I have a question for World of Warcraft Players and a problem

Anyone else seeing performance drops/issues with this new expansion?

With the new Mists of Pandaria expansion it appears my GPU has to work much harder than with Cataclysm.

I have found that playing Cataclysm I could generally leave graphics set to high or ultra and would see 60fps at high and mid 40's at ultra. With Pandaria I am finding I need to keep the graphics set at good or high to maintain the same frame rates that high and ultra yielded in Cataclysm.

Most notably over the past two weeks I have done the Sha of Anger 40 man raid three times and each time around mid fight my frame rates dropped so low I was watching them load and I had to go into the game menu and drop my graphics setting to “Low” to get it playable again.

Then last night I did Mogu'shan Vaults (LFR) and on the final bosses on both the first and second parts experienced the same frame rate drop and was forced to drop the graphics setting to low. On all occasions my home and world latency never went over 85ms

So I am looking for any advice, insight or pointers since I was really hoping not to have to upgrade the GPU in this machine.


Specs
M17X R3
Core i7 2670QM
Radeon HD 6870m - Video driver is the Dell 7990 driver for the R4 version :8.973.0.0
1920 x 1080 60Hz WLED
256Gb Corsair Performance Pro SSD
250Gb Western Digital Scorpio Black
Slot-Loading Dual Layer Blu-ray Reader (BR-ROM, DVD+-RW, CD-RW)
16Gb Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600

 

FPS dropped for sure, as the graphics engine, like with every expansion, has had an overhaul with some bells and whistles added. However I didn't have such a drastic drop like you have. That said I'm running an R4.

 

FPS dropped but my experience is most problems come from addons.
Just deactivate all addons to get a sense of what you should get.
If the results are good add the addons a few at a time until you see which are killing the performance.

If it isn't enough make sure that triple buffering is deactivated and that API is Direct X 11 (advanced settings)
If it isn't enough put texture filtering on bilinear.
If it isn't enough put multisampling on 2x.

On my M17x R2 I am playing with these settings with generally way more than 30fps.

 

Also you might want to update to the latest AMD driver, I know there were a number of tweaks specific to WoW that went in to the later drivers. I assume the DELL driver is very old and probably worth an update.