoW before that, I have never experienced this level of game-breaking FPS drops, occurring throughout the world. It makes it unplayable. I'm not sure if there is anything you guys can do, sever-side, about this issue, but I ask that someone look into it, as many players use NVIDIA hardware, and we would like to be up to date with drivers as much as possible.
EDIT #2: after disabled hardware cursor, the game stutters seem to have stopped. I reupdated both mouse + graphics drivers and will update this post if anything else occurs
Thank you in advance, and if I can provide any diags or information please do not hesitate to let me know,
Piama
Edited: December 20, 2020
Reason: Further information obtained on possibilities.