I was super excited for Ray Tracing, but it seems to not be coded very well considering overclock values seem to directly correlate to having the option available AFTER updating correctly. After updating to W10 version 2004, Nvidia GPU update 456.71, and making sure both chipset and BIOS are current, I found that overclock dictated the availability of ray tracing. I have a water cooled XC Ultra EVGA 2080ti and with +130 on the core and +1000 on the memory it’s stable, but +140/150 core makes the game freeze for a few seconds and revert to “not available for graphical reasons” on the system option. Modern Warfare and Battlefield have no issues with either of these overclocks, and it’s a little irritating that ONE game can’t handle ray tracing above a certain amount of core clock.
Katchin,
We do not under any circumstances support overclocking. We cannot verify the stability of any level of overclocking on any chip, and ultimately every game uses your graphics drivers differently, as well as your CPU. If there’s some kind of hardware instability being caused by the overclock and the ray tracing drivers, the feature is being disabled to prevent crashing most likely. It’s possible something we’re doing is inefficient, but that’s not something we can fix in tech support.
If you think you’ve encountered a bug in a certain area that might be causing this you’re welcome to post in #support:bug-report about it (as well as at the Nvidia forums - more on why in a moment), but considering that dropping your overclock fixes the problem, we can’t troubleshoot it. You already know the fix or work around at this point.
It’s most likely that your drivers are becoming unstable due to something in the zone that taps coding that’s SUPPOSED to work, but either we miscoded it, your overclock isn’t as stable as you think it is, or the driver coding we’re trying to use to draw certain things is buggy. That last option is somewhat common when we release something new, and Nvidia is typically pretty good about fixing things if they get enough reports, so please do report the issue with them as well just in case they’re getting reports on their end. Ray Tracing is Nvidia tech after all, so in if there is a bug we’ll likely have to work together on it eventually, regardless of where the fault lies.
Sorry to Necro this, but I wasnt seeing this issue until a few days ago with Ray tracing. My overclock has not changed and existed prior to the Shadowlands pre-patch. The game will appear to crash to the desktop, but after a few moments come back but with Ray Tracing disabled as an option. I would say its a display driver crash, but that would temporarily disable all the display outputs as well, and that isnt happening in this case.
I suppose its also possible that if the ray tracing in WoW is using the tensor cores, that maybe they overclock differently than normal CUDA cores and since we (as end users) typically cant differentiate between CUDA and Tensor overclocking, this is the cause. When overclocking, the CUDA cores are stable, but the Tensor cores are not. This is something Nvidia would need to address with better driver support.
Im going to disable my overclock in the meantime to see if that helps, its only a couple % performance gain anyways.
Hi Katchin,
I’ve been having the exact problem you described. Did you get a chance to test this without the overclock? Or did you find any other solution?
Thanks