World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration

Hello, I just built a new PC, downloaded all drivers and started up WoW. At first, it worked flawlessly. After about 24 hours, WoW froze and crashed.
The error from wow was: “World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration”.
I also got a Windows 10 notification that stated: “Application Wow.exe has been blocked from accessing Graphics hardware.”

Things I have tried:
SFC/DISM checking
Turning off all overlays (Game bar, discord, geforce experience)
Reinstalling my OS
Fresh installing all software/WoW
Reseating RAM and Graphics card
Updating all drivers and windows updates
Rolling back graphics drivers
Playing WoW on DirectX 11 Legacy, DirectX 11, DirectX 12
Playing WoW with no addons
Playing WoW with no interface changes (basically new player UI)
Unplugging my 2nd monitor and only running native resolution on my primary monitor (2560x1080)

This issue doesnt happen with any other game except for WoW, I’ve tested Doom Eternal, Valorant, Minecraft, OSRS, and EVE Online. The only other time I have experienced any issue is with Google Chrome when watching a video. There was artifacting, but simply turning off hardware acceleration in the Chrome settings fixed it.

DxDiag: pastebin link is /5GsFCvrQ
MSInfo32: pastebin link is /73Knw2rN

I am sure they will ask you to pull your DxDiag and MSinfo, I would recommend doing that now and posting it so they can evaluate that as well.
I hope you find your solution soon Catterall!

Above link can explain how to obtain that information.

Thanks for the heads up!

Hey Catterall,

Based on everything you have tried it sounds like there may be some kind of hardware issue even if it’s only affecting WoW. For example there could be an issue with overheating. However, there have been a lot of reports recently of similar crashes with Nvidia cards which is being investigated. You can find that thread here.

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Try this : https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/ive-found-the-solution-to-the-aplication-has-been/146feaec-1cfe-41e3-9482-c07f5b1ae66c

But this seems to be more of a band-aid fix than anything else.
There are a lot of variable why this is happening. Quite notably PSU and GPU Clock speed (which i assume connected to each other).

I just experienced major hardware failure on my primary machine so pulled out my laptop to troubleshoot and play classic here and there. I had classic running on this laptop in January but it now has the same issue and I have troubleshoot the 3D acceleration error and it’s many fixes to no such luck. The funny thing is that retail launches fine, and the most success I’ve had is launching in Windows 8 Compatability mode as sys admin, which gives me the WoW pointer but just a windowed white screen with no interactability. I saw a post around March 10 blaming a patch but no admin ever provides a fix, it’s all the same troubleshooting and providing your DxInfo.

Guru3d has a hotfix for Nvidia drivers. I just installed it and everything is working normally for me. I havent tried overlays or addons, but I am running lag and screen jitter / crash free for now.

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