Intel GPU's DX11 Crash

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1

For the past several months, there have been ongoing issues with World of Warcraft related to Intel GPUs.

If you play WoW in fullscreen and alt-tab out, the driver sometimes loses the D3D12 device. When that happens, the client falls back to D3D11, causing the renderer to degrade. Resulting in stuttering, missing textures, and eventually a crash.

To reproduce: alt-tab into a browser and leave the game running. After some time, the game will slow down, assets will disappear, and it will crash.

The point of this post is that I’m not sure who’s at fault here. Is this caused by a bad Intel driver, or is it something specific to WoW that Blizzard’s developers will need to fix? If it’s on Blizzard’s end, I just want to highlight the issue. If it’s entirely on Intel’s side, then this post can be disregarded.

I can’t post links but if you look up the latest driver from Intel (10/7/2025). Driver Version: 32.0.101.8136 Non-WHQL, you’ll see this listed in the known issues.

2

Which version of the game? Most Intel GPUs don’t meet the requirements for the retail client. The exceptions are “Intel Iris Xe Graphics with Shader Model 5 or greater.”

3

Retail.

The Intel B580 meets the requirements for retail.

4

Did you try using DDU before reinstalling the driver?

5

Yes.
The bug is a known issue.
Just hard to tell who’s at fault for this, Intel or Blizzard.