World of Warcraft: Windowed Performance Drops

In World of Warcraft, I get really good performance - >100 FPS, no stuttering - until I try actually doing more complex things. The easiest example, oddly enough, is to go into a dungeon, get into combat, then jump. At that point, FPS appears to stay within 90% of where it was, but frame times jump wildly and visual stuttering occurs to the point of being nearly unplayable.

When I changed from Windowed mode to Fullscreen (Windowed), everything is fine. However, I’d REALLY like to have the flexibility of a movable window. My suspicion is that this is largely related to GNOME’s compositor: from a reddit thread I saw, it can’t be disabled, but it unredirects output on fullscreen windows only.

Other things I’ve tried to no avail:

  • Limiting Max and Target FPS to 90 and 80 respectively
  • Using Wine-GE
  • Using DX11/DXVK and DX12/VKD3D
  • Reducing/Turning Off Shadow, Liquids, AntiAliasing
  • Using __GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP 1 to allow the shader cache to go beyond 128MB

Lutris Submit Issue Output: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/ktxFBp6bkt/

Hardware:
Ryzen 3900x
Geforce 3070
Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro Wifi
32GB RAM (@ 3200 14-14-14-36. IIRC)
2TB WD Black NVMe SSD

Software:
Fedora 35, updated default kernel 5.16.18-200.fc35.x86_64
Nvidia Binary Driver 510.60.02
Gnome 41 on X11
Lutris 0.5.9.1
Wine: lutris-fshack-7.2-x86_64, lutris-GE-Proton-7-8-x86_64
Battle.Net launcher stable release and WoW Retail 9.2.0 (42979)

Definitely is the compositor, but you don’t need to play in windowed mode.
Remember that we are just redirecting the wine outputs to something linux can interpret, so if you press the hotkeys to switch to desktop you should be able to access your desktop normally. (i.e. Super+2 for the second desktop)

This way Desktop 1 has WoW in full screen and Desktop 2 has just the desktop.

Take this with a grain of salt as I do not use Gnome.

As an additional note, you should try a custom kernel, I use the zen kernel to be able to use Fsync (that is what the fshack is all about in your wine installation, there is gaming improvements ).