Thanks for the reports, everyone! We’re continuing to track this issue, but we’d like to gather a bit more information of each system.
Open the Apple Menu, select About this Mac.
Typically, it’s actually better to use the feature built into wow client. go into help menu and choose “gather support information” then paste entire thing here. You may not be able to do this without first going into windowed mode though so you can see menu bar.
I resolved my graphics issue by simply changing full screen to windowed mode, then clicking the green maximize button. Try it and let me know if that worked for you.
Last night after updating to 10.14.4 I didn’t have a crash for a change but still a lot of graphical issues. Ground clutter flashing in general and rainbow patches on the ground in drustvar in the woods. At one point the screen went black aside from nameplates and had to do /reload 3 times.
Late 2013 iMac / iMac14,2
NVIDIA GeForce GTX780M 4gig
i7 3.5ghz
@Omegall I didn’t see an option for “gather support information” so I just did the usual about Mac / system information.
What’s the best way to post screenshots?
Edited with specs
Does today’s patch fix any of the graphics issues?
Edit: it does not fix the flickering ground cover.
Eklecras,
You can always provide full reports by using services such as paste bin. Not all users can post links to websites so just put the code and reference the website you used in some manner.
Example:
pastebin.com/a1s2d3
The code in this one would be the letters/numbers after the slash.
I am also having the issue with flickering ground detail. I was also experiencing black texture issues but it appears the patch has fixed it.
Here is my system:
OSX Mojave 10.14.3
3.4 GHz Intel Core i5
16GB 1600 MHz DDR3
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M
Hi all. Just an update on my issue (I too have ground flicker, but WoW also freezes and crashes the machine - I experience this in all my games). After wiping my machine completely and downgraded it to High Sierra (with no solution), I took it to a genius at Apple. He tested the computer with his diagnostics (CPU, graphics card, etc) and it passed perfectly. I then showed him what has happening in-game and within 5 minutes it crashed and restarted. After the restart he quickly did a boot into his diagnostics to test the graphics again, but this time it wouldn’t even load the test and kept crashing the computer (he tried 3 times). He then tried testing other components and they passed fine. He wasn’t sure what the problem was and hadn’t seen anything like this. He determined it COULD be two things… 1) Graphics card not working properly and overheating - a repair of this is $750 and they will replace my card with the EXACT same one, or 2) A Nvidia / Apple driver compatibility issue, especially seeing that I can use other heavy programs like Adobe without fault. His suggestion was not to replace the gfx card yet, as if it was a driver issue I would still have a Nvidia card and be out of pocket. He suggested to contact apple.com.au/feedback and put a report into them and hopefully the engineers will get in contact with me, read my report he made and work to find a solution around the Nvidia driver issue. Fingers cross… See below my report so far.Hi all. Just an update on my issue (I too have ground flicker, but WoW also freezes and crashes the machine - I experience this in all my games). After wiping my machine completely and downgraded it to High Sierra (with no solution), I took it to a genius at Apple. He tested the computer with his diagnostics (CPU, graphics card, etc) and it passed perfectly. I then showed him what has happening in-game and within 5 minutes it crashed and restarted. After the restart he quickly did a boot into his diagnostics to test the graphics again, but this time it wouldn’t even load the test and kept crashing the computer (he tried 3 times). He then tried testing other components and they passed fine. He wasn’t sure what the problem was and hadn’t seen anything like this. He determined it COULD be two things… 1) Graphics card not working properly and overheating - a repair of this is $750 and they will replace my card with the EXACT same one, or 2) A Nvidia / Apple driver compatibility issue, especially seeing that I can use other heavy programs like Adobe without fault. His suggestion was not to replace the gfx card yet, as if it was a driver issue I would still have a Nvidia card and be out of pocket. He suggested to contact apple.com.au/feedback and put a report into them and hopefully the engineers will get in contact with me, read my report he made and work to find a solution around the Nvidia driver issue. Fingers cross… See below my report so far.
I can’t post links but go look up pastebin/gHbQvKSL
Hope that helps some people.
J
These screen grabs are the kinda of thing I’m seeing most often. Followed by a less often but still occurring screen recording of graphics just I don’t even know.
I’m not having any crashes as such since 10.14.4 I don’t think, but occasionally the graphics throw up weird and hard enough that I’ll relog character or quit and restart.
Frequent map glitch:
https://i1040.photobucket.com/albums/b406/paragon2k/Video%20Glitches/map%20glitch.png
Ground Artifacts:
http://i1040.photobucket.com/albums/b406/paragon2k/Video%20Glitches/splotchy%20ground.png
Screen recording gif:
https://imgur.com/a/Gto03wrI’m surprised Apple couldn’t determine definitively if the graphics are overheating. Maybe temps don’t actually get logged by anything Apple despite having the monitoring support ![:confused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")
Well initially, the 1st test he did it didn’t over heat and passed with flying colours. After the crash, he couldn’t get into the diagnostics for the second test - it kept locking up on him. Tonight I am gonna try wiping the Mac and installing just Sierra.
I’ve found a potential solution to the crash, and so far it’s worked. I’m running Sierra but this applies to High Sierra and probably Mojave for any machine with an nVidia graphics card. The crashes I used to be able to induce by running around Stormsong Valley or Nazmir no longer happen. The flicker is still there on High Sierra (and presumably Mojave).
Apparently a change in WoW corrupted the shader cache associated with the card, metal, and the app, so you need to delete it so it’ll build fresh. It’s located in:
/var/folders/21/(some ridiculous hash)/C/com.blizzard.worldofwarcraft/com.apple.metal. The “21’” may not be the same for all users – you need to find the com.blizzard.worldofwarcraft directory that’s buried somewhere in there. This is probably true of other blizzard games as well.
Inside there will be the name of your graphics card. Delete the whole com.apple.metal directory. It will rebuild when you run the game. Anyone that’s a bit more knowledgable on the ins and outs of metal feel free to chime in here.
I believe you can use this in Terminal to do the job if someone else can confirm:
find /private/var/folders/ \( -name com.blizzard.worldofwarcraft \) -exec rm -rfv {} \;
I might give it a try tomorrow and see if there’s any change for Mojave 10.14.4. Note that I’d probably remove all the blizzard cache since it seems like a safer search string to use.
Well lads. It kinda worked. I deleted that file and ran WoW and it didn’t crash within the first 5 minutes. That was the first time in a week where it didn’t crash the computer straight away. But I did have glitches and artifacts come and go, especially when I tested going in lfr (massive glitches at the first mob, but after that had passed, the three bosses had no issues). But I finally crashed after an hour of play… baby steps I guess. Surely this is a Metal issue? What do you reckon blue?
I just ran the terminal command a little while ago confirming expected results of the command itself.
Initial in game testing show some promise. Flying in BFA zones was pretty reliably showing bizarre graphical anomalies which don’t appear to be showing at the moment.
10.14.4 Nvidia 780M 4gig
Edit: Map corruption / anomalies are still occurring. Not sure about minimap yet, but probably
That command just wipes shader cache, which makes sense as resolving crash since just updating to 10.14.4 which fixed crash, wouldn’t make it go away until you actually wiped the previous compiled shaders.
That said, i don’t see it actually resolving all the issues since some of them are still not yet fixed in 10.14.4 (or 10.13.6 for that matter)
I’ll further add that the source of the corruption still seems to be there – wiping the cache just buys you time. I haven’t crashed since doing it once – have played 4 hours or so including multiple runnings of the incursion in Stormsong Valley (which used to induce it in a couple of minutes).
And I’ll add I’m running it on 10.12.6. I suspect a bug on Blizz’s end – one of of course where the nVidia driver is not returning much less handling an error.
So, let me get this straight. Apple is pretending this issue doesn’t exist, Blizz is not acknowledging this as a issue (this is not listed in 8.1.5 known issues page), and Nvidia is just going “meh…” The three wise monkeys.
If it wasn’t for this forum i’d never know it was a metal compatibility issue.
I’m actually starting to suspect Apple on this one. I just got the kernel panic crash today not running wow but opening Firefox and loading its default web page (I had just updated the Firefox app). The only common link, assuming Firefox doesn’t use web kit for some items, is all three OS versions have gotten a few security updates over the last few months.
It’s not like Apple might not try to patch a security flaw in Metal and botch it. I have no idea how and again I have no proof that it’s the case, but seeing a very similar pattern in other apps over time and on multiple versions of the OS makes me wonder.
@ Omegall: what crash allegedly got fixed in 10.14.4 that required deletion of the shader cache?
Here’s my perception from reading around a bit:
The root of issues is related to Nvidia drivers being very literal with no or little error correction. Blizzard makes work arounds for that issue (although I’m not sure how the issue isn’t with Blizzard’s use of apis). Nvidia blames Apple for drivers even though they (Nvidia) haven’t made web drivers available - at least for Mojave.
But again, given that we didn’t have issues (or I didn’t) prior to 8.1.5 it seems clear that Blizzard broke somethings (using new apis or calling them incorrectly? No idea). As a result they’re trying to work with Apple / Nvidia to resolve whatever driver issues they’ve now run into while looking for workarounds.
Not sure what to think on the more recent leanings towards possibly being issues with metal. If that’s the case the it might be possible it’s related to Apple’s metal api use on Nvidia (I didn’t think Nvidia was supposed to be fully supported for Metal - at least initially). But again it was fine before 8.1.5.
At least things aren’t crashing for me anymore on 10.14.4 but still have map issues. Infact most of the time when graphics really explode right now is when I’m trying to use the map which I don’t understand at all. It often has some weird tile issues.
It’s a frustrating matter for sure, but at least they’ve made some progress.