Hello community ,
After today macOS update to Monterey 12.4 the game is completely unplayable on M1 chip.
The game kind crash on every few minutes, but in reality game doesn’t crash - it just cannot work with GPU and windowserver and macOS is thinking all is ok but game is like picture and not updating the windowserver (graphical interface) . If you plug off and on your display from T4 or HDMI , game reinitialize connection with service and continue running as normal.
If you using two monitors and run the game on any of it you can see that after the freeze , the game is there and you can move windows to this monitor but they will be hidden behind the game . It is really odd behavior and I am getting complete ignore from the Blizzard support as they don’t understand the scale of the issue.
I tried on multiple MacStudio with different monitors - Studio, Samsung, Dell, same behavior. I made clean install of the game no addons, same behavior . Different resolutions down to 1920x1080 again the same issue.
Game is not generating error log as it is not really crashing, it is working and it is visible in activity monitor, it’s just not responsive graphically. The console stream is showing small crash but said it cannot be logged in Spin and after that start generating info messages that cannot control the process .
I made some recordings :
You can see even I kill the wowapp it is still displayed as it is running , windowserver doesn’t know wow is displayed :
Here you can see after freeze on 2nd display and disconnect of it, game appear on main display and it is working as nothing happen - continue auto combat and my skada is showing the dps done for last minute as the game was running in background :
I didn’t record behavior on main display as it is nothing to show game become a picture - cannot switch windows, cannot see the background apps - only way to fix is plug off and on the T4 or HDMI cable.
For me, when I hit “play”, it says in a gray box: he CAS system was unable to initialize: ClientHandler: initialization error: failed fetching the CDN configuration file
ClientHandler: initialization error: failed fetching the CDN configuration file
ClientHandler: initialization error: failed fetching the CDN configuration file
tact::ClientHandler::Create failed: E_IO_ERROR
[20220517T22:24:44] {21466} INF: adding network address 137.221.64.7:80 for serve Followed by several server numbers.
i had 2 hours call with Apple support today and numerous call backs, and we found a solution - Turn Vsync ON
It appears that some applications who doesn’t correctly utilise Metal protocol have such issues, and it reality what happen is that Monitor get out of sync with GPU.
With Monterey 12.4, if you put the game into windowed mode, can you resize the window (by dragging the corners)? Or is that basic feature still broken?
just an FYI blizzard uses metal specification to letter per apple guidance. they work directly with apple engineers that actually come on site for these types of things. So wow definitely uses vsync correctly (if it’s on). now if having it off creates problems that’s something I’ll definitely pass on, but having it off isn’t using it incorrectly, it’s not using it at all. If they find an issue with it being off they may just force it on (they’ve had to in past when the intel driver had an issue if i recall)
Thank you, I suppose Blizzard is working with Apple that’s normal.
However something change with 12.4 , in the past Vsync off doesn’t cause issues - very rare freeze but nothing dramatic . From yesterday it was on every 3-5 min, and today when I turn vsync on everything works amazing - my GPU consumption drop significant - down to 50-60% from constant 90%, the memory for GPU is down to 2Gb from 3-4Gb, system never goes above 50C and I am playing on full 5K resolution with ultra high video settings , which was not possible before.
So definitely something is wrong with video settings when Vsync is Off , it should not affect the performance so badly.
By the way it’s not only WoW . I am following few topics in other forums and people complain some Video editing softwares are affected, as well and some games as God of War running on parallel .
Vsync should almost never be off with metal anyways. Metal api as a whole is designed with it always being on in mind. it might just be time for blizzard to remove ability to turn it off at all.
