I seem to have this issue where the clouds and other Skybox objects look really Blurry and Low Resolution in World of Warcraft (Retail). Clouds for example are just blocks of white textures and don’t look like clouds at all. The same issue happens for the Aurora Borealis in Northrend (Dragonblight).
Weirdly enough, this issue doesn’t happen in every zone in the game, or it seems to be Expansion based more or less. For example it happens in every Eastern Kingdom/Kalimdor zones, but doesn’t happen in Mount Hyjal (Cataclysm, The World Tree area, a “Static” Skybox perhaps?). It also happens in TBC areas (Eversong Woods, Silvermoon City) and in Wrath of the Lich King areas (Dragonblight).
Interestingly, areas with more “Static” Skyboxes seem to be unaffected by this, for example Dalaran in Northrend was just fine, as well as Zul’drak in Northrend. It also doesn’t appear at all in the newer expansion zones I’ve checked (but then again I seriously can’t go through every zone in the game, tbh).
it didn’t appear in:
The Jade Forest (MoP)
Azsuna (Legion)
Bastion (Shadowlands)
Oribos (Shadowlands)
My PC is Core i5-9600k, RTX 2070 (v. 461.40 drivers), 32 Gb Ram, Windows 10 (2004 release). WoW is installed on a NVMe SSD with minimal addons. I’ve tried different Display settings in WoW but nothing seems to affect the Skyboxes specifically. I’ve tried running in DX11 and DX12 modes but the issue persists. I’ve also tried different mipmap/texture detail settings (you’d think these would affect Skybox textures?)
I’ve heard some rumours that this is a issue which happens in newer Nvidia drivers, but I’m not sure of this information. I tried going back to older drivers from summer 2020 (my go-to drivers when issues arise) but WoW barely launched with those drivers and the Skybox issue was still there with those old drivers (I checked Northern Barrens, very quickly though as I didn’t want to run the game too much when it didn’t work, it was stuttering on the old drivers).
Edit:
I did try deleting WoW’s Cache folder from it’s files and now I at least think that the clouds in game look slightly better. But then again, it’s also night-time in the game right now.
Maybe it’s just how clouds are in WoW, a little bit blurry and not 100% sharp and high in details? (but the blocky/blurry clouds looked really bad during daytime and I thought they must be glitching out).