Integrated Video Switching after 8.1 Issues

Support Technical Support
1

I am on the very line of minimum supported video requirements.
You require AMD Radeon 7850 … Im on Radeon 7730.

As a lot of others are seeing, the current deflection of support due to being “below minimum requirements” … This issue is with the WoW.exe … and how it handles Dedicated video. Something changed in 8.1 that has caused the boot to take 7-8 min before it engages the dedicated video card, set by the video configs on my system.

Many people are having the issue. My system runs the game fine after this prolonged boot. I can turn up the performance, and get it to optimize like 90+% of my AMD card. The issue solely lies with the boot functionality, and how it is cooperating with the Switchable Graphics controller.

I see a bunch of people with this same issue. And I am sure you have plenty of reports of the issue with your DEV team. The latest reply in the “Cant open game after 8.1” makes me think that the DEV team wants to stop working on the issue entirely.

I do not have the $200 to dump into a laptop that is just above requirements just so you can kill support again, And it will take at least that to barely get there. My Radeon 7730M Card handles the game… Why is wow taking so long to boot?.. what is happening, that is so different from 8.0 … (I don’t have 200 dollars to waste on anything… I already pay enough to you guys to even play this game)

I reported a ticket with your team last night, and me and the support guy went over things, and he sent on a report to the DEV team, and is closing my issue. I want to keep in contact… until this is solved. For everyone… there are a lot of people who have no money to spend on a big upgrade, just to have you push the line forward again.

If the game gets to the point where the FPS gets too low, and I cant run it… I get it. I totally do, at that point hopefully ill have a better financial situation. But this whole problem is not an issue of how my card runs the game, its about how your software cooperates with the switchable graphics, and the fact that you changed something with how wow detects the dedicated gaming card.

I want to run logs, I help looking over what is happening in those 7-8 mins from the point where the system makes the DX object, to when it initializes the Video. What is it doing. Why is it taking forever.

3 Likes
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Hey there, if you have dx12 currently selected, have you tried changing ti back to dx11?

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the 7730M is not right on the cusp of meeting the minimum. it is less than 25% as powerful as the 7850. the 7730m was worse than the minimum requirement in legion, as well. so you’re living on borrowed time.

that said, i hope you can get it working anyway.

4

It might be “on the cusp”, but as he said, the game itself plays fine. I’m in the same situation. The game plays FINE on 7 settings. The issue isn’t “the card can’t handle the graphics”, the issue is something being wrong at startup.

Also, on my computer at least, trying to open the System menu causes the game to hang and disconnect. I have trouble believing that’s because my graphics card can’t handle popping up a new menu screen (the shop opens fine!), rather than there being something wrong with their code.

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Regarding minimum requirements overall.
My cpu is by the looks of it in range of minimal supported one, according to some benchmarks and release date it’s even better - intel i7 4810mq.
I have more than enough ram, which is 12gb.
My integrated gpu - intel hd 4600 is probably lower than minimum. But my dedicated - Radeon HD 8790m, while being lower than the one stated in initial requirements page, it certainly is supported according to the list of supported video cards page, cause it does fall under Radeon HD 8000 series category.
I did notice this text on supported video cards page, “You may have performance issues if you use a card near the bottom of this list”, and surely 8000 series is near the bottom of the list. If it was fps or whatnot, it would be understandable, those kinds of things are expected to happen if it is a “performance issue”, but what we’re having here is way too specific. 7 minutes to boot is a very specific time, and it occurs every time we launch the game. Surely, for whatever reason times differ by up to 10 seconds, but it’s still too close to 7 and that hardly looks like a coincidence. And really it’s hard to speak of performance if what happens in those 7 minutes has nothing to do with gpu, since gpu is not even active at that time and thus does not have a chance to “perform”.

And a bit besides the point, but i’ve seen some other topics on recommended graphic settings getting lower in 8.1, and funny thing is, mine actually went from 3 to 7, even though my gpu is still the same, and it supposedly is on verge of performance issues, makes no sense at all.

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They can’t say your card is not supported. You are above the recommended Video Card settings. Even if only a little, you are. Me being below it is a terrible excuse for support on something that is clearly a problem with the Boot process for wow.

I just want to know what is happening in those 7 min. What actually is going on… If I can say, a particular process that is doing A. or B. is talking to driver C. or D. and getting “Some” error… before resolving, then cool I can hound my Laptop people to update their driver because of whatever that is, has to be fixed in the driver. … But I cant even do that.

Maybe they just put a timeout trying to load Video 1 … and it sits ignoring my Catalyst control center until the timeout, then reluctantly does what my system wants, in which case, it SHOULD be a setting, I can disable. Or even a command line paramater, or a config file with some setting I can flip a 0 to a 1. or change a Timeout from 430s to 10s … so it times out much more quickly.

There has to be a real answer Blizzard can provide so I can approach this in a way that is not just me pleading with stubborn developers to fix it.

[Not that it particularly matters to Blizzard, but this is a terrible time in my life to suddenly take away my only outlet in life, and make me come up with money I don’t have, at a time when I’m drowning in debt, just in time for a Happy Effing Christmas… I need less stress, I need this to work, I need you guys to care, I need someone to freekin’ care, no one gives a damn in this world anymore. It’s all survival of the richest… You don’t have money well no one cares about you then… Please, help us… I’m just asking to know what actually changed, in technical terms, so I can proceed somewhere with some amount of hope… ]

1 Like
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Ligeya,

kind of beside the original point, but i don’t completely understand how they determine what is and isn’t supported. the 8790m is way worse than the “minimum” 7850, not much better than OP’s 7730m really. yet the 8000 series is listed as supported. not sure what they actually support or why they have minimums if worse cards are supported anyway.

good luck with a fix.

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I must say timeout does sound pretty probable. If let’s say that timeout was set to 6:30 that would explain why there’s 10ish seconds+/- on 7 minutes when the client initializes. After all I had this white screen even back in legion, and it usually took 20-30 seconds for client to start. So it would make sense if 6:30 was preset now and the rest is just the normal loading time. Unfortunately it still doesn’t explain why the client freezes when you open settings.

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The M series are almost always worse than the non-M series. The M is mobile, and uses less power typically, which generates less processing power.
In this case, the 8000 Radeons are almost always just rebadged 7000 Radeons.

So yes, almost any 7XXXM is below spec.

Whether or not there’s a switching issue is another matter, but understand that most businesses aren’t going to go out of their way to make sure something works that is below what they have listed as their supported minimums.

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A non-technical explanation of why cards go to the unsupported category.
Each card series supports certain functions to draw graphics on the screen. The newer the series the more advanced the functions. Game makers are only willing to support so far back for those functions so they will stop using the older functions.

As an example, Blizzard no longer supports cards that use only DX9, so cards that cannot use DX11 or 12 won’t work.

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So I get that. But the Card “DOES” work, after the “seemingly preset delay”. And it runs well in fact, I get a good 20-40 fps. My card runs the game more than well enough for my purposes. Maybe if there are a lot of things on the screen it gets a little slow, if I have effects turned up, things bog a little. But its playable in every way I would need, once the boot finishes.

Regardless of the functionality of the card, the game does function, so the Cards abilities are not in question here. The problem lies squarely with the boot, and why it delays. If this is something I can mitigate somehow, I want to know how. I am not asking for a lot here. Just restore the boot times from before 8.1 … or offer me a reason why the game boots slowly. If I have to hound DELL to update something, that’s fine, If I know what I’m asking them to update, and why.

I am not the only one with this very specific situation. The delay is too static. There is a reason. We should be able to get the DEV teams input on this.

1 Like
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It isn’t you. Now, my delay isn’t as profound as yours, but I’ve been having integrated and switchable issues for a while now.

They SAY they support AMD but there is either:

A. Lack of communication between Devs and Support on this issue for them to be able to relay what they are doing in the background… which is obvious because support doesn’t really understand that AMD works differently to the others and that the pat answers don’t apply…

B. A lack of understanding and communication between the Devs and AMD for how their graphics handle their game…

And there is ABSOLUTELY a lack of QA and testing on certain builds before going live, or they would see the problem, as it is so widespread.

I have R5 as my integrated and RX560 as my dedicated.

Wow hasn’t been using my RX560 properly… like, ever. Despite being pretty much at the top of the list of “supported,” trust me when I say that isn’t actually supported either.

My R5, further down the list but not at the very bottom, is what the system uses, and even though it is a supported card ALSO, I have to be at only 3 for that to work and give me 30 fps. This is despite being on a decent gaming laptop with a SATA drive.

It is likely that my SATA drive is the reason why I am “only” waiting about 4 minutes for Wow to launch since the patch as opposed to the extended amount of time you’re putting up with.

I was complaining about Wow not seeing these discreet cards… loudly. It may be that they are trying to call them in a different way.

Generally, your integrated is attached to your display and your dedicated isn’t. Mine, for example, is headless… as are all the discrete RX series that are “top of the line,” listed as supported, but don’t actually work with the game. I’m not sure if yours is having a similar issue, but it very well could be, as several AMD cards are.

Wow was not calling the discrete properly, and can’t recognize them in the advanced options inside the game. Support usually has people run HW monitor, but again, that won’t see the headless card because it relies on the display. Then say, “It’s you” when it isn’t. Is your AMD card in the display devices in your dxdiag or down near the bottom in your other devices?

Perhaps they are trying to fix that, causing a slowdown for people like you and I.

Can you see your AMD card in the options within Wow? You can also watch what happens while you’re waiting with a utility called GPU-Z from techpowerup dot com

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Is your AMD card in the display devices in your dxdiag or down near the bottom in your other devices?

Yeah its at the very bottom. As long as I have it set to load in catalyst control center, it does in fact do the Rendering, I can see it spike up in the AMD Monitor. Again after the 7-8 min wait.

Can you see your AMD card in the options within Wow?

Nope, I only see the Intel card and the “automatic detection”

I suspect you are correct, I am wondering what they changed in 8.1 which has made it so bad. If there was even any delay before 8.1, it was very small.

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in my case it’s in display devices along with intel.

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One of the things they did in 8.1 was to default back to Dx12.
Shouldn’t make a difference, but I swapped it back to 11 today and I do get in faster.
Some of the older cards aren’t optimized for 12.
Down the bottom probably means it is headless…

Stand somewhere with moderate activity in the game. Go into the graphics advanced settings and change it to the integrated card. Apply.

Any change to FPS or in game default settings? Other than a dip for a few seconds right after it applies, that is… because that always happens.

Go Back to Autodetect and apply to be sure.

Start there… and I’ll tell ya why.

I’ve been on this issue with the wow/AMD conflict for months, so I am curious to get the absolute bottom of it and am convinced that this new game loading issue is connected.

In my case, I have the newer adrenaline software, so that unfortunately doesn’t show anything but “high performance/power saving” and I have to rely on another utility to actually watch my usage.

So, I can play with the R5 and have it be the exact same experience as it is with “autodetect”. Same default settings, same FPS. No difference.

When I choose autodetect, it will max out my dedicated to 100%, though, and still actually use the R5 and default to 3. No bueno.

So, because a boatload of people had this problem on these newer machines with newer AMD cards (or at very least get messages that their drivers or cards weren’t supported), I’m guessing they tried a fix that not only hasn’t worked, but has slowed down the process for everyone at launch who have certain cards, even IF they weren’t having the same switchable issue as those with headless cards.

Obviously wow is the only game I have this issue with. I got steam and downloaded a bunch of nonsense to test it — I get great performance as a gaming laptop should.

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That’s the thing, we can’t really just switch card settings in game. If we click on settings we’re getting client not responding for about 3-5 minutes and upon response getting sent back to main screen with disconnect message. Then, if either settings opened along with this message, or we clicked settings from the main menu and waited 5 minutes more, we can change this setting and wait 5 more minutes when clicking apply. So it won’t be possible to notice the difference in performance straight away, but we could log back in and check the FPS.
I’ll try it a bit later, when I have 20 minutes to kill :smiley:

1 Like
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There are millions of Hardware Combinations. Blizzard has no way to test them all.

AMD desktop card work no different then NVidia desktop cards. However some Mobile cards have switchable graphics which is why If I have to by a laptop I only buy ones without switchable graphics.

I will explain it very simply AMD really does not support laptops with switchable graphics. They are Supported by the OEM that made the laptop as most people with older laptops have discovered driver support by the OEM is only one to two years. If you did not know Laptops are proprietary one of the reason it is hard on some or down right impossible to use reference drivers on some laptops

Once the OEM stops making drivers there are going to be issues with games as the Integrated driver is the one that chooses which GPU to use. As with Concequences computer the OEM stopped supporting it long ago which makes it hard for developers to make the game work with current hardware and hardware not supported by the OEM

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Can’t speak for other companies, but I spent a lot of time with Dell on this issue… and not tech support — corporate in TX.

You see, when Blizz blamed Dell for this issue and Dell support said I had a “software problem” they wanted to charge me for (machine is still less than a year old) I got a little irritated and went to the top.

For people with Adrenaline, retail driver are no longer an issue. As long as you download the Dell Bristol Ridge version of Adrenaline and update through that, you can stay current “forever.” They recently updated it, and even if you use an older install file, it will update and allow access to even the beta drivers.

So, that’s no longer an issue… at least on Dell AMD laptops.

As that didn’t solve the issue with Wow, obviously, I went to AMD and got into a fantastic conversation with a dev there. As we are told to do things like run HW monitor here or be told that our drivers don’t exist because they aren’t where folks here think they should be in dxdiag, I got into a long conversation about headless drivers and how they work with the display, how they are called by Adrenaline, and every last I one has to dot and T one has to cross on a laptop from being plugged in to BIOS settings to be SURE the RX line is called to do the job.

So, yes… AMD IS different especially in the way it calls the headless cards, but again, no one has taken the time to explain the difference to you guys… or you simply aren’t interested in doing the research on your own. I don’t blame you. I have a lot of hours spent on it — but I enjoy a good challenge.

See, my background is as a Technical Resource Analyst, and while I had my A+ cert quite some time back, my practical experience isn’t in graphics specifically. There were few things I needed to learn from the manufacturers. My expertise is in trouble-shooting, quality control, standard operating procedures for technical support departments for B2B software. The problems that seemingly couldn’t be solved came to my desk.

In any case, people have unique builds — absolutely. I get that all those can’t be tested. However, you don’t put a card at the top of the list as supported without QA. Well, I guess Blizz DOES do that since no one has of yet been able to solve the issue that those with this card are having.

IF they understand how they work, there is no downward communication to support to give the end users information about what we can do to get the program to work with the RX500 line — which I could easily show with screenshots in the old forum — and certainly there is no upward communication to the devs that the cards aren’t being called properly so that they can perhaps fix the display to call the headless cards (since they are listed as being supported, after all!).

If there is due diligence QA, I reiterate, they should at least be testing the cards at the top of the list and how they work in the game rather than making assumptions that they SHOULD work.

More, even the R5 should perform better than it does. It is listed above the OP’s cards, and yet still need to be on Fair, low, and disabled to run the game at more than 10fps since the display changes. That’s crazy.

Now, I don’t want to hijack the thread with my reply to the off topic post by NL. My apologies.

Bottom line is that since the last patch, something is happening when trying to call dedicated cards when there are switchable graphics — headless or not — that is causing an abnormally long wait for the game to load.

We’d like to know what happened here… because if they thought it was a tweak to call these cards properly, not only didn’t it work or change the experience, but it caused the system to sit and spin. Much of programming is: “if this, then this,” and something in that process may be in a loop of some kind.

The real issue is whether or not it has been relayed back to the devs that this is happening with switchable graphics, because while it gives a person a chance to pee and get a snack while waiting for the game to load, that kind of slowness isn’t something people pay a subscription to have.

Also, that issue above where it is taking forever just to switch back and forth between the graphic card options once IN game is very telling about how it isn’t calling properly. My wait isn’t ANYTHING like that.

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Sorry, took a bit longer to get back to you.
So I tried changing card in game, and apparently, game has no control over what’s used, only Radeon Settings does. When i changed it from Auto - detect to Intel, performance was left untouched, and Amd system monitor showed that even when it was set to Intel, Amd card was still fully utilized.

But i made a few discoveries along the way.
I logged the whole procedure in AMD system monitor, and as i said, i clicked settings from logged in character, Dedicated card turned off for 2m 22s, disconnected me and did not open settings. Opening settings from main menu - 2m 20s. Changed the card and clicked apply - 2m 20s. This sure does not look like a coincidence, i don’t believe even if my hardware was performing poorly, that it could ever achieve such precise timing every time, unless something external forced it.

Next is loading the game. This time while loading the game i had chrome running with a youtube video working on it, certainly an activity that integrated gpu is set to perform, and when game finally launched, it was all incredibly laggy, until and even for a minute after i closed chrome. Of chrome wasn’t done with the intention of testing anything or increasing the load on Intel gpu, on a contrary, i knew full well that it should all be good, as i launched chrome and youtube there on multiple occasions when my game was already running. Needless to say, i didn’t expect it to lag that bad when it launched.
When i checked dx.log afterwards, i noticed that client actually took 9 minutes to initialize instead of usual 7. Combine that with lag i had on launch, and it serves as an indication that if integrated is loaded more than usual, it actually delays the launch.
Found out that this is the process that took extra time, which usually is 2 minutes, but this time it took 4, perhaps it would yield some information (just an example since log from that launch is gone unfortunately, but as you can see there’s 2 min 18 sec gap between d3d11 and cpu proc.det., this time it was 4 instead.)
12/19 22:13:04.051 D3d11 Device Create Successful
12/19 22:15:22.146 CPU Processor Detection: 8 H/W threads
Not sure my conclusions make any sense, but i decided that if i can increase the time of initializing by increasing the load on my intel gpu, perhaps i could decrease it if i was to minimize the load. Unfortunately, it didn’t work at all. I turned my resolution to minimum, turned a bunch of unnecessary booting apps and services off (that’s what i thought could put less load on gpu), and while i didn’t wait for game to load completely, when it went beyond 1 minute i shut it down, as it clearly indicated game was still not loading properly.

Oh and guilty as charged, but i haven’t payed a visit to windows update in approximately a year or so. I found some random post somewhere that if there’s an issue with something gpu related perhaps installing updates could help. Installed everything i could, nothing changed :man_shrugging:

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They actually know how they work. FYI it’s the integrated driver that determines what GPU to use not the catalyst control center. catalyst control center is just a interface it sets the variables for the drivers. Just like Nvidia control panel is just a interface . The Integrated GPU is your display GPU . The AMD Dedicated GPU is the rendering device. In my experience the tech you get on the phone at Dell is just CS and have little to no education that would actually help them in techs support. They follow a check list if they get to the end of the check list they either tell you its not their issue or they have you send it in for repair.

Calling corporate does not normally get you a person with any technical background either. If you can get the issue escalated to the engineering department you might get help. in your case they may have custom drivers available or beta drivers since the laptop is not that old.

Do not see a DXdiag however would bet that the drivers you are using is not the latest drivers. As dell generally stops support of their laptops within 1 -2 years of there production.

The bottom line is if the OEM gave everyone with issues the current driver the issue would most likely be solved. Have a friend with AMD switchable graphics he bought it despite me telling him not to . Installed modded drivers and the issue was resolved.

Corporate HQ USA is in California and GPU Division of AMD ATI Technologies, ULC. is located IN Canada. Texas office is not the corporate HQ its more of a sales office.