Resolution Changes After Tabbing Out of the Game

I’m having issues with my graphics resolution resetting every time I tab out of WoW. I run the game in Fullscreen (Windowed) with a resolution of 1920x1080. However, after I’ve tabbed out and click back into the game, the game will freeze and when it unfreezes, the resolution of the game has changed. The temporary fix I’ve been doing in the meantime is either logging out and logging back in, or: switching to Windowed, maximizing the window, switching back to Fullscreen (Windowed), and resetting the resolution. If I attempt to reset the resolution without flipping it to Windowed and maximizing first, it will kick it back to the weird Custom setting.

This only began about a month or so ago and had never happened to me before this. I haven’t changed any of my computer settings as I’m computer illiterate and don’t know what I’m doing. When I tried to troubleshoot I did find a resolution error people had with NVIDIA Overlay, so I did disable that, but my issue is persisting. If I don’t tab out of the game at all, my resolution remains intact and doesn’t sporadically change. It will only do this when I tab out and click back into the game. Has this ever happened to anyone? Is there a fix? It’s driving me bonkers.

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OMG I thought I was the ONLY one!.. WTF is with this? Mine doesn’t happen immediately, but if I’m say tabbed out reading a website and can see the game in the background, within a few mins it does a stutter and then bloop! looks like crap. It’s most noticeable for me with any of the TEXT. All text goes blurry.

Sounds like a driver crash or a TDR. Update your graphics drivers. Also, make sure that in your world of warcraft\GAMEVERSION\wow.exe properties->compatibility that you do NOT have “disable fullscreen optimizations” checked.

I’ve been having the same issue except it happens when I boot up the game. Been occurring since TWW pre-patch…

My drivers are up to date and I do not have Disable Fullscreen Optimizations checked. Is there anything else I can check into?

Make sure that there are absolutely zero other apps actively running or running in the background. Apps like mouse and keyboard softwares, rgb controlling softwares, discord, your web browser, etc etc. Almost all of them will use overlays and/or hardware acceleration.

When you’ve made sure that absolutely nothing else is touching the GPU, test again. You can also check the task manager task list. At the top of the list in the column names section, right click one of them like name/status/cpu and check the option for “GPU engine.” It will show up on the far right of the columns. Click it a couple times so that it sorts the list and you’ll see “Desktop Window Manager” at the top now and it will say “GPU 0 - 3D.”

It should pretty much be the ONLY thing showing up, aside from explorer and a a few other blips here and there from other Windows tasks. If anything else shows up in that list, close it.

I’ve had the same thing. When it happens, I go to Graphics Settings → Resolution DropDown → Set it to ‘Default’ → Hit Apply.

Not the ideal permanent fix but it works for me, for now.

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Yes, that’s what I have been doing for almost five months now, it’s gotten very old. :frowning:

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I’m also experiencing this - it is beyond frustrating

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bump this still happens to me

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Same.

It just happened to me.

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Hey all,

No need to bump this thread as tech support is a P2P troubleshooting area. Volunteers here can’t pass your messages on to developers, but you can, by posting in the correct forum: Bug Report

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For anyone frustrated enough to Google the same keywords I did and find this post, the solution so far seems to be going ‘Fullscreen (Windowed)’ and set resolution to ‘Default’. Full disclosure: This does not solve the issue of your computer nearly crashing when alt-tabbing out of this game, but it does prevent the text from being blurry. Lol

Other people in the thread mentioned this has been happening to them since TWW launched. I only started experiencing this issue after making major software upgrades to my PC such as flashing bios and upgrading my NVIDIA drivers. I did these upgrades within days of each other so it’s really hard to say which one caused the issue, if either of them did at all.

I hope Blizzard, MSI, or NVIDIA can find a solution. :rofl:

Edit: Evidence online points to this being an issue with the latest Nvidia driver. Use DDU to remove the current one and install an older one. Good luck out there guys!

This and similar issues seem to crop up from time to time via Nvidia driver updates. I’ve had this issue and the GPU crash issue when using browsers or multi-monitor in the past with certain driver versions.

DDU reinstall of the drivers fixed my rescaling and crashes while using Firefox along with the game. The odd thing is that these issues specifically affect WoW when they crop up, leading to GPU crashes ONLY in WoW, which suggests that whatever method Blizzard is using to call on GPU resources is being overlooked by Nvidia or Windows.

I think the last I had this issue was about 8 months back and the only fix was a driver reinstall. I’m still trying rack my brain as to why it would specifically affect WoW.

In terms my gx log file, the “Error WaitForSingleObjectEx Timeout: The wait operation timed out(0x80070102)” was the error code being reported as to cause of the flickering and GPU crash (which then changed the resolution off by a few pixels).

For me, it was specifically doing this while I had Firefox open (WoW is a game that requires a lot of alt-tabbing…guides, wowhead articles, archon for builds, mythic trap strats, etc.) and I’d switch focus to Firefox for a few seconds. Turning off MPO and Gsync did not work either.

I suppose it’s, at least for me, a Nvidia/Blizzard/Windows hiccup that crops up every few months :confused: