Not sure if my video card is dying or it’s a client bug, but sometimes when I go to Nazmir, the lighting on tree trunks flickers a lot. It alternates from normal to dark lighting. And the funny thing is, I want to record a small video about it using OBS Studio but as soon as I launch OBS, the flickering stops! WoW is the only game that does this glitch. I’ve also seen this glitch one time in Stormsong Valley on grass, but most of the time it’s in Nazmir.
Here are my PC specs:
Intel i7-8086k @ 4.9 GHz all cores
32GB G.Skill @ 3200 MHz
Asrock Fatal1ty Z370 Gaming-ITX/ac
Asus Strix GeForce GTX 1080
Playing on a 4K monitor @ 60 Hz with graphic settings at 10
Temps while playing WoW: CPU 59 deg C, GPU 61 deg C.
That definitely sounds weird. Would you be able to provide your DxDiag so we can take a closer look?
Press Windows Key + R.
Type DxDiag and press Enter.
In the DxDiag window, click Save All Information.
Name the file “dxdiag” and click Save
Paste the DXdiag into the post, select and highlight everything you just pasted, and hit the “preformated text” button (</>). That’ll make the information much more readable.
It should look like this.
If you have issues pasting here, please use Pastebin and post the link (ex: Pastebin (dot) com/123456).
4k is a huge load for any graphics device, especially at the highest possible settings. Does lowering the graphics settings to 7 or 5 help remove the flickering any? Might also be worth a shot testing a lower resolution scale.
Keep in mind both of those things are just tests, not permanent changes to the game client.
I’ll try that… In the mean time I found a spot in Nazmir where the glitch appears maybe once every 10 minutes or so… I was able to record it this time with GeForce experience:
Your GPU isn’t dying, there is a known bug with Nvidia drivers above 445.xx for sometime now, feel free to check my post history. But I will give some links here as well. Get DDU and install the stand alone 442.50 and it will stop. It is due to sharpening options.
The glitch is VERY hard to reproduce on will… Since my last post the glitch hasn’t appeared yet and I have not changed any settings. Even though I tried heating up the GPU at 80 deg C by lowering the fan speed at 25% temporarily the bug hasn’t shown yet.
I will try a few settings and drivers once I find a way to reproduce the bug on will!
Are you running anything else at the same time as your WoW client, such as the Battle.net app or your Firefox browser? Also, I have to ask since it’s in the dxdiag, but you aren’t running Elder Scrolls Online simultaneously with WoW are you? Your GPU temperatures are well under the thermal throttling threshold and even 20°C under the warning threshold for the GTX 1080, so you most assuredly aren’t overheating.
The best way to narrow down the problem is to restart and run only WoW and see if the problem persists. I also suggest setting your Battle.net client to Automatically exit Battle.net when launching games. That app is both a resource hog and has been known to cause in-game issues when it is running. With Battle.net chat being integrated into WoW, there is no longer any need to have it open when a Blizzard game is running.
No I’m not running ESO at the same time as WoW… I don’t know why it’s in DXdiag, but ESO did crash yesterday. Maybe the eso64.exe process was still present in the process list… Anyways the glitch has been appearing from time to time in the last few months…
I would definitely give Dokkan’s advice a try and use Display Driver Uninstaller to uninstall your current drivers in Safe Mode, and then after rebooting, also into Safe Mode, install the 442.50 drivers found in the link below. The link is for the Standard driver, which you’ll want, and not the DCH driver, which gives you a crippled nVidia Control Panel via the Microsoft Store.
This seems like the known issue with the drivers causing flickering, mentioned here. It’s possible that that issue is causing additional problems on top of what you were already experiencing.