I’m seeing this exact issue on WoW Classic with my old 2014 Mac Book Pro running Big Sur.
Okay odd, issue seems to have cleared up by enabling automatic brightness in the Display setting which was disabled for me…
Baseline Mac Mini M2 and I was having constant micro-stutters and hitches. Never occurred to me that they may be related to mouse/cursor movement!
Anyway, I tried everything to resolve it: disabling addons, reducing graphics settings, resetting caches, trying the console commands you see everywhere… nothing worked and it made the game unbearable, especially in dungeons.
The only two things that would resolve it for me were to:
- Play in windowed mode
- As described above, leave the sound input settings open so the recording activity indicator is overlayed in full screen
Something about that recording indicator overlay/not being in full screen must be forcing WoW to render differently.
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M1 Mac Mini. Dragonflight. Didn’t have an issue whatsoever until I upgraded to Ventura last night. I had the exact same problems everyone has described in here.
Thanks to this rollercoaster of comments I tried windowed mode and it has fixed the issue, although it still stutters while I’m over here on my second monitor typing this out. I can live with that, it clears up when I go back to the game.
I am very thankful to everyone who has posted in here. I was about ready to tear my hair out.
EDIT: actually there were still a few glitches in windowed mode. Tried fullscreen mode while sitting in discord and it’s running perfectly. I wonder if this has something to do with all the dramas a lot of Mac users have had with sound - it will not work unless I use a bluetooth device (speaker or headset).
Strange problem. I have a Mac mini M1 and a Mac mini pro M2 and thankfully didn’t experience said behavior.
I am having a similar/same issue. The display blinks to black and back on intermittently but… I can reproduce it about 90% of the time
Mac Studio M1 Max 10c CPU / 32G GPU, 64G Ram Literally brand new out of the box.
Apple Studio Display, plugged in via Thunderbolt
External LG 27" Display via HDMI
Ventura 13.4.
Only WoW installed. No add ons
All settings at “Default”
Fullscreen
5120 x 02880
Render scale 100%
Vertical Sync Enabled
Low Latency Disabled
Anti-Aliasing None
Camera FOC 90
UI Scale 100%
Base Game Quality 7
The issue mostly happens in the new zones, and as mentioned the display blinks black and then back.
To Duplicate: When in a ‘busy’ area, or when flying, if I move the mouse cursor off the main Apple display to the external display and back without clicking, the issue is visible. In fact, if I move it back and forth rapidly it blinks a LOT.
It also blinks from time to time in a ‘quiet’ area with no mouse movement.
As a side note, I then reset the Mac Studio and migrated everything from a 2019 iMac 27" (which never flickered) along with all add ons etc and then tried it again with the same result. Turned all add ons off, same thing.
Vertical sync on/off has no effect.
So. conclusion is it’s related to mouse control/macOS interacting with game.
I also filed a bug report.
I feel bad for you. Brand new out of box a week before they release a new one. :o
Also I still don’t get why so many have this issue and I can’t reproduce it even using 3 displays and steps people give. I use two external 4k displays and another 1080p display. I’ll even run two wows at same time both set to full screen windowed on the two 4ks, and mouse and swap between them and just never see this issue on my M1 Max. Wish I knew what missing piece was.
lol. Don’t feel bad. Had for several months and just got around to setting it up. This one will cycle back to the company for use if (when) something better is available.
Perhaps the new ‘thing’ will not have screen flicker!
As another note, one of our other other Mac Studios - with almost the exact same config does the same thing. The only difference is that one is 32G Ram. Other than that, identical with an identical issue. If I slide the mouse cursor off and back onto the main screen, it flickers most of the time.
Edit:
And it gets more interesting. Using all default settings per the above, when moving the mouse cursor in-game certain parts of the sky flicker - turning vertical sync off makes the game unplayable (if you are looking at the sky or an area that contains the sky). I have these issues captured on video and they are pretty easily duplicated.
Metal almost never works right with vsync off, that is kinda known. Apple doesn’t recommend it and neither does blizzard. i’m not sure why they even let user still do it to be honest, I guess cause it’s allowed on windows and uniformity and all that.
I found this prior post about Ventura
Which is close to what I am seeing, and provides this option
Setting
/console HardwareCursor 0removes the flickering, as the cursor does not need to be redrawn every time you mouselook.
and sure enough. That corrected it. The downside is the cursor became very small but that can be adjusted in the Options to a larger size. Went all day with no flicker or screen blackouts.
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Yes disabling hw cursor fixes it but creates another bug) the cursor position is not correct after disabling hw cursor. It is lower and I can not click anything correctly
I had the same issue - however, going to Options and then manually adjusting the cursor size to what it was (or close to what it was) resolved that issue.
It’s been several days with the new settings and it the game is running flawlessly at high settings.
The issue (bug) still needs to be addressed by the WoW team obviously but the workaround is satisfactory for now.
Hardware cursor is interesting cause it causes issues with variable refresh rate, but I don’t think many of you are using variable refresh rate. this is because any time you move mouse hardware cursor has to set refresh rate to highest for smooth movement of mouse (that’s what hardware cursor does). so it exits the games refresh rate that’s matching fps to do this at all times while mouse is moving then back to games refresh rate when mouse isn’t moving. I can see that causing flicker, but only with promotion or VRR. it’s actually one of reasons I actually turned off variable refresh rate (not cause of flicker i still never noticed that but because it’s jarring for frame rate to jump in and out of vrr, and i didn’t want a slow mouse cursor either so i opted for no VRR)
- Please tell us how to disable vrr. 2) If problem is found, Blizzard can make a hotfix to disable vrr by default
go into display settings and disable promotion or variable refresh rate. anyways that’s just one thing I know caused problems with hardware cursor. but may not be specifically what’s going on here.
It does not work for me, after disabling hardware cursor, no matter how i adjust the cursor size, it is still way off. not sure if it is due to i am using external monitor
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You can disable vrr only on external display. Internal display has no settings about it.
holy hell you just saved me. this work around worked! If i join my own discord channel and have the little orange thing in the corner of my screen in wow client the flickering stopped and i can play the game again!
So do we have a chance to be fixed ? Or at least to fix disabling hardware cursor bug, where it is misplaced.
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I’m seeing this exact problem on M1 Pro macbook 16 inch running macos Sonoma 14.1.2. Playing in fullscreen on internal display and the game lags when clicking (whenever the cursor appears or disappears). Disabling hardware cursor seems to fix that but now it’s offset from the actual pointer location which makes it hard to play. Any updates here?
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