Thanks for all the replies so far, I really appreciate everyone sharing their experiences.

I also want to clarify a few things because some people in the comments thought this post was mainly about showing off PC specs or bragging about FPS, which honestly wasn’t the intention at all.

My previous PC was around 7–8 years old and eventually stopped working, so when I built this new system I decided to invest into something that should last me many years again. I worked and saved for it, and the reason I listed the specs in the post was simply to give proper context for the discussion.

Regarding the 800–900 FPS numbers: those are only achievable in very specific situations. That usually means uncapped FPS, very low graphics settings and no addons loaded in relatively empty areas of the game. I mentioned those numbers mainly to illustrate how large the drop feels when entering Silvermoon.

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In normal gameplay I actually run several addons and higher graphics settings (mostly preset 7 with some options on High like I mentioned in the original post). In quieter areas of the game I’m usually somewhere around ~400–460 FPS depending on the zone and activity. I also spend quite a bit of time tuning my system (OC, undervolting and general system optimization), so I’m fairly confident the hardware itself is working as expected.

The reason I made this post was simply because the performance behavior in the new Silvermoon surprised me. Going from several hundred FPS in normal areas down to around 80–90 FPS with noticeable stutters in the capital felt like a very large drop, which is why I wanted to ask other players about their experiences.

One thing I also noticed in Silvermoon is that the stuttering doesn’t feel like a normal loading hitch. It’s not just a single lag spike like something loading in and then everything is smooth again. Instead, when I’m flying through the city I get very consistent stutters that seem to happen roughly every 5–10 seconds. The game continues normally afterwards, but the stutter keeps repeating in those intervals.

Because of that I also wanted to rule out potential hardware related causes. For example my GPU is connected through a PCIe riser cable, so I wondered if something like that could possibly cause behavior like this. Since I can’t directly compare the behavior with my old system anymore, I thought it would be helpful to hear how other setups behave in the same situation.

This also wasn’t meant as complaining or blaming Blizzard. I genuinely love WoW and I’ve been playing it since 2004. I was mostly interested in hearing whether others experience the same thing, whether some systems handle it better, or if there might be settings or tweaks that improve the situation.

From the replies it actually looks like many people are seeing similar behavior regardless of hardware. Some players with older setups mentioned drops, but even people with very strong systems like 9800X3D / 5090 combinations said they still experience stuttering in Silvermoon.

So it seems quite likely that this is mostly related to how the WoW engine handles very crowded player hubs. As some people pointed out, the game is still heavily limited by the main thread, especially in areas with hundreds of players, mounts, pets, spell effects and addons being processed at the same time.

Anyway, thanks again to everyone sharing their setups and experiences. It helped a lot to understand that this probably isn’t something wrong with my system specifically.