Random Black Screen in game

Support Technical Support
1

I got back into playing the game after a couple of months, and I’ve started to encounter problems with the game freezing up temporarily and the screen going black, however after some time I can still hear the music and sounds inside the game, but my monitor acts like it’s turned off and I can’t turn it on again unless I do a hard reset.

Thing is, I don’t think it’s a hardware issue, because the GPU runs fine and under barely any heat. I encountered this problem last year a few times, and back then the fix was to change the API to DirectX 9, and then it worked fine. But now I can’t switch to DirectX 9, and after I’ve tried every suggested fix, like deleting problematic folders, repairing the game files or updating/reinstalling drivers, it still happens completely at random. Sometimes I can play for an hour or two until it goes black, sometimes it happens immediately after logging into a character. I’m using windows 8.1 and I don’t support DirectX 12. Let me know if there’s anything I can do – i’ll post the dxdiag and msinfo here if need be.

2

Turning the settings down is my first suggestion and I believe will go some way to solving this, however, we need to make sure… Now, I need a little more info:

Have you monitored your GPU temperature when under load? Have you monitored your CPU temp under load? What PSU do you run (model/wattage)? What other components do you run (full system spec and attached devices)? Have you run heavy GFX stresstests to see if the problem occurs?

Please post that information and for every question where the answer is no, please perform those tasks. We will be able to isolate the the problem very quickly and determine what the problem maker is with others including myself possibly being able to help you further in the future.

:sunny: Thanks for taking the time to read my comment and I hope you have a wonderful day in the World of Warcraft! :sunny:

3

I’ve had to hard reset my computer three times in the last 30 minutes, the last time being just now when I’ve tried turning down all graphics settings. I don’t think it’s an issue of the GPU heat crashing under load, because just now the game caused the screen to go black as I was changing settings in the character screen, and not inside the world. I’ll try to turn down every single setting to minimum and see what happens, though I’ve run much more resource-intense games on my GTX 950 and have had no such issues. The graphics crash seems to be exclusive to WoW as of now.

I have a 750W PSU running alongside two ordinary hard drives and a Core i5. Pretty sure that if it were a PSU issue, the PC would just shut down or reboot - same with heat.

4

This sounds horribly familiar to when I was using a GTX 660… the cooling fans fell over & I had to replace the whole card, in the end.

It turned out that some of the fans used for GTX 660’s weren’t up to the job & failed significantly faster than they should have… but most often after the card was discontinued/out of warranty.

EDIT:
Could still be a GPU issue, despite yours being a 950.
Next up for the checklist would be your CPU cooler… if you have a gummy fan/cooling fins full of dust-bunnies, that will cause crashes faster as WoW is more CPU than GPU intensive.

5

I’ve monitored the game under load for awhile now. There haven’t been any graphics crashes, and none of my components have gone over 50 degrees centigrade. Graphics look… uh, awful, but I’ll gradually up the settings one by one to try and see what was the problem. My money is on the lighting/shadows/particles.

Edit: Still pretty sure it’s not a hardware issue; I spent quite a while last week cleaning the inside of my PC. Wasn’t any dust. Looking more and more like a rendering issue going awry and completely crashing the API, as when it last crashed, I could alt-f4 the game into windows, and even call up the windows narrator.

Edit: 30 minutes later and the graphics crashed again. Sound still runs in the game. Completely random - minimal CPU and GPU load. Both components running reasonably cold. Please help.

6

Hey Nalren,

Let’s see if this is caused by a driver conflict. Please use a Display Driver Uninstaller to remove your current graphics drivers completely and install the latest driver afterwards before testing again.

Have a few seconds to spare? Let me know how I’m doing!

7

Nenyasqi,

I removed the drivers, like you said, made a fresh install, ran the game for about 15-20 minutes and got the same problem.

I looked at the gx.log and found one line that is recurring and conspicuous.
D3d11 Device Create Failed: result -2005270524

Should I post links to my dxdiag and msinfo now?

8

Could be time to upgrade to Win10… Win8 was a bit of a ‘downer’ of an OS, with 7 & 10 being the the relative ‘ups’, in the grand Windows OS cycle, so it may be that the OS is struggling in general.

That said, it’s odd that if it’s only WoW that’s causing problems, why other stuff isn’t causing the same issues…