I was having trouble loading with direct x12 in classic and retail on my Surface Pro 4, Windows 10 (whatever build is latest as of 9/1/19). WoW loads and shows only the upper left 25% of the screen, windowed even though settings are full screen. It’s completely uplayable. In retail, I’ve resolved this by loading Direct x11 in the advanced graphics settings. In classic, no such option is available. Using he -d3d11 command in the Blizzard launcher settings didn’t work either, though does for retail.
What did work was going to the wow classic executable and running the compatibility troubleshooter. Go to Program Files (x86) >> World of Warcraft >> _ classic _ >> wow.exe
- Right click wow.exe, click the compatibility tab, then run compatibility troubleshooter.
- Choose “Troubleshoot Program”
- Choose “The program opens but doesn’t display correctly”
- Choose “Program starts up in a small window (640x480) and won’t switch to full screen”
- Click “Test the program” and confirm that wow classic displays properly
- Next and “yes, save these settings for this program”
From here on out, you will have to open and login into the game manually using the wow.exe and not the Blizzard Launcher – the blizzard launcher must use some other path to launch the game and it doesn’t work if you go through the launcher. You will still have to update the game through the launcher and will probably have to run through the steps above every time the game updates.
It does, however, work if you run wow by running the wow.exe file after running the troubleshooter.