Problem with Graphic Lag/Windows 7 Nvidia

Support Technical Support
78

Boy, do I have some VERY happy news for everyone in this thread. I have found another makeshift method to circumvent this issue! It’s a shame it’s had to come to my own poking around to get a fix rather than the QA team pushing out a polished fix for this issue, but I’ll take what I can get here. Allow me to explain what my findings are…

If we recall back to when this issue originally came out in patch 8.1(That’s 10 months ago! No official fix to date!), we were able to circumvent the stuttering by changing the “Graphics Card” setting, ironically, to the integrated graphics rather than the dedicated graphics card. This was fine until patch 8.1.5 rolled around and broke the Graphics Card setting(for us). No longer could we select the integrated graphics, but instead just saw duplicate dedicated graphics card options.

After much various troubleshooting and attempted workarounds for over half a year, I’ve finally stumbled across the solution. I had the crazy idea of manually changing the “Graphics Card” setting in the WTF\Config.wtf file to the name of the integrated graphics adapter. This absolutely works! There are a few notes and caveats I need to mention:

  • After manually changing the setting, it will be overwritten after you exit the game.
  • You can prevent the setting from being overwritten by starting the game with the command line argument to reference a separate config file.
  • This will prevent any settings changes to not persist upon game restart.
  • DX11 feels slightly janky, stick with DX11 Legacy.
  • (More a note to QA): After applying this fix, switching to the dedicated graphics card in the same game session does not create the stuttering issue. There’s no performance difference. Not sure why this is the case.

Instructions to fix the stuttering

  1. Locate your WoW folder, navigate through _retail_\WTF.
  2. Create a copy of Config.wtf in the same folder. Name it anything, I’ll name it Configfix.wtf for this demonstration.
  3. Open Configfix.wtf with any text editor, such as Notepad. Search(Ctrl+F) the file for the text gxAdapter.
  4. If the text is not found, create a new line anywhere in the file.
  5. We’ll need to find the name of your integrated graphics adapter.
  6. Press Windows key+R to bring up Run diaglogue, type dxdiag and press enter.
  7. Press the Display tab, then look for the adapter name under Device>Name. It should look something similar to Intel® HD Graphics 4600.
  8. Either replace the line in Configfix.wtf that contains gxAdapter or the new line you created with the following: SET gxAdapter "NAME OF YOUR ADAPTER INCLUDING THE QUOTES"
  9. Save the file.
  10. Go to the Battle,net client, click the big Blizzard logo on the top-left, navigate through Settings>Game Settings>Scroll down to World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth.
  11. Check Additional command line arguments.
  12. In the text box below, enter -config WTF\Configfix.wtf
  13. You can now launch the game with this issue being fixed. If you’d like to change in-game settings, you will need to remove the command line argument, make your changes, then redo the steps above.

Alternatively, you can use a macro to change the setting and restart the graphics engine every time you log into the game. Not very convenient in my opinion, but here’s the macro:

/console gxAdapter NAME OF YOUR ADAPTER WITHOUT QUOTES
/console gxRestart