Graphics problem on WoW – He’p me, Jeebus!
/whimper
/beg
How pathetic!
I’m at a loss here, dear readers. I have been unable to play World of Warcraft for four days now. Do you hear me, I said FOUR DAYS!!! Do you know what it’s like for a Warcrack addict to go cold turkey? I can assure you it’s not pretty. I’m talking “not pretty” as in female dwarf “not pretty.” Yeah, that bad.
The Problem
It started right after the last patch. At first I was getting streaks of graphics running off of random objects, like the image above. Then the textures of things like grass, dirt, and mountains started tiling into repeated gradients, similar to the image below. I could relieve the problem temporarily by alt-tabbing out of WoW to my PC desktop and everything would be fine for a while.
These things happened more and more often and then one time I logged in and all the graphics that are “on top” of my playing screen — things like the mini map, my health bar, my spell bar, speech bubbles — were all whited out. I could barely make out the shapes of them but couldn’t read them or use them. Again, alt-tabbing fixed it temporarily.
What really got my attention, though, was the lag. I would press keys that wouldn’t show results for upwards of 30 seconds. By then the battle was over and either the mob was dead, or I was. I could no longer play the game other than checking mail and trotting to the Auction House.
Oh, but it gets worse! Now whenever I start up WoW, it locks up my computer so badly that I must do a hard shutdown using the power button. The mouse moves but can’t click anything and the keyboard doesn’t work at all. So now I’m afraid to even start the program!
Not Alone
I’ve searched high and low to figure out (a) what the problem is and (b) how to fix it. Interestingly, I came across a lot of other folks who have experienced the same problem in the weeks since the last patch. However, when mentioned in the Blizzard forums, it’s dismissed as a video driver, sound card, or video card problem. I even compiled a document of solution ideas from around the web, hoping one of them would work.
Wulf, of Wulf’s Warcraft Weblog described a problem almost identical to mine, had even bought a new graphics card, and is currently considering buying a new computer! We started corresponding to compare notes. Unfortunately, we are no further along.
Attempted Solutions
- Ran Disk Cleanup and Defrag.
- Tried the first three fixes on this very helpful page. Nothing worked.
- Stress-tested the video card and it passed with flying colors.
- Neither the graphics card nor the computer itself feel hot.
- Can’t figure out how to check the over-clocking. If it’s in my BIOS, I can’t find it.
- Don’t know how to check the AGP.
- Tried all the property additions that Blizzard recommends here (opengl, no sound, etc.) and here. Didn’t work.
- Turned off my sound card completely.
- Uninstalled and reinstalled the chipset drivers and the video drivers.
- Deleted entire WTF and Cache folders in WoW subdirectory. Deleted all add-ons.
- Uninstalled and reinstalled WoW.
What Now? I Need Help!
I’m fairly convinced that I don’t have a hardware problem, despite everyone on the boards saying that it sounds to them like the video card is dead. My computer is only 18 months old and the video card passed all the tests I did on it, but maybe I’m missing one.
I’m also pretty sure it’s not a driver problem since I updated everything on this bloody computer per Blizzard’s specifications.
Which leaves me with only a few possible sources of the problem:
- Problem is caused by something I don’t know how to check (see above bullet list).
- Problem is caused by World of Warcraft’s latest patch and developers either don’t know it or are denying it.
So, my question to you, dear readers, is this: can anyone out there help me and Wulf save our computers and get us back to playing the game?
I’ve posted the specs of my computer, in case anyone wants to geek out on them.
January 17, 2008 at 7:33 am
Looking at your specs..it says you’re running DirectX9? If you are try updating it to DirectX10 (if you haven’t already). Maybe that will work.
/crosses fingers for you
January 17, 2008 at 7:37 am
“Problem is caused by World of Warcraft’s latest patch and developers either don’t know it or are denying it. ”
Most likely cause, IMO. /sigh. I haven’t played WoW in close to a year, but your post reminded me of the dreaded ‘morning after patch’ hell. There’s a pill for that, it’s called a Pitcher of Martinis.
Flippancy aside, let’s look at the symptoms – gradually deteriorating graphics performance…alt-tabbing fixes it temporarily…latest patch has set this off….sounds like a RAM issue. Could be a memory leak, that ‘refreshes’ or ‘resets’ when you alt tab. Could be that the patch requires more RAM to run the game now (I remember the severe lag that Bliz would deny was their doing, but when I added more RAM than their box specs required, the issue went away. That’s when I knew the patches/additions to the game they were making were at the center of the lag issue).
I can’t see your PC’s specs from work, as Personal sites are Web(non)sense blocked, so I don’t know how much RAM you have. Also, you could have a failing stick. If I were you, I would try the following, in order of cheapest to most frustrating:
1. Test for memory leaks – honestly, I am not sure how this is done, but I would think a web search should give you information
2. Test for failing RAM – swap out a known-good stick, one at a time in each slot, check results
3. Increase your RAM by half a gig or more if you can.
4. Wait until the screaming on the forums reaches such a crescendo that Bliz responds and fixes what they f’ed up
Good luck. I’ve been thinking about returning to WoW, but things like this just make me remember how poor the customer service has become. I’ll be watching to see what your resolution turns out to be.
P.
January 17, 2008 at 3:17 pm
The RAM situation is a possibility.
Believe it or not, so is a failing power supply. The WEIRDEST crap shows up when a power supply is starting to fail. I know…why does it only show up when trying to play WoW? All I know is, my daughter-in-law was seeing weird stuff too, and a new PS fixed all her problems. (I am now a godlike father-in-law, believe me!)
January 17, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Kestrel, thanks for the tips. I got a link the other day to download a program which would test one’s RAM. The longer the program works, the more likely it is to find a problem and it suggested that I run the program all night. I ran it from 7:30pm to 7:00am and there was no errors reported off my ram.
I often wondered too if my power source was going but when I asked the folks at the computer store if that could be the problem they assured me they checked it and it was running fine.
The only suggestion they gave me was adding more RAM as well but I have more than 1G of RAM which my other gaming friends who know more about computers tell me I have plenty.
I am at my wits end. >.<!! But I do appreciate the many people who tried to help me troubleshoot through my issues.
/thank
January 17, 2008 at 8:21 pm
@Wulf: Geez, that DirectX version slipped right past me! Thanks for pointing that out. That’s the first thing I’m going to do. Updates throughout the evening tonight…
January 18, 2008 at 1:17 am
I have has similar issues in the past with Blizz patches breaking things and being told it was my hardware. After days of pulling of the hair and gnashing of the teeth, I exhausted every diagnostic I could run save for checking my own pulse. The WOW forums were also lit up like Christmas trees with people having similar problems. A few days later, a hotfix and a rolling restart, and everything was smooth as silk.
Your memory should be fine. I have about half of what you are running and am currently not experiencing any of the problems you and Wulf are.
My bet is that Blizz broke something for a few users, and are trying to iron it out without admitting it’s on their end. I would be amazed if the next hotfix doesn’t make it all better auto-magically.
Great Shammie blog BTW. Was part of the reason I rolled Shaman. Keep up the great work!!
Oz
January 18, 2008 at 8:34 am
[...] I am not the only one The Game Dame has had the same issues I have had. She also clued me into a few WoW forum posts where other [...]
January 25, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Same issues here, since the last patch… they game will play fine for about 15 minutes…then I will notice the screen glitch here and there, progressively gets worse, then the colors look like I just changed resolution to a very low one. And then it will screen lock.
Rebooting the computer fixes it right away… I can log right back onto WoW and its fine, for about another 15 minutes.
Blizz started off answering posts in the technical forums…they listed everything from out dated drivers, to over heating video cards as the root cause. Now they are just ignoring, they have stopped responding to ALL of the posts related to this issue (which is usually an indication that they know what it is, know its on their end….and will magically fix it soon)
I don’t think they know what the long term effect on the video cards is, so they will just not respond, attemt to fix it…and just in case whatever they have going on starts killing video cards,,,they will never admit a thing and risk having to rplace a bunch of video cards.
Its funny too..because you get people on teh forums defending Blizz at random saying things like ( millions of people play WoW…so it wouldn’t be unheard of for 100’s of people to have video cards go dead at the same time. Problem with that theory is…1000’s would be going dead at the same time ALL YEAR…not just since the past week!!! You would have seen these graphics issue’s post before now.
Its a hot top on the WoW forums, everyopne having the same issues.
My video card isn’t going dead… I play Age of empires 3, need for speed… no issues…I load up wow and play for 15 minutes and I get some really pretty rainbow colored fish on my background picture.
WoW has clammed up…so give them a day or so to schedule a “rolling restart” and I bet the problem magically goes away!!!
January 26, 2008 at 10:49 am
It’s not your hardware. It’s not your monitor.
I took my computer in for issues with another game around Christmas. WOW was working fine. We replaced the graphics card and the power supply.
I was still having issues with my games so I took the computer back to the shop. They ran diagnostics and found nothing wrong, but did say my hard drive would soon be dying. Replaced that. Clean hard drive. Clean installs of all programs.
Still having issues with my games. Took it back and got a different/better graphics card.
My games work. My son signs onto WOW, patches download and screen goes wacky. Pixels missing. Lines running through it.
What else could it be but the monitor, right? Since I use this system for work, we figured we should get a new monitor.
$400.00 and an awesome new monitor. WOW is still acting up.
Somewhere in there (after the new hard drive) I emailed WOW. Went through ALL of the steps they said to and still having the same issues.
January 29, 2008 at 10:11 am
oh dear well,I have similer problem i get the Pixels missing and lines running through it,ect and thought i’d get new graphics card.after finding that it got rid of most of the wired pixels n corrupt textures I found that when I take my power supply out of my laptop it makes all the corrupt textures dissapear as if like magic—what does this mean?
January 30, 2008 at 4:24 am
That’s called overheating. Your video card simply gets too hot after this 5 minutes or so. If it’s Nvidia card, download Nvidia monitor and check the temperatures. Normal temperature should be 50-60 C, but mine too went very quickly to 90+ and same artifacts started to appear. In some games, they still appear (Black & White 2) but I managed to solve problem by installing a cooler onto video card. Well, I didn’t buy this, but ripped old computer apart, took case fan and simply put it laying on radiator of video card. Well, and connected it. It works and my card’s temperature never goes over 60C. Even with graphics heavy games such as Oblivion.
January 30, 2008 at 4:01 pm
[...] few rolling restarts on WoW have not fixed my PC’s graphics problems. I think I will try the graphics card fan trick [...]
January 31, 2008 at 2:07 pm
@InC: see my follow up post today. It ain’t the heat.
February 16, 2008 at 10:33 pm
When I returned to WOW after a few months of not playing last spring, the graphics on my Dell 2400 would go plaid with most of your other symptoms. My advice is to do everything you can and see if that helps. What worked for me though, was waiting (I have a second computer that is not as good, but can run WOW without crashing ). The only thing I looked forward to each week was the patch. Sooner or later, one was released that made everything normal again:).
February 21, 2008 at 9:32 pm
U neeed to get a new graphic card atleast a 9800GTX k thanks!
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April 2, 2008 at 5:38 am
I am having the exact same problem you describe. Bought a new video card, new CPU fan, downloaded a heap of updates but its still there. Its not a compouter problem its a WOW problem.
May 9, 2008 at 2:08 pm
i have this problen………when i logging ………the game showme this:::
uneable to valide version . this maybe caused by file corruption or the interference of another program……..
how i solutionthis problem??????????
July 26, 2008 at 1:58 am
I’m having a problem too with WoW. i get bits of the NPC’s and my player character missing and streaked around them and flashes of graphics across the screen before it locks up and i have to reboot. I followed Blizz’s fixes from their TS but its still happening. I’ve read this whole thing and it sounds like its the same because i just started playing WoW again after a year or two and it didn’t happen before after i added more RAM so it worked fine. I don’t have a system spec or where to get it, but i do have my cpu, vid card, and how much RAM if it’ll help someone to tell me if its the latest patch that just came out or if its my comp thats the problem.
Processor:
Intel[R]
Pentium[R] 4 CPU 2.40GHz
2.39GHz
RAM Memory:
1.00 Gb
Video Card:
nVidia GeForce 6600
Now before the new patches in the 2.0.0 that was all I needed to play WoW but it seems that from a friend of mine who says that i need more RAM, at least 2 Gb to play it and she might be right which is bad cause i don’t have the money to buy another stick. So any help would be great.
August 10, 2008 at 4:30 pm
I am having the same problems, blacking out, locking up(to the point of manually restarting the computer), and artifacting hardcore. (Alt-tabbing resets its generally) Also it seems turning the graphics down all the way, res, and EVERYTHING in game makes it chill out but then i can’t see anything and makes playing the game no fun.. I’ve replaced the card, HAD all the hardware checked and got more RAM, none of this has fixed this and oddly enough it just started happening after the latest patch. If its blizzards fault i will be very angry i’ve put alot of money into “fixing this” and plan on spending atleast 200+ more in dollars to upgrade my graphics card since the people that replaced my graphics card gave me one that was WORSE than what i had before.
August 11, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Keety, the only thing that fixed this issue for me was getting a new graphics card. I paid about $120 for it and got a $40 rebate on it. Might want to check the sales.
October 24, 2008 at 2:06 am
Same issue here. It seems to have something to do with the patches, I suspect with the increased graphics with each patch (ie I have noticed different rain, fog, etc. recently.) perhaps the graphics card can no longer support it? (my card is running at about 51degrees, nvidia 9700GTX.) I too am on direct X9 and will try 10.
Seems there is a few of us out there with the same issues.