Anyone else seeing this? While 8.3 hit my laptop performance-wise, I haven’t had the stability issues others have had. However since the last patch I’ve noticed some graphics elements are missing…
In the portal room in Zandalar / Orgrimmar / Stormwind the graphics are missing out of the middle of the portals (the preview of where you’re going).
In the final room of Ulduar, where if you run through green-ish clouds you spawn extra mobs, those clouds are no longer visible.
When trying a Calligraphy WQ, the preview sparkles on the ground were missing.
Raising my graphics from 3 (default) to 4 fixed the Calligraphy issue, but not the portals. Haven’t been back to Ulduar. It’s a MBA 2018 so not a powerhouse, but had been running WoW OK (knock on wood).
On tuesday, if you had your particle effects on “low” in hope of avoiding the sudden freezes/fps drops, it is now set to “disabled.” At least on my computer. Unless you switch it to “good,” this all remains invisible now, for w/e reason.
On top of it, my mac is still freezing! Just had to close WoW as my fps dropped to 9 on the lowest settings as I was sitting idle in The Great Seal… (I keep it capped at 60, but it generally doesn’t drop down more than a few fps…ever)
OK, weird. Even at “Good” (the default Particle Density setting for Graphics Quality 4) there’s still broken stuff. I just ran through Emerald Nightmare and the entrance portal is completely missing, as are the fog clouds you’re supposed to avoid on the path up after the first boss.
Fortunately it doesn’t matter running old stuff, this would suck on current content…
Thanks for the info, thought I was losing my mind… =)
I have had my FPS drop but only if I’m AFK and the screen goes blank. When I wake the laptop up I often get 1 FPS and have to restart WoW. That’s a new feature 8.3 brought on. Sucks, but doesn’t happen while playing (knock on wood), only if I walk away from the computer for 10+ minutes…
Omg thank you. I thought I was going insane. I have the same problem. Some portals are less visible and the fishing nodes are completely invisible. This is so frustrating.
I thought something was wrong with my Mac. I have particle effects set to ULTRA and I still can only see the outline of portals sometimes usually they’re invisible. I can’t do calligraphy world quests because I can’t even see what shape I’m supposed to be drawing. There are no particles. I did a clean reinstall of the game thinking I had an installation problem. I did not. Please can we get some attention for this? I died to shek’zeera five times because I could not see the particles when she started singing. There is literally nothing but invisible damage.
If you are on a Mac that only has an Intel iGPU, for the current time you are stuck with these issues.
Blizzard patched the game to basically turn off particle effects, no matter what you set it to, to allow the game to be stable enough to play. We don’t know if they will try to resolve it later, and/or wait for Apple to release a patch to fix the actual Intel bug, then re-enable it. But the game is now at least playable.
The only quick solution is to use an AMD eGPU if you have a thunderbolt 3 machine, as it has not been disabled on any machines that have an AMD dGPU or are using an eGPU that I am aware of.
No you shouldn’t get an eGPU to just work around this one issue, yes you should get an eGPU if you want all your games to look and perform way better in the long run.
I’ve seen the exact same thing with regards to various animations since the patch. For example, in the Wetlands, necessary quest objectives are invisible unless you temporarily elevate your graphics to 4, 5 or 6. Portal animations such as the Darkmoon Faire portal in Elwynn Forest are invisible.
Prior to the patch, I had none of these problems with same Mac I have now. All of the graphics/animations appeared as they should.
So they did this on purpose? The game isn’t any fun and is often unplayable without particle effects. I don’t use the number slider so I can’t throw out a number because I adjust my gfx settings individually. And before this patch, ultra particle density was never a problem for me. Ever. SO I guess I’m canceling my sub until they fix this. Imagine the outrage had they done this to PC players. Even during 8.3 I never experienced any stability issues before this or after. A few crashes before 8.3 but that was caused by addons. Ok then… this is sad news.
Just going to cross post my reply from the other thread. This covers the reason why particles have been disabled. The short version is that there’s a critical driver bug which can result in full system lockups/crashes which are bad for your Operating System and hardware. Since we don’t make the drivers which are causing this problem, we have to wait for the bug to be fixed between Intel/Apple and in the mean time we wanted to make sure it was possible to play the game on Intel cards without these risks.
Hi, I am having the graphic issue as described in this thread.
Although I am using Mac, my Mac book pro comes with the discrete AMD GPU which is automatically selected for WOW. Prior to the patch you mentioned to solve the crash issue, I only had a few occasional freeze, which I think I can tolerant. On the contrary, The missing particle effects makes it really hard to play a lot of the current content, so I was wondering if you can introduce a patch to allow user re-enable the particle effects on their own risk. It can remain off by default, but I just wanted an option to enable it.
I experienced the same problem. It appears they disabled the particle density for all Mac game clients rather than just those with Intel graphics cards. My (aging) Mac has a Nvidia graphics card. So I upgraded the particle density back up to good and it solved the problem without introducing the crashes because I don’t have the Intel graphics.
Apple really needs to change how it approves graphic drivers from the graphic card companies. It’s been many months and there is still no Nvidia driver for my card because of a stupid dispute between Apple and Nvidia on who gets to write and approve the drivers. My guess is that Apple is also being restrictive with Intel, too, in which case it may be awhile before we see a fix for Intel graphics users.
ETA: After I logged out and then logged back into the game I found the graphics were missing the particle elements again — even though the particle density was still showing as set to “good”. I switched the setting to disabled and applied that, then back to good and applied that and it fixed the problem. It looks like Blizzard has it set to disable on log-in, so I’ll have to do this every time I log in. A bit annoying. Hopefully the driver issue will get fixed so Blizzard won’t resort to this, or Blizzard will enable those without Intel cards to have the proper settings until the driver is fixed for Intel card users.
Thanks for the update. I was finally able to raid tonight after weeks of missing out on the fun. Yeah! <3
Now if only I could see loot and trace circles for the young turtles!
Thanks for the update Drakuloth, I hope Apple and Intel can get this sorted out soon. For those of us who weren’t crashing the fix is is some ways worse than the bug…
As others have pointed out, it appears Particle Density is disabled on each login no matter what it’s set to, but if you change the setting it will stick for that session (but not sure if you change characters).
I was able to do a Calligraphy WQ by changing it from “Good” to “Disabled” and back again and the sparkle trails appeared on the ground. It also fixed loot sparkles.
Other things (portals, some ground effects) still seem broken no matter what…
UPDATE Feb 22: May have been pre-mature on my previous update or there is something quirky where it works sometimes and doesn’t others. I just tried doing the Calligraphy quest with ULTRA Particle Effects, and the circle did not appear at all for me. I turned it down to HIGH, and it suddenly appeared. Makes no sense. I guess don’t set it to Ultra?
UPDATE Feb 21: It appears to have been fixed as of last night. AMD GPU is working properly now. Intel issues are still persisting.
Many particle effects are missing and/or incomplete for me on an AMD GPU, on ULTRA settings. They broke something with particle density when they added the option to disable it to fix a bug related to Intel GPUs.
This issue is now not limited to only Intel GPUs.
I play on a MacBook Pro 2019 13 inch, with an eGPU (AMD Radeon 580). Here is the current situation for both GPUs, as a summary:
AMD - The Game runs as expected on Ultra/Max settings (no crashing/freezing, solid frame rates), however many particles are just straight up missing (notably Vexiona’s Breath, the Vale World Boss’s “Song of the Empress” - causes me to get silenced for 20 seconds since I can’t dodge these, etc.) Particle Density is NOT disabled. It is set to ULTRA. These issues started AFTER they added the “Disable Particle Density” hot fix. Everything was perfectly fine prior to that “fix.”
Intel - Game is “playable” on lower settings with expected FPS when Particle Density is completely disabled…but gameplay is extremely diminished as a result (unable to see most/all mechanics). Turning on Particle Density (even to lowest setting) causes freezes/crashes.
Blizzard is handling this fiasco so unbelievably poorly. Their resolution is just to blame Apple for the Intel issues, even though it was working perfectly fine prior to 8.3 on the SAME OS with the SAME HARDWARE… and from what I’ve seen in these threads, they haven’t even acknowledged that there’s any issues with AMD or Nvidia GPU’s after their Intel “fix”.
Blizzard, could you at least acknowledge that you broke something for those of us who are using AMD GPU’s, and provide a resolution/ETA to revert this bug?
As of 22 Feb, I am experiencing this issue on a 2017 iMac with an AMD 580. When the game launches, Particle Effects are disabled. I’ve found that you can turn on Particle Effects by going into System settings, setting Particle Effects to disabled, hitting Apply, then changing back to Good, and again hitting Apply. I have not experienced any freezes or crashes.
I went into the Advanced settings and changed the video card from Autodetect to AMD 580, but this did not make any difference.
If there’s a fix for AMD graphics, perhaps they have not pushed it out yet. Until then, you can apply this workaround each time you start the game. If you log out and into another toon, Particle Effects stays on. If you quit the game and relaunch, you’ll have to turn Particle Effects back on.
Oddly, I discovered this on my own after noticing a bunch of things missing and playing with the graphics settings until I found the one that did something. Came here and found this…