I’ve been having issues with my graphics card crashing ever since the pre-patch, usually when specific effects are on-screen. I’ll try to describe it as best as I can.
My card: Radeon RX 480, with the most recent drivers (21.5.2).
What happens: When the crash happens, my screen turns black and the graphics card’s fan suddenly goes to 100% speed, much faster than it was before. I can still hear music playing, can still talk to people on discord and can presumably still interact with the game and my character, I just can’t see anything happening. The only thing to do then is to restart the computer, and sometimes when windows starts again, the display driver starts disabled and I have to re-enable it multiple times for it to work.
When this happens: Usually when there are a lot of AoE effects, mostly ones with some sort of mist effect.
It happened first in Scarlet Monastery when there was a consecration effect, hunter frost trap and warlock hellfire up at the same time.
It happened multiple times in TBC in Slave Pens with multiple mage blizzards.
It happens consistently in the Mechanar either in the first boss room or on the gauntlet towards last boss, probably due to the long view distance and many glowing effects of the environment.
It happened most recently when doing The Exorcism of Colonel Jules quest in Hellfire Peninsula, probably due to the mist around the adds and the ground effect.
What I’ve tried: I reduced every single video setting in the game to the absolute minimum. I’ve tried running on all three DirectX modes (11 legacy seemed to make it better, but the crashes still happen).
I’m out of ideas right now. All I can say is that this never happened before the pre-patch, either on classic or on retail (Legion, BFA and Shadowlands). I would really appreciate some help, as it sucks to constantly worry that if too many things happen on the screen, I have to restart my computer abruptly and leave whatever group I’m with missing a tank for a while.
Please, send help.