New Graphics APIs in 8.1.5

In 8.1.5, we are making some improvements to how World of Warcraft uses DirectX. In essence, our old DirectX 11 is now called DirectX 11 Legacy, and our new DirectX 11 is multi-threaded. More details on each DirectX version is below:

DirectX 11 Legacy

A single-threaded rendering backend. This is provided to be the most compatible with older hardware, operating systems, and drivers. This is also the least performant. This is very similar to the functionality of DirectX 11 in 8.0.1.

DirectX 11

A new multi-threaded rendering backend using DirectX 11. This should improve performance for older GPUs or operating systems that don’t support DirectX 12. This is new for 8.1.5.

DirectX 12

A multi-threaded rendering backend using DirectX 12 for hardware, drivers, and operating systems that support it. There are some performance improvements in 8.1.5, but it is mainly the same as the 8.1.0 release.

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Thank you. From the bottom of my heart thank you. These are the kinds of changes I want to see in this game. Under the hood optimizations.

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How do we switch between the different formats?

Escape -> System -> Advanced -> DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 are choices.

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Thank you so much Doomwaffle!

Has anyone played around with multi-threaded DX11 on Nvidia 10 series? These cards are supposed to be better in DX11 than 12.

I’ll be using DX11 until DX12 (Multi GPU) comes out for alternate frame rendering modes.

I don’t have the DirectX 12 option in my system tab > graphics api
Just DirectX 11 legacy and DirectX 11
(Win 7)

does DirectX11 support multiple GPUs?

can anyone please help me lol my boyfriend is running windows 7 and he needs to update his directx to 12 how do we do this, we literally need a step by step of where to go because we are noobs lolol thx

DX12 is Windows 10 only

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I am MOST EXCITED for this, but for now, as a lowly Linux WINE user, I need to spend who knows how long figuring out how to get WoW to run, again.

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it’s funny how the cpu usage look when
DX 11 legacy - 1 thread
DX 11 - 3 thread
DX 12 - 2 thread

is there a new command line argument to switch to dx11 legacy from the launcher?

Any other updates you might be able to hint that you did for Linux users like myself? I know you don’t support linux directly, but everything worked fine yesterday. So something in this patch presumably this change also changed how it’s handled in wine.

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Please see: Linux Client? thread, along with numerous threads from Windows users, detailing issues with these new changes. The game has become nigh unplayable for Linux users, whether they are using Wine Staging with dxvk or Wine with vkd3d. In addition, some Windows users are reporting graphical errors, changes in refresh rate, poorer performance than before these changes were implemented, crashes, system hangs and much more.

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More importantly, when are we getting our actual exclusive fullscreen back? Just to remind everyone, the game is TEMPORARILY running with only window options. I say temporary because this can not be a long term situation, it does not give the application exclusive access to the GPU and other hardware so
performance, responsiveness (input lag), sharpness and functionality is diminished . No other games come with window only options and it was removed in BFA, yet we had it since day 1.

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Hate to burst your bubble but exclusive fullscreen is never coming back and most new games will not support it either. DX12 works better in windowed full screen and doesn’t really support true fullscreen, and before you say anything there are already tests out there showing that no exclusive full screen can not run in DX12, it was a WFS that was made to look like EFS. Any game that runs on DX12 doesn’t have EFS it has WFS with a different name to make you think you are using FS.

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Is that why Metro Exodus, the current most bleeding edge Direct X 12 game has shipped with ONLY exclusive fullscreen AND has great performance?

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