Client Freezing Intermittently

Support Technical Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been having an issue with my World of Warcraft client where the client freezes for anywhere between about 6-10 seconds. During this time, the rest of my PC is running just fine, if I spam click like the impatient monkey that I am, the client stops responding but if I wait a few seconds it starts responding again, so it does recover by itself.
I’d like to be clear that there is no FPS drop - I’ve got my max FPS set to 120 and that’s what it sits comfortably at and then suddenly the whole client will freeze.

The thing that I’m finding really strange about this is, if I open the start menu then the client starts responding again immediately, but alt tabbing doesn’t make a difference. Also, this only fixes the issue if World of Warcraft is the active window - simply opening the start menu while it’s not the active window doesn’t do anything, which on that note, the freezes do also occur even if it’s not the active window.

The issue occurs on both the classic era client (which has addons installed) and the retail client (has no addons installed). There is no error message or any other symptom beyond a client freeze. I’m returning to WoW now after taking a break - I last played after phase 5 but before phase 6 of the WoW classic launch a few years ago (before TBC) and I never experienced these issues, I’m still using the same PC.

I’ve flicked a ticket to Blizzard support and they were…an experience.
Per their troubleshooting, I have tried the following:

  • Ensure your computer well exceeds the system requirements (specs listed below)
  • Shut down all other programs (including internet browsers)
  • Ensure your graphics driver is not outdated
  • Turn off vertical sync
  • Reset in-game graphics settings to default
  • Reset video driver settings to default
  • Run the game in DX11 instead of DX12
  • Run the repair tool
  • Check my hardware for overheating (temperature peaked at 52.5°C)
  • Set my windows power plan to high performance

After this very thorough list of troubleshooting, Blizzard support threw in the towel, refused to escalate my ticket and told me to either post in this forum or reach out to a local IT technician.

My PC specs are:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
GPU: Asus TUF Gaming RTX 4080 (driver ver 566.36)
RAM: 64gb 3200MHz CAS 22 (XMP 2.0 enabled)
Mobo: Gigabyte X570S Aero G
SDD running the client: Gen 3 M.2 3400/3000MB/s
OS: Windows 11 Pro

Again, none of these hardware specs have changed since I last played, only the WoW client has changed and last time I checked, my PC should be able to handle World of Warcraft. Pretty confident that it’s not my PC/OS, just to be sure, I even did a clean reinstall of Windows (also because I needed to do a good clean out anyway) and the issue persists.

Anyway, I hope that someone here can shed some wisdom on what might be causing this because level 1 Blizzard support sure wasn’t interested.

2

Have you tried rolling back to previous version of the graphics card drivers? To see if it’s just the latest version drivers causing the problem?

3

I haven’t tried that, I wouldn’t know what version to roll back to. But wouldn’t it be a more widespread issue if this was a problem with a specific driver? I’ve had this issue for a few driver versions now.

Edit: Cool so it doesn’t look like the forum updated the profile for my original post above (I changed the character on my profile).

4

Have you ran dxdiag yet? I personally don’t know how to read the log but others will, if you can post that it may shed light for someone else on what it may be causing the issue.

5

I just pulled one now, no problems were found on any components.
Also it’s worth noting that WoW is the only game that I have this issue and I’ve tested with both the game ready and studio driver.

6

Each character is separate on the wow forums. Swapping your posting toon will not affect any posts you’ve currently made. You can think of each character as basically a new forum account essentially.

7

Ah right, makes sense.

8

Errors don’t really show up until you export the report.

9

Yeah, I exported the report and all components reported fine.

10

We don’t ask you to run a dxdiag for no reason. You are too run it, export it, and post it to the forum or to pastebin and provide the link so that the export can be seen and reviewed.

Right now all you’ve done is say “yep, i don’t see any problems” without providing any diagnostic information.

11

Jesus christ dude, no need to be so rude. I didn’t realise I was being explicitly asked to provide the log, I thought they were more asking if there were any obvious errors.

12

I’m not sure what Python is, it reported a memory leak,

  1. +++ WER2 +++:

  2. Fault bucket 1864092847619183488, type 5

  3. Event Name: RADAR_PRE_LEAK_64

  4. Response: Not available

  5. Cab Id: 0

  • Problem signature:

  1. P1: python.exe

  2. P2: 3.10.6150.1013

  3. P3: 10.0.22631.2.0.0

I am also seeing apphangs in wow classic and possibly a GIT updater/Installer, and I do not know what GIT actually does either, sorry.

A lot of drives, windows and wow are on C: ?

13

Thanks for checking that out for me. Python is a programming language, I use the deployment to run a few applications, but nothing that runs while WoW is running. I only recently reinstalled Python after doing my OS reinstall, the issue was still present prior to reinstalling Python.
I use git to clone and pull updates from git repositories, I was having issues with the installer which would be the apphangs you spotted. I’m definitely interested in the apphangs in wow classic though, is there something you could recommend I do to dig deeper into that?
I have a few different storage drives, Windows is on C, WoW is on B.

14

B is internal or USB connected? Not sure why, but when I see A and B I think floppy drives, lol I’m old.

I think C has enough space.

2 Likes
15

Haha yeah so B is internal, it’s an M.2 drive. I don’t have any external drives connected, although for some reason it detects my D drive (HDD which I use for storage) as an external drive but I don’t run any apps off that.
I get you with the A and B conventions as floppy drives, I figured it shouldn’t be too much of a sin to occupy those drive letters these days, I can’t remember the last time I saw a floppy disk xD

1 Like
16

BIOS is 2 years out of date and that is important for stability.
Current - F4 15.04 MB Dec 28, 2022
Newest - F7d 14.99 MB Sep 02, 2024

It looks like the chipset drivers are also out of date - https://www.amd.com/en/support/downloads/drivers.html/chipsets/am4/x570.html

Those are also important for overall stability.

1 Like
17

Thanks, I’ll update those and see if the issue persists.

18

You mentioned graphics drivers and I’ve noticed that the nVidia app has been known to cause intermittent issues with clients. It likes to optimize the driver then optimize the driver for the game and the 3D settings. What I would consider is remove the nVidia app and reinstall the Graphic Game Ready drive AFTER you updated those others part they mentioned.

1 Like
19

Updated BIOS and chipset, issue still occurs.
New dxdiag dump https://pastebin.com/XRDP8ycm
Next thing I’ll check is Roxiu’s suggestion of removing the Nvidia app and reinstalling the graphics driver.

20

Issue still occurs after uninstalling the Nvidia app and reinstalling the driver (clean reinstall) :frowning: