World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration

Support Technical Support
1

I have Windows 10 now and yesterday buy prepaid. I wanna play on Classic. But I saw this allert (on previous system was OK). I read a lot and i try a lot to do. Nothing. Always error. Today… Magic. I can playing! So all day playing. I try play now. I can’t i see “World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration”. Anybody have the same?

1 Like
2

What GPU do you have, did you install the latest drivers?

(run userbenchmark and post a url to the results for a quick overview of the PC)

3

yees, i try everything what i read on forums. Unistal and install drivers, admin option, windowed, manual change to main graphic card, check direct x

4

but what hardware do you have?

5

Im having same error for almost 2 weeks. Only way to play for me (~25-30fps) is to put gpu off (gtx 860 m) and play with intel 4600 on lowest resolution and settings.

6

intel hd graphic 300
geforce gt 540m

when i use windows 7 all be ok. I have only new system, nothing more. Strange is - i’m playing yesterday, few hours later i can’t. I don’t understand this situation.

7

This GPU can actually be unsupported although you should see the message since long ago. On a desktop 570 Fermi card it looks like so:

https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/wow.rk.edu.pl/images/wow_fermi1.jpg

Although mid BFA it still allowed to run the game:

https://rk.edu.pl/site_media/resources/wow.rk.edu.pl/images/wow_fermi2.jpg

That’s maxwell, did they screwed up compatibility detection in some recent mini-patch? Or did Nvidia made some driver changes making WoW react incorrectly to the driver version?

What Nvidia driver versions do you both have?

8

had newest - 445.87 but now downgraded to 441.41

9

And both won’t work? Does other games have any problems? Nvidia lists the latest driver for this GPU (while 391.35 for the 540m)

10

problem occurs on both driver versions. dunno about other games

11

Then run something to check if it’s WoW only or more of a system problem. It can even be a free benchmark like 3DMark or Unigine Superposition and alike.

12

Hey Arîsa,

We’ve seen some reports of this error, (specifically with Classic) for some GPU’s. There is workaround that you can try :

  • Open the folder where you have WoW installed on your PC (Options > Show in Explorer on the app)
  • Rename the WowClassic.exe to something else (e.g. WowClassic1.exe)
  • Launch the client directly from the renamed executable instead of the Blizzard app

This should clear the error for you and allow you to play for the time being. If this is working for you, just make sure that you launch the app to check for updates/patches to keep your client updated.

1 Like
13

thank you all for help. I try all what do you wrote and nothing work. Now work for me is only one stupid thing. I delete interface folder, run wow classic, quit game, restore this folder and log in again. Stupid, strange but working for me. Maybe someone will need this information with the some problem

14

Nobody going to advise him to turn off any overlays? Which is the second most common cause of that error?

15

Trovlak, im having same problem with retail, everyday im trying to repair this problem and Im quite sure i did that.

  • quiet mode in win10, a-vir (360 total security, even uninstalled), spotify.
    Yesterday i was able to play for 10mins - flying in SW, then I used hs to northrend dalaran and it started lag spikes, and after 20sec this error occured
16

And i must say that i was albe to play for years on wow installed on external hdd smoothly. Now its installed on ssd, and now when i lost almost all my gold on game time i cant play. …

17

Most of the answers here will not help you.
On my laptop I have sometime same error with my nVidia card.
What resolve it? Simple restart or:
Shift + Right click on start menu (the icon, bottom left) -> Device Manager.
Then find your video card, right click, disable device, then again right click, enable device and restart your pc.

18

Is this being investigated?

I’m getting the same issue while using a 1080ti for retial WoW, the only tempory fix that has worked so far is to run a repair on the game however the error returns after closing the game.

19

No. In every single case so far, its turned out to be a problem with the client PC, not with world of warcraft.

20

Did you tested my “fix” by disabling your video card, enabling and restaring pc?
This was working for me on my nVidia card.

It is not related with wow, yes.
It’s driver issue.