well hopefully it gets fixed soon lol ty <3
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This fix actually worked for me too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/hpclhu/nvidiaflickering_fix_for_directx_12/
If you want to manually change the setting in nvidia profile inspector, click the magnifying glass on the toolbar (show unknown settings) and then you can scroll down to the “unknown” options in the world of warcraft profiles and change setting 0x006D6197 to 0xA2B53761 (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, World of Warcraft)
According to the post, the setting apparently disables a specific dx12 optimization that’s known to cause flickering in certain situations.
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That’s why people are seeing no flickering when they switch to DX11.
One thing to note, they have certainly done some improvement in the latest driver, however for nighttime it seems to be there.
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It’s February 14th… This issue is still around? It’s really annoying at this point.
Just joined a dungeon and it was far worse in a dungeon.
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I haven’t noticed any more flickering once I turned triple buffering off, and I went to Revendreth and Bastion afterwards. Hopefully that will last as I am using the 461.40 drivers.
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I applied this fix to the latest drivers last week and played all weekend with no flickering. The fix literally takes like 5 min to apply, including the time it takes to download profile inspector.
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It’s not a fix, its a bandaid until they actually fix it. We shouldn’t have to mess with stuff like this, it’t not normal and it shouldn’t be expected for a consumer to do what is the equivalent to a registry edit.
Glad it works for you but I’ll stick to 457.51 until they officially fix it, hopefully its sooner than later.
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That actually is the fix. That exact setting is in 457.51 and earlier, and It’s the exact setting which was removed from the newer drivers causing them to misbehave in the first place. Putting it back is exactly the way to fix it without some kind of overhaul at a much, much lower level (which I would expect NVidia to be reluctant to do, given how long Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been requiring the same flag).
That flag disables a DX12 hack implemented by NVidia. DX12, by its very nature, is not meant to have any hacks applied to it - it’s a CtM (Close to Metal) API which is supposed to do exactly what the program tells it to do in the way said program tells it to do it. As soon as you start deviating from that you open the door to problems such as this. That it’s not more wide spread than two titles is just dumb luck.
A “bandaid” fix for this is switching to DX11. While it works it doesn’t fix the underlying issue - it merely bypasses it.
It’s understandable if you don’t want to do it. Modifying low level system settings like that has to be done with care. But ultimately all you’re waiting for is NVidia to do exactly the same thing for you instead of doing it yourself right now.
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Thank you for explaining this with so much detail!
I’m honestly not comfortable making a change like that so I’ll hang out with 457.51 till they fix it.
In my case I was able to resolve the issue by disabling the shader cache for WoW specifically (via the NVidia control panel). I’m on 461.40, 3090 rtx. No other in game settings were changed. I haven’t noticed a performance impact from this.
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Tried this, unfortunately didn’t work for me 
I just installed 461.51 again to try some things out. I was going to try the profile inspector fix and I even downloaded it, but I never got around to actually using it.
I changed the shadows to low, and turned off triple buffering, as I did before. All the flickering stopped. I turned Triple buffering back on, and shadows back up to ultra high. Still no flickering. Ray Tracing is also on high. I played all day yesterday, going to various zones in and out of Shadowlands, on multiple characters, doing dungeons and battlegrounds, and did not see any flickering after changing the settings. I even closed the game a couple times and when I reopened it, there was still no flickering. I’m using a RTX 2080 Ti.
There’s been several times now where the flickering is so constant that it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache so I just have to turn it off. It’s extremely frustrating. Anything I do only seems to temporarily fix it. Trying the switch to directx11.
Another possible data point, at least in my case: I didn’t experience the flickering until I updated my bios (AMD 5950x cpu) which has AMD’s newest AGESA, along with the Windows 10 drivers for it. I’m not completely versed on AGESA but has something to do with game optimization stuff like getting textures to the video card faster. At any rate, it made my system in general unstable so I downgraded the BIOS and downgraded the drivers back to what was previously stable. Not sure if this is AMD specific or if this is affecting people of any CPU type but figured I’d put it out there in case it helps QA.
Intel 10900 here so it’s not AMD specific.
This discussion is strictly about the flickering caused by the specific Nvidia driver update. If an AMD GPU is causing a similar set of symptoms, that would be a completely different thread.
OTOH, if you mean AMD CPU, the main processor is completely not relevant to the issue. Only the Nvidia GPU running the specific versions of GPU drivers.
Just dropping in to say this fix also worked for me. Flickering is 100% gone.
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I’m having trouble finding the fix. Do you think you can quote it? I’ve looked throughout, but there’s so many people claiming a fix that works. Yikes.
So I think I got this part sorted out. Up above there’s a reddit post for anyone curious that has info about Nvidia Profile Inspector. I just installed it, and so far, so good.
I don’t experience it on other games, either. It’s only on WoW, and only in Shadowlands content. Any other place in the game, it’s just fine, no issues or flickering. The instant I load into Oribos or any SL zone, it starts.
Howdy!
I’ve been experiencing a flickering texture issue since Shadowlands dropped and only in SL zones. It is most prevalent in Ardenweald but some textures in Revendreth and The Maw (Surprisingly only around Broker Ve’Nari) flicker that I’ve noticed.
In addition to flickering I’ve been plagued, and driven almost mad by, trying to figure out why my PC would shut down only while playing WoW. This behavior started with the SL patch. I could trigger a shutdown by taking two steps, first I had to die, second I had to release. When I released I would see a 1/4 second of the release animation and then bam, PC restarts. Thankfully, I’ve mostly figured out what was causing the restarts and haven’t had a crash in the last few hours playing.
I uploaded DxDiag to pastebin and here is the link code: yENcVu8M
Troubleshooting steps I’ve taken:
- My first step was to reinstall a service that was intermittently crashing (Corsair iCue) and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent. - I thought this might be tied to the pc crashing by causing weird power spikes on my PSU causing it to shut down.
- Ran the Battle.net scan and repair service for WoW and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Disabled all addons and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Set system display options to potato mode (lowest settings and turned off all settings that impacted GPU) and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
A. I left DirectX 12 enabled through all testing at potato level. - Updated NVMe drivers and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Updated motherboard drivers and BIOS and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Reset GPU overclocking and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Reset RAM overclocking and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Ran Memory Diagnostic Tool in Extended mode with no errors reported and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- Reset CPU overclocking and retested, crashes and flickering still persistent.
- After reading a post about DirectX 12 I switched to 11 and retested, crashes seem to be eliminated but flickering still persistent although much, much less frequent.
While the persistent PC restarts were super annoying, they were 100% able to be consistently recreated. I have several horde players to thank for ganking me as I was troubleshooting. They saved me some of the run to a cliff to jump off. My PC didn’t restart if I used a soulstone or accepted a resurrections, it ONLY happened when releasing. If memory serves, I never had a crash related to releasing after death in an instance.
From my experiences over the last several weeks I can point my finger at the DirectX 12 drivers causing instability issues with WoW. I’m not quite sure what is causing the restarts however, this does not seem to be a new issue. It is unfortunate that WoW isn’t optimized to run DirectX12 without all the texture issues and the restarts that I’ve experienced.
All that being said, is there anything that I can do to make DirectX 12 work? I think I saw on Reddit a fix but I’m not sure how much to trust that solution.
TL;DR - Switched from DirectX 11 to 12, had texture flickering and PC restarts. Touched everything possible and tested incrementally to fix with no luck after several months of the game being virtually unplayable. Finally, out of desperation, rolled back to DirectX 11 and now have a stable game.
Thanks for reading my wall-o-text…
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