Over the past several months, I’ve noticed my PC’s performance while playing WoW slowly degrading and manifesting mostly in the form of longer load screens and reduced framerates in busy areas.
However, a couple of weeks ago a new problem appeared: My PC will now randomly lock up while alt-tabbing to another program when WoW is open, including back into WoW itself. When it happens to WoW, the screen will eventually ‘reload’, sometimes with an actual loading screen, but sometimes just in the form of reloading the game world and characters in a staggered fashion. This gets to be quite annoying if I’m quickly tabbing out to wowhead or discord while on a flight path and then get stuck staring at a frozen screen for up to 30 seconds or so when I tab back in.
But what’s really got me to finally try looking for help here is that today my whole display actually refreshed itself during one of these freezes. It didn’t actually turn off (the display was still lit the whole time) or have any visual glitches; the screen just went black for a few seconds until the freeze was over.
All told, the experience has gotten to the point where I feel obligated to finally try to do something about it. Do any of these symptoms line up neatly with a particular hardware component going bad/failing? I’ve had this PC for about 5.5 years now so it’s not exactly new and it seems like something’s definitely getting worn out. The graphics card seems most likely to me, but is there a way I can figure it out for sure before I go looking for new stuff?
EDIT: Turns out I probably should have included the hardware I’m using in a post asking about hardware.
CPU: Intel i7 9700KF @ 3.60GHz
RAM: 16GB DDR4 (8x2) @ 3000MHz
GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
SSD: 512GB Intel M.2 NVMe (62GB free)
OS: Windows 11 Home
Good deal
The CPU, RAM & Disk seem to be just fine, as far as specs & amounts go.
Based on the symptoms you have listed, I would lean toward the GPU running out of RAM.
You could try reducing the resolution of your display (I should have asked for that as well, my bad) and/or reducing the fidelity of your WOW settings to see if they have any noticeable impact on performance you are seeing.
One other odd thought, there might be dust bunnies in the computer’s fans that are reducing the cooling of the system. As you run more, and/or longer, if there is reduced cooling, the heat load can start to cause slowdowns and/or instabilities.
Hope this helps
Reducing graphics settings, oddly enough, didn’t seem to do anything. In fact, in the midst of trying to tweak these settings, my PC ended up locking up completely for the first time and eventually turning off the display, forcing a hard shutdown.
However, switching the game to windowed mode rather than fullscreen seems to be doing the trick. All of the problems related to tabbing between programs don’t seem to be present anymore with the game like this. I guess my PC really doesn’t like fullscreen mode anymore?
Hmmm… that is interesting and unusual.
What is the resolution of your display?
While quite old, this Microsoft forums post does seem… related to what you are seeing:
I can’t post links, but I did a web search with these items:
windows 10 full screen problems, but windowed works fine
And the Microsoft Community post (second hit on my search, your mileage may vary) might help provide a path forward.
If I were to hazard a guess, I would suspect that there is a corrupt file in the GPU card drivers or configuration files.
A buddy and myself had this happen - we resolved it by setting the background refresh rate to the same as the in-game refresh rate in the game settings
I’m going down the path of thinking it’s something with the GPU as well. I saw a tool mentioned that can be used to completely remove/clean up display drivers, so I’m going to use that and try reinstalling them to see if that’s indeed what’s going wrong.
Forgive my ignorance, but would you know how I could change either of these settings? The only mention of refresh rate I saw in WoW’s settings was with vertical sync, but that’s just an on/off toggle, and I couldn’t find anything in display settings for Windows either (but that could be the completely wrong place to look).
There should be a checkbox in graphics to enable a background fps limit. I think it’s default enabled really low, chugging around at like 12fps or something. I have it set to 60, though I play borderless windowed so I’m not sure how Fullscreen would differ here.
For the sake of clarity, is ‘borderless windowed’ the fullscreen windowed option in-game? That’s what I’ve been playing with up 'til now, when it started causing issues.
Yes, “borderless windows” is the fullscreen setting now.
Setting the background refresh rate is a setting in the graphics portion of the options, about 2/3s of the way down, as I recall.
Hm…is it the ‘vertical sync’ option? That’s the only thing I see that mentions refresh rate at all, but it’s only a toggle to have it either on or off. Is that the only option available?
For me, it is in the graphics section of settings, and it is in the “Advanced” settings, about 10 items down. There are three frame rate settings there.
If your install does not have these settings, I am confused. But, it is not the first or last time I will be confused.
Yeah, I missed where Microsoft deprecated exclusive fullscreen a few years ago.
Not quite the same, but setting the background frame rate to the refresh rate of your monitor is probably what Luugar meant. Though like I said, I just set mine to 60 so when I’m alt tabbed the game is still running decently if I’m peepin over. I checked an addon, and the default is supposedly 30 but I swear mine was in the tens before I set it to 60.
To me this sounds like a thermal issue. Heat is building up over time, and eventually hardware starts to throttle to prevent damage.
Blow the dust out of your computer. Check to make sure all of your fans are working well. Make sure there’s plenty of space around your computer for hot air to properly vent. Make sure there’s nothing covering the vents on your computer. If you’re using a laptop, try setting the laptop up so that the back edge is elevated slightly, and have a fan blow underneath it. If that works, you might want to invest in a laptop cooling pad.
If everything checks out with the thermals, then you can start looking into hardware. Run hwmonitor in the background, play the game and let the problem happen for a while. Then go back to hwmonitor and look for readings that are out of whack.
