THIS. Texture rendering should be done on the GPU and NOT the CPU. It seems like Blizz either accidentally (or maybe intentionally?) dumped that particular job on the cpu. But it really seems out of place there, and if all other textures are rendered on gpu as they should be it would explain why only these textures are suffering for it.
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Would a change in what renders what be significant enough for Blizzard to not consider doing (out of it being too much of a hassle) or is it within the realm of possibilty?
Donât mock yourself. The smooth brains work at Blizzard not understanding a large portion of their playerbase uses their PC mostly for internet browsing and WoW.
You shouldnât need to spend insane amounts of money on a new PC to play a 16 year old game, updates or not.
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Itâs so nice to see someone else who understands this stuff explain it far better than I can. Intel supported AVX before AMD, so they donât have this issue.
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Well the way Bliz is treating it, they are basically blaming the people having the issues for not spending several hundred dollars (or more) to upgrade to brand new CPUS & hardware to play WoW. Seems I picked the wrong time to come back into WoW. Now I canât run it on my processor with 8gb of ram & a nVidia GTX 1050 Ti card. Damn sad when I do 3d rendering on this âoldâ system & âobsoleteâ video hardware without issue but WoW canât even load texture maps for skin & hairâŚ
I failed my coding classes and this is the conclusion that even I came to. I hope the explanations here help the devs pinpoint the issue so they can get it fixed. I imagine everyone will sleep better after.
EDIT: I will also note that after reading all that my guess is itâs an oversight on Blizzâs part on how AMD CPUs work vs other brands.
In my opinion it should be 100% within the realm of possibility. Iâm just a hobbyist so take that with a grain of salt but I donât think this would be impossible for someone like Blizz.
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I wouldnât mind if they even had an option for the old models similar to when they changed the skeletal structure of the models way back and let us with the older computers just have less options. Unfortunately for myself and some friends covid hit our pockets more than our health, and cant exactly upgrade just yet.
Thatâs pretty much it right there 100%. I have no idea why AVX is likely the culprit, but it definitely explains why FX and later cpus have no issue. Up until then, SSE4a was the latest AMD had and sadly Phenom II was one year shy of getting it. Weirdly enough Intel and AMD both shipped CPUs supporting it at the same time. Intel shipped the Core platform with the i3, i5, and i7 first in Q1 2011. AMD followed with the FX in Q3 which sparked a lot of âadd moar coresâ memes.
nerd talk aside, I have no proof that itâs the culprit, but it seems very likely since it ends right when AVX was introduced to the markets. Someone with an Intel older than 2011âs Sandy Bridge needs to chime in, lol.
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Please fix it 
dont forget about us
I should have a system that old kicking around. I think. Lemme go rummage around.
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Please do⌠if it does not have the same issue Iâll eat myâŚheadband. Iâll log in and take the level squish just to update my armory, too.
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Well, time for me to sleep ; v ;
Thanks a lot guys for at least trying to give us some help/insight. It feels a bit better now that I know more people are chiming in c:
I hope by the time I wake up this has been addressed by a blue post that can give us some more answers >.<
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Sorry to say this is what they are calling âfixedâ. Basically if you arenât running hardware that isnât 3 years old or newer, they have already abandoned us. Read the Shadowlands requirements⌠Iâll bet only 1 in five players can match that minimum requirements nowâŚ
Same problem, Iâm using:
- AMD Phenom II X4 810 Processor
- Nvidia Geforce GTX 1050 Ti
Letâs try to keep this focused on getting a solution, and less on trying to rag on Blizz.
Also @Bragonsdane Unfortunately it looks like my oldest intel system atm is an i3-2350m which is Sandybridge if Iâm not mistaken.
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11 year old computer here. Everything is fine here graphics wise. Iâm in ultra settings. I just canât create allied races characters as it says i have too many characters on my account yet I can create regular characters.
SSD
GTX 1650
PHENOM II X4 955
if that canât run WoW anymore thatâs depressing on many a level
Same issue here.
- AMD Athlon X2 270
- Radeon R7 200 Series
thatâs a bummer.
this bit from wikipedia explains it perfectly I think.
AVX introduces a three-operand SIMD instruction format, where the destination register is distinct from the two source operands. For example, an SSE instruction using the conventional two-operand form a = a + b can now use a non-destructive three-operand form c = a + b, preserving both source operands.
So likely what we are seeing is an artifact of that. While maybe some code is optimized for SSE, it will run on AVX, but AVX code will not work properly on SSE. And I guess someone shifted player models to the CPU to lower gpu load perhaps? Player models would be constantly changing with gear upgrades, so I can see how they would shift the calculations there to load a new calculated model into the GPU which would then be rendered as normal. So what weâre seeing here is a part of the model not rendering correctly and so the texture perhaps cannot get attached to it and so it renders as black or whatever the game engine chooses.
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