Was directed here by BlizzCS on Twitter, hoping I can find some help.
Recently the game has started freezing up when alt-tabbing back into the game. Like, the entire game freezes, disappears as if it was minimized, and does not respond. Game sounds and music are still happening so I know it’s not a full lockup. The only way to get it to unfreeze is to alt-tab back out and then back in again…but the game acts very oddly after that until I close the game entirely and restart it.
My framerate stays at 100+, but it’s jittery and choppy like I’m getting lag spikes or a memory leak or something. My player model turns a completely flat gray texture, but not my armor or anything else in the game, just my face and whatnot. The game thinks I have the alt key pressed constantly, and so NPCs and other interactions do not work until I tap the alt key (not alt-tab again) a few times to ‘unstick’ it.
I’ve tried reloading and relogging to try and fix it, but the only thing that works is a full game exit and restart…which is naturally annoying when you forget and alt-tab out real quick on a flightpath or something and then have to exit and restart as soon as you land before you can continue on playing.
I play in windowed fullscreen mode as I have for years, and haven’t changed any options or addons since this started happening.
Is anyone else experiencing this, or is it something on my end? Again, it’s only started happening recently, like in the last month or less (sorry I’m bad with time) and I haven’t personally changed anything on my end which is why I’m thinking it might be a Warcraft thing and not something I can fix or update on my own?
You mentioned the game seems to think you are still pressing the alt key. If you have a different keyboard handy try swapping it out and seeing if that fixes the problem. Super easy way to check if it’s a keyboard issue or game issue.
I have a wireless keyboard so I swapped out the batteries just in case, and also borrowed a separate keyboard as well, and the problem still persists unfortunately.
1.) Are your videocard’s drivers up to date?
2.) how hot is your videocard getting? (How many degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit)
3.) Does this happen if you alt-tab out of the game when its both in fullscreen mode as well?
4.) Is this happening with any other games?
I would also post your direct X diagnostics here as well so that if anyone from Blizzards technical support team reads this, they have this information availble.
Drivers are 511.65, so I can update those to 512.15 it looks like.
Ran around Zereth Mortis for a while, did the world boss, etc, highest temp was 53c. Average was 49-50c
I’m not sure what you mean here? My only two options are Windowed and Fullscreen (Windowed), and I’ve always played in fullscreen windowed.
I don’t play other PC games often, so I couldn’t tell you without dusting one off and testing tabbing in other games too.
UPDATE: Well this is interesting. I just had the lockup/freeze happen again, but this time with ZERO keyboard input. I had alt-tabbed out to a browser window to look some stuff up, got distracted, did some other stuff, and noticed I had gone AFK in game. So I closed out my browser window with my mouse, which defaulted the game back into the priority again since it was visible behind the browser and the only other program running at the time. The game visuals froze immediately, despite them still moving like normal the entire time until I closed the browser window. Sound was still playing so it wasn’t a total lockup, just a visual freeze. Since I didn’t have anything else open at the time I couldn’t alt-tab in/out, so I just hit the windows key twice to bring something up for a second and sure enough WoW unfroze after a second and continued on as usual…now with the expected non-framerate-dropping stutters.
Sigh, this is so frustrating.
This is even after I had earlier updated my nvidia driver, and since I was updating I also checked windows update (no updates available), did a disk cleanup for good measure, and restarted again after literally everything just to be extra sure everything was good to go.
Well the game has a minimum background fps enabled by default I think. Should default to 8fps if WoW isn’t the focused window. Sometimes there can be issues with apps getting focus again. Things like overlays can sometimes mess with this. Disable/close out of everything: Discord, steam, xbox overlays(windows+g, might be in the settings somewhere), etc etc. Check your task manager>startup>disable anything that isn’t absolutely essential>reboot.
Another thing that could be happening is you’re running out of VRAM or something and when you’re tabbing back into Chrome, it’s having to unload/reload information. Chrome, by default, will have GPU acceleration enabled, which means it’s going to use VRAM for operations. If you’ve got a lot of stuff open, it might be trying to push all that back into the GPU or something. There’s a lot of variables that can cause issues like this, so it’s really hard to rule out in a single post with limited information.
One quick thing you can try to test: Are you running multiple monitors? If so, try hitting Windows+P and set it to use “PC screen only” and see if you’re still having issues. I’ve had similar issues in the past, that turned out to be coming from having multiple screens going.
I turned off the minimum background fps ages ago, since my browser window isn’t fullscreen and seeing the 8fps game behind my browser drove my eyes bonkers. I don’t use steam/discord often, and have long since set those to not automatically load on startup, and always fully exit (not minimize) when I close them. I disabled everything xbox/windows gaming I possibly could, as I don’t use anything related to that on my PC at all. The only things I have on at startup are essential, plus the Launcher and TSM. Also of note, this only started happening recently. I haven’t installed or uninstalled anything new since it started happening, or making any other changes to my PC other than windows updates, nvidia driver updates, and blizz launcher/game updates. This is why it’s so frustrating. If it was some new program I had installed or adding a new monitor setup I could see that breaking something and just switching back to the way I had it before to see if that fixed the problem…but I haven’t changed anything like that. My setup has been the way it’s been for well over a year, with only the essential updates.
I do use Chrome, but I turned off hardware acceleration because I was having other unrelated browser issues. I rarely have more than a single tab open at a time, and the game freezes happen not just when tabbing back and forth, but straight up closing chrome and it going back to the game too. It doesn’t happen every time either, which makes it more infuriating. What other information can I provide, if any, that would help rule something out?
I do have multiple monitors, but I’ve had the second one for quite some time with no issues…is that something that could develop problems after using for a while vs something that would start happening immediately? If so I’ll happily pull the plug on the second one and find some other way to make that work. I don’t even use it all the time, it’s just an occasional convenience thing for spreadsheets or watching a steam/video while I’m playing.