466.47 released today and it’s still listed as an open issue…
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If this is a compositing issue as mentioned earlier, it could be worth checking if the just-released 21H1 Win10 update fixes it, or at least helps. There’s no specific mention of anything but this build is supposed to be based on “quality” and “stability”, and they almost always increment the WDDM version, so it’s possible; even if unlikely.
I might run my backup scripts and do a full system wipe & reload followed by a test w/ the latest drivers if I can manage it this weekend and there’s no major issue w/ my hardware. But I haven’t read of any hardware/driver blocks as of yet so prob. good. I need a clean OS install to test my summer overclock anyway lol
I find, 90% of the time, switching to DirectX 11 and then back to 12 (trying to run on 11 is a nightmare of lag and fps drops) seems to work, for the duration of my playtime, until I close the game again. I have to do it every single time the game is booted.
Tends to always work, but it would be really nice if this was finally fixed…
I would let it auto-detect my graphics card, but my computer has both Intel & Nvidia, and for some reason the damn thing always picks Intel and proceeds to run horribly, lol.
So I tried doing some more digging to see exactly what’s going on with the flicker and it looks like it’s some kind of culling or gbuffer issue. I found a reliable spot to demo it.
Here’s how the lighting should look:
https://imgur.com/1ElcbSB
Here’s it breaking and flickering rapidly (spammed the screenshot button until I got the frames I needed):
https://imgur.com/xxOZsf4
If I backed outside the entrance and compared the lighting, to the frame where the flicker happens, they match up.
EDIT: Oh and in areas where it flickers to almost black, like in some of the SL zones, I imagine that’s because the actual skybox is pretty basic and dark. A lot of what you’ll see in the sky in those zones is actually not a part of the skybox and are meshes with textures for swirly stuff and whatnot. There could also be cases where you’re inside a cave, where the game might stop rendering the skybox all together as well, which could result in black lighting as well.
My guess is that the glitch is happening in the DX12 multithreading of the draw calls. Things aren’t getting computed/composited in the right order, and when the flicker happens, it’s a piece of geometry that isn’t getting the rest of the gbuffer/lighting data. Instead, it’s basically getting rendered with the skybox lighting in an “empty” level(think falling under the world).
If this does turn out to be the case, then it really is most likely on the Microsoft end of things and would explain why Nvidia and Blizzard haven’t managed to fix it in the six months it’s been an issue, since the 46X+ version of the Nvidia drivers enabled the multiplane overlay support in the desktop windows manager.
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I’ve read most of this thread and my head is spinning with all the driver versions.
Which driver is working with WoW?
If I use the latest driver, which work around is stable? Shader Cache off etc?
If you want latest drivers
You can either, DX11 or Use a nvidia inspector and use a old profile of WoW (same as disabling dx12).
Or use 457.xx~ Drivers.
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Thanks Kane, I now have 457.51. This was the last driver to work before the flicker started (based on Reddit posts). So far, working without issue.
The actual driver version is 27.21.14.5751. I chose not to include GeForce Experience as it looks like pointless bloatware.
This is interesting, so i was in Halls, and earlier this week i updated my windows to the latest release which is 20H2.
Noticing no flickering in Halls, and i’ve gone to my usual spots in Ardent, with no flickering either. 466.27.
The usual settings, all maxed, 3080.
This meshes with Everia’s analysis well: that the core issue was a DX12 rendering bug and Windows 10 20H2 fixes it.
Of course, I’m speculating from one data point here. I don’t know if there are still folks with this flicker issue with that Window release, since that was literally last year’s Windows release.
I’m able to reproduce the issue comfortably with 20H2.
Latest release is 21H1. Came out two days ago.
In the event that this is just a misnomer and you meant to say you updated to 21H1, I posted about that on the day it launched wondering if it might have addressed the issue - at least in part. Are you able to verify whether you’ve got 20H2 (19042) or 21H1 (19043)?
Nope 20H2. Mainly updated it from 1903 because i wanted to play Metro Enhanced with RTX 
There are some more notes on guru3d from nvidia rep, they might be pretty close to wrapping this up soon.
But for the moment still no flickering.
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Is this the comment at Guru3d?
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The latest set of drivers for Nvidia has the flashing problem back in them…I just installed them yesterday and getting flashing again…I have the Nvidia Geoforce GTX 1660 super card. The drivers are 466.47
That’s awesome to see about the potential fix soon. The post right above in that thread also mentions there is a sort of fix in these newly released ones that supposedly reduces the flickering some. I might try it myself this weekend and see what I get. I’d really like to be on newer drivers for some other games.
So it sounds like they are just going to do some hacky driver level magic, rather than wait for Microsoft to fix DX12/WPO on their end. It will definifely result in a slight loss in the DX12 bump WoW got with these 46X.xx drivers, but hopefully not too big of a loss. Based on my analysis of what’s going on, it seems like a DX12 multithreaded drawcall batching issue maybe mixed with an order of operations issue. Nvidia will likely make the drivers wait for a few more “checks and completions” each frame to make sure all the async draw calls are done in time and done in the right order, to render the frame, which means extra time per frame aka lower FPS. Might only be a -5-10% difference, but let’s hope they fix it.
Personally, I don’t get the bug often because I play on 7-8 with CMAA. Tends to only happen when the shadows are set to ultra or ultra high, which would make sense because there’s a lot of extra math that goes into the shadow mapping.
Again, in the meantime, make a macro with:
/console gxrestart
Put it on a bar and click it when the flicker happens. It takes most pcs <2 seconds to do.
So I just wiped my system clean, installed Windows 10 May 2021 (21H1), and then only missing drivers and WOW Retail, nothing else. After the full download of the game I spent a good 30m or more running around in The Maw and Ardenwald with all settings maxed out, G-SYNC enabled via NVIDIA Control Panel, V-SYNC enabled in WOW, and a hard frame cap of 117 (Monitor is set to 120) as recommended for a G-SYNC setup (3 FPS lower than your max) and had ZERO flickers under 466.47
Now if this will hold true long term, I can’t say. I’m using this load to do some system testing, including the testing of my summer overclock so when I wipe it for my production install I might go back to 457.30 until the 47x branch or whatever it will be numbered comes out…
Just tried the 466.47. Initially seemed good in Ardenweald finally. Then swapped to my Venthyr toon and flew around Revendreth. Got some flickering trees which GXrestart fixed. Swapped back to ardenweald toon and the Heart was now flickering. Same thing fixed it. Overall it seems reduced in the severity but I think I’m going back to the 457’s and waiting out one more version for that supposed fix. I don’t want to have to potentially deal with flickering issues in raids or while streaming.
Still running my test install, forgot about Revendreth so I just ran around there for 15m and not a single flicker. Looking like Windows played a part in this more and more I guess…
Just installed latest drivers. I don’t see any flickering, but now I have a new problem. Every 10 seconds or so my frames drop from 90 to like 20 and experience extreme stuttering. Then it goes back to normal. I can also cause the frames to drop by having the settings menu up. This only seems to happen using dx12. I changed to dx11 and the game ran fine, but didn’t look as good.
I might have to revert back, arg. Anyone else have this issue?