A lot of people have been experiencing a wide range of texture corruption (not flickering) issues since 10.0 pre-patch on a wide range of Nvidia cards. (From GTX 1080s all the way to RTX 3070/3080s.)
Here is a post I made about it in the bug report forums:
This all started happening after the Dragonflight pre-patch on systems that were previously running Shadowlands on DX12 just fine. Can we please even get an acknowledgement that the Devs are aware of the issue? I have seen nothing but dead silence about this from Blizzard and yet it seems to be a common problem for many people on very capable systems. Running DX11 when our setups are more than capable of DX12 (and ran it in the past) feels like a horrible step backwards. Something between DX12 Dragonflight and Nvidia drivers is downright not working. Please investigate and fix.
So glad you posted this. I thought my GPU was going out and it’s not even a year old.
I’m getting green patches on mountains and a rainbow of colors in other areas as well as sometimes not being able to fully see quest rewards.
It’s very likely you are running into the texture issues I am describing here. Try running on DX11 for now and they should go away, although it will be at the cost of some fps unfortunately.
Probably a stale shader that didn’t get compiled correctly or didn’t get flagged for a recompile between client updates or driver updates or something. You might need to clear your DX caches. They get stored in one of a few places, but usually in local or locallow and in Nvidia folders. I think now days, the Nvidia DX12 shaders get stored in %localappdata%\NVIDIA\DXCache so close the game and delete the folder. It might say some files are in use, but those are usually tied to other OS stuff like the DWM, but it will clear everything you need it to that would be related to WoW.
Other than that, the weird texture corruption issues aren’t exclusive to WoW. Nvidia has had issues with them in quite a few other games this year. I actually just had some pop up on one of our PCs a couple hours ago playing Warzone 2 (RTX 3060).
Thanks for trying to help, but clearing DX cache was one of the tried solutions and does not change anything. Maybe the corruption issues aren’t exclusive to WoW - although people suffering from this are saying it’s almost exclusively happening in WoW, including myself - what did happen was they all started happening on launch of prepatch Dragonflight. That at least tells me Blizzard has something to look into even if it’s just some change they need to talk with Nvidia about.
Right, but where did you clear? Sometime around the 500.xx drivers, they moved locations of the caches, so you need to make 100% sure you cleared the ones that actually get used now.
Play more games, it’s a lot more common than you’d think. There are a wide range of things that can lead into that type of corruption, but 95% of the time, it’s a bad shader cache or a bad combination of drivers and Windows builds.
Best advice is to make sure you’re on the latest 22H2 build of Windows and then do a DDU uninstall of the drivers from safemode and install the latest drivers. Sometimes it’s just some weird vestigial driver flag that didn’t get updated, but a DDU will pretty much make 100% sure to get all prior traces of the driver and settings.
527.56 are the latest Nvidia drivers, so make sure you’re on them.
Here are links to the DDU uninstaller pinned by staff on the Nvidia forums: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/1001/wagnard-tools-ddugmptdr-manipulator-new-cpu-core-a/
But why would these drivers corrupt at the exact same time as prepatch for so many people? I remember back when Shadowlands released, DX12 had a very bad texture flickering issue that lasted for several months until Nvidia released drivers that fixed it. I’m concerned this might be a similar situation. As in, the drivers themselves are at fault and not them failing/corrupting.
Something went horribly wrong today with my Nvidia setup. Not sure if it was a Windows update, WoW or NVdia update but something is now wrong. GeForce Experience no longer detects WoW. Just happened to me the last day or so.
I have a feeling it may be a Nvidia issue with some recent change to WoW.
Yeah they could be, but my point is that it’s likely not something on the Blizzard client end. The shaders get compiled by the driver, by the way, so if there’s a glitch in their code, you can end up with a consistently reproducable bug like this. Much like the MSAA flicker bug that plagued WoW for ages until Nvidia fixed some things.
Has anyone found any workaround for this issue? I have DDU and reinstalled my drivers and game. I have disabled all addons and ran in 100% vanilla. I still have these issues. I understand running in DX11 is a temp fix but DX11 does not look as good and I also get much worse FPS in both DX11 settings.
The game has a vram memory leak going from 10 gb vram usage roughly or more exiting the game restarting back to 6 gb and within an hour its back to 7 gb imagine only having 8 gb vram if memory leaks can cause total system freezes then vram memory leak can cause whole gpu to freeze, and i often do not even get a gpu driver time out when this happens, please fix.
There where reports of memory leak in dx11 legacy but the memory leak is also in dx11 and dx12 but its probably in vram i should not be anywhere near 10 gb vram usage playing wow at all.
That’s probably not a memory leak, that’s just the engine keeping stale assets for longer. It will cap itself by culling things out of the pool as it needs to. Games are designed to be able to use up to 2xVRAM, with a duplicate amount of it being in your regular ram. Like if your GPU has 8GB of VRAM, then Windows will let the game use up to 16GB. These show up as dedicated, sharded and gpu memory(d+s) in the task manager on the GPU tab.
However, most game engines will usually cap out their texture pools at some percentage of your physical ram, but they can still spill over into the regular ram if you exceed limits. That’s why a lot of games will have the handy slider that shows VRAM usaged while you pick and choose options in the graphics menu. So let’s say your card has 12GB of VRAM, it might cap to 80% of that or 9.6GB. If a game has to actually use the shared GPU ram and transfer information in and out of it, there will be performance issues since it’s a much higher latency operation to go back and forth through the CPU constantly.
What would indicate a memory leak would be if it filled not only your VRAM+Shared, but it filled all of the regular ram and then started to spill into the pagefile, until it fills that and crashes. DX11 Legacy will do this 100% of the time on our PC with an AMD card in it(latest drivers), running Windows 11 22H2.
This information may not be as accessible as it seems, but most players are aware of the driver issues with Windows 11 22H2 and some types of Nvidia graphics cards / GPUs.
The best thing is to get the latest drivers, latest cumulative updates. I don’t want to say something negative, but I have no issues with my AMD GPU ( this does not mean ANYTHING is WRONG with your graphics card either. I’m sure you have a nicer one than I do. I wouldn’t give that up any time soon, just because of a minor software update issue. )
A new patch will eventually fix it. Some have integrated graphics ( Intel GPU, ) and a discrete graphics card from Nvidia. You have to get both ( select DCH and the “Game Ready” drivers if you can, ) to have it run properly. GeForce Experience is only optional to install btw, and you still have the control panel even without GeForce Experience. I’m not sure if this is the same as your situation, but here are some links:
Official Advanced Driver Search | NVIDIA -> https://www.nvidia.com/Download/Find.aspx?lang=en-us
Intel Graphics – Windows DCH Drivers -> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19344/intel-graphics-windows-dch-drivers.html
Given my gpu driver freezes instead of timing out that is exactly what a vram memory leak does… im having no issues outside wow 24 hour run heaven yes 24 hours 8 hours superposition 8 hours port royal 3dmark on a loop
many cpu test and memory test no errors found.
Given Nvidia users have this again
And other odd issues that happen like texture corruption i would not be surprised if i am right.
Heck the above linked issue if had 2 years ago and you know how you fixed that back then ? yes thats right clearing shader cache, the game is doing endless loop of shader cache compilation and storing it in vram and then when its full it freezes or causes all kind of weird behaviour mostly when loading in assets, even as simple as opening a talent tree and if you think there no shaders there think again, in Elden Ring it needs to generate a shader and compile it or you have no black bars in Elden Ring for example
Anyway i am sick tired of this issue with system freezes pop in gpu driver crashes etc, Blizzard does’t fix it i will ask for refund and if they dont give it i will take it to court, cos the game is unfinisched broken i have no problems in other games, and can barely play without having my entire system freeze up or crash, Blizzard needs to learn to optimise their game cos if clearing shader cache fixes an issue like flickering tree’s then clearly they have failed, and they have failed since BFA cos this issue exist since BFA, i may not have it on my AMD gpu the flickering but if i clear shader cache daily and have no system freezes for a week then there is clearly something wrong with shader compilation in this game let alone that a lot users have had texture corruption and other weird issues as well.
Im not trusting Blizzard if they say they aren’t aware of a memory leak, there is clearly a memory leak im already sitting at 8 gb vram again closing the game and i am back at 6 gb, this is ridicilous…
Actually asked same user that linked me that video and he does’t even use AA it could be that this was case in the past but its not the case right now, and i do remember quite well this issue that clearing shader data fixed it only wish i could test this my self on Nvidia gpu, cos for all i know you could be right i do remember tho that i never used MSAA tho but did in the past.