Hi, I am playing WoW classic on the 2019 iMac (i9, 40gb ram, vega 48 8gb) and occasionally the game freezes the whole computer, often I have to restart the whole computer after it. This doesn’t happen with any other game. When I look at the GPU usage in activity monitor, I can see that the GPU usage is quite low when I play classic but when it crashes, it just jumps to 100% instantly and stays there. The crashes are also quite random, it might be days without a crash but then suddenly it crashes, and sometimes the game just freezes for like 20 seconds and then continues.
I can’t think of many things that could cause this issue. Of course, the first would be to check if there’s any pending update for MacOS. I would also do an Interface Reset and Scan and Repair the game installation.
Hi, I have done those things now and I will report back if it crashes again and I have to reboot.
It seems that the same issue is being posted in the American forums.
The last post there describes exactly what is happening to me too but less frequently
My last crash was too when I hearthed to stormwind after raid.
EDIT:
Yep, it happened again today when I was standing in stormwind. Had to reboot computer again. Look at that thread in the USA WoW forums, it’s the exactly same issue, the whole computer freezes, even force quit doesn’t work.
This doesn’t happen with any other game. What should I do next? I don’t want to be forced to use bootcamp to play this game because I do everything else on Mac OS
EDIT 2: It crashed 2 more times today, it’s getting ridiculous. I am probably going to try this on Windows Bootcamp and see if it crashes there, if not, then it’s an issue with the mac client. To be fair, it’s probably a client issue because it doesn’t happen with other games and is also being reported on the USA forum.
EDIT 3: This issue seems to happen in stormwind fairly often
Did you end up solving this? I’m getting these freezes every so often and finally started looked at console errors - seems to be similar. Except I’m on the regular WoW. Seems to happen more in Shadowlands for me.
I am also experiencing a similar experience still. But in my case it happens when I’m using my Dell monitor (I have a MacBook Pro 16”). The game plays well but sometimes freezes. I can move my mouse around but on the Dell monitor the game is frozen and on the MacBook screen everything works fine. I have to force quit the window server then a white screen pops out and I’m again to put my password to log in into my MacBook Pro. I tried using only the MacBook and I think the problem isn’t occurring. Any ideas?
I think this is an issue between Apple (not supporting games properly, drivers, metal…), the Metal implementation (both Apple and Blizzard), and the fact that WoW now runs windowed (Blizzard).
I’ve been getting a lot less freezes since tweaking my settings some more.
I think what is happening is the Graphics card is sometimes getting overwhelmed (memory I think!), and suddenly everything “slows down until it can catch up”. So essentially, it’s about lowering those settings down a little even though it usually has a good constant frame rate.
So…not the greatest drivers, not the greatest implementation by Blizzard and the fact it’s running windowed all affect this in a poor way. Tweaking your settings should help, hopefully.
