Originally posted by: Leyawiin
With patch 3.0.2 in October (Echoes of Doom) the WoW graphics engine got a complete revamping. Landscape draw distance was almost doubled (at maximum) and dynamic shadow quality was introduced. Did you have these issues prior to that? Basically, to recreate what was "max quality" prior to the patch you have to have the Shadow Quality slider all the way to the left (back to "blob" shadows) and have Landscape View Distance set to about 60%. These changes have little to do with your graphics card, they are primarily CPU intensive and everyone is complaining about them.
I have a GTX 260 OC'd to 666 Mhz. It used to run WoW before the patch at almost a constant vertical sync limited 60 FPS with all options at max. Now when I have all options maxed I notice a 10-15 FPS drop in many areas and a fair bit of stuttering if I pan the camera too fast (like when flying somewhere or running along on my mount). If I place those two sliders I told you about back to their pre-patch values everything returns to "normal". You might also want to reset some of your WoW folders by deleting Cache, WTF and Interface. Allowing these to rebuild helped my performance on "patch day" quite a lot.