The title says it all. I did not discover this on my own, but rather through half a dozen other posts in the past 4 days all with the same issue. My thanks to all those who came up with the solution.
This game, or any other Blizzard game, freezes after about 10 to 30 minutes of gameplay if you have RivaTuner Statistics Server enabled. The best thing, for now, is to just completely disable it. Another option is to remove wow.exe from RivaTuner’s list of programs. Both have been known to work. I can do without the onscreen numbers until either Blizzard or the development team at RivaTuner figures out the issue.
Other players have reported that MSI Afterburner can still be used so long as RTSS is either disabled or wow.exe is removed from its list of programs.
Happy gaming.
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Yep, add wow.exe as an exception. It seems recent update to WoW has caused RTSS overlay to random drop, and cause the game to ‘freeze’. Its still technically running but the visual screen is frozen
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Thank you for this information!
I tried this and my issues with GPU drivers and ApphangB1 problems were not solved.
I found the solution messing around with some experimental settings (which I didn’t found in the RivaTuner / Afterburner UI).
Since I know some programing and software development, I took the trouble to study what the hell actually does the DX12 D3D12 Api which WoW relies on, when Rivatuner Statistics Server crashes that bad. What I found is it periodically fully destroys D3D12 swapchain and fully recreates it, f****** up any overlay hooked, thus freezing or crashing periodically WoW anytime you try to interact with the overlay (taking screenshot, record a video, reopening crashed hardware performance monitor).
The following setting detects this strange behavior, and looks like it worked charmingly well at least for me.
Since I got some D3D12 games acting like wow with Rivatuner / Afterburner overlay, I just put this setting in global profile for every D3D12 api based games. Have a try!
Go to and edit file with notepad or notepad++ with admin privileges in C:\Program Files (x86)\RivaTuner Statistics Server\Profiles\global
You should find this line:
[RendererDirect3D12]
Implementation=2
Below this line, add the setting QueueDetection = 1, leaving it like this:
[RendererDirect3D12]
Implementation=2
QueueDetection = 1
You can do it for global profile, or create a WoW.exe specific profile instead, and try the same trick.
That’s it.
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Necro reply: Did you ever resolve this? I know some cards have a VBIOS update that solves some hardware issues. My 30 series card needed one to take advantage of “resize BAR”.
Actually it was the Intel Graphics drivers that were doing it. So bad in fact that I disabled them completely in Windows. Only then did the major issues stop. Funny thing is they weren’t doing anything. Nothing was plugged into the MB video outputs.
Nvidia drivers give me a hiccup now and then still but it’s nowhere near what it was.