Performance with and without SMT
World of Warcraft was developed and launched at a time when single-core processors were still the norm. Therefore, the title was not optimized for multithreading at all in its beginnings. This game has, of course, evolved its 3D engine over the years, but its management of CPU resources, especially SMT, is still imperfect: In our tests, we quickly realized that this technology at best has no, at worst negative impact on performance. To create the most comprehensive analysis possible, we choose three graphics cards that are representative of the three most important architectures on the market: the GeForce GTX 1080, Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64.
The SMT has an impact on overall performance, but in a more subtle way than we originally thought! In DirectX 11, there are no changes in the GeForce card. The performance of the Vega 64, on the other hand, drops slightly. With the RX 580, on the other hand, SMT improves performance slightly. In DirectX 12, the difference with the RX 580 is negligible, while the performance of the Vega 64 card increases slightly and decreases with the GeForce GTX 1080.
But the most important point is the frame time: it is systematically more stable when SMT is disabled, regardless of the graphics card! We have therefore decided to disable the SMT for the following tests if it is relevant from an expected performance perspective.
Performance according to the graphical options
Depending on the graphics options you choose, the performance of a graphics card in games drops sharply. With all three maps, we go through the game's presets: Low (Graphics Level 2), Medium (Graphics Level 5), High (Graphics Level 7), and Ultra (Graphics Level 10). Once again, we have set the environment details in the highest preset from Ultra to High to keep HBAO+ disabled. In addition, the details of the environment (?!?) have been limited to level 9. The tests were performed with SMT disabled.
MSI GTX 1060 Armor OC 6G
MSI RX 580 Gaming 8G Gaming 8G
AMD RX Vega 64
Performance is consistently better in DirectX 11, regardless of the graphics card, with one exception: the RX 580. With this graphics processor, performance in DirectX 12 with maximum graphics settings is slightly better and completely identical, regardless of the API used as soon as the graphics details are reduced! Again, the number of frametime displayed in DirectX 12 is less important than in DirectX 11, although the differences between these two APIs are quite small for these cards.
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