WoW Shadowlands flickering is back

Objects like mushrooms, waterfalls or even hunter pets in WoW flicker again. Noticed it happends occasionally in Zereth Mortis and also in Ardenweald. Probably in other places too. Switching from DX12 to DX11 fixing it. Not sure is it a cause of 9.2 or Nvidia driver again.

Win 10
Nvidia 2070 SUPER, latest driver 511.79

3 Likes

Same problem here, and the flickering is really annoying, especially because it happens in instances where you’ll easily miss mechanichs and die like an idiot.

Example: 1st boss in Tirna Falcis, the blue pools flicker so much you can’t see them, last boss the same with green pools spreading from you.

Didn’t change anything on my computer side, Nvidia Drivers 511.79 and GeForce 1060GTX on Windows 11

Are you able to reset your game settings to defaults, ensuring that Geforce experience isn’t force applying settings? Not been seeing any of the issues described with similar GPU’s on this driver.

I don’t have Geforce Experience installed. Will reset setting and see if that helps.

When I saw this post’s title I was a bit surprised because for me the issue with flickering shadows, transparant textures and projected textures never went away after DX12 was implemented in BFA.
Depending on various driver versions and in-game settings the flickering textures are at best slightly annoying but when I’m in a place like some specific floors in Torghast where you meet Broker Ve’ken in his bubble, in area’s with a lot of fire and particle effects combined with a few layers of transparant, projected and shader textures in a hallway where you can’t zoom out far enough or point the camera at a boring wall to let the gpu calm down a bit , it’s just a perfect storm that makes my poor GTX1070 Strix act like an angry 4 year old kid on speed. That happend a few months ago and the flickering was so bad my first thought was: O crap, my graphics card is saying it’s final farewell.

The weird thing I noticed over the past years and what people also say in older forum posts I found on the US wow forum, when you close and restart the game or do a /console gxrestart the problem goes away for a bit, even if you don’t change any settings but sooner or later it always comes back so it not a case of “Setting X bad, Setting Y good” or the usual: “Turn off function X in Nvidia Control Panel” internet pro tips.
Nvidia claims in the 471.11 release notes they fixed the issue and all I see Blizzard do is telling people to switch the game to DX11, install old drivers from a few years ago and to send them a DxDiag file but judging by the still flickering textures and forum posts as recent as this one, it’s safe to say the fix didn’t work.

So until I buy a new graphics card that (hopefully) doen’t have this problem or Nvidia/Blizzard come up with a real fix I just keep using my “/console gxrestart” macro

1 Like

disabling adaptive sync/freesync/g-sync fixed the flickering for me

Disabling gsync did not work for me. It seems to be worse in Classic but it’s also present in Retail.

I still get this flickering issue with NVidia GeForce 2060 Super. I was resolving it by switching to DirectX 11 from DirectX 12, but I’ve just switched to “Default Settings” as Blue suggested and that has worked too (it puts me on DirectX 12 obviously, but no flickering). Unfortunately I didn’t make a note of which other setting it reverted…

clips.twitch. tv/DrabBigCobblerBigBrother-X1gJJ1TyNKveabhg
clips.twitch. tv/BoldHonestOkapiArgieB8-ZihkSgtBDkeJjLjo

i’m having the same flickering issues as him, either black or white textures, never action bars or anything like that
its really annoying tbh, tried wow on my second pc and its not apparent there, even tho it also uses a gsync screen and the same nvidia driver

edit:
pc with those problems:
10700k
3080
1440p 144hz native gsync screen
every driver and windows up2date

pc without those problems:
6700k
980
1080p 144hz native gsync
everything up2date

both had a complete fresh install of wow, still happens only on one pc

Have exactly the same

I am also suffering from what I can only describe as a lack of anti aliasing, terrible draw distance (objects popping in everywhere) and also shimmering ground textures - I have tested this in Stormwind and elwynn but I also get this issue in Oribos and bastion, basically everywhere…

Hello.

Did switching to default settings fix the issue?
If so how did you switch to default settings? Was it on the game options or did you reset the UI?

Yep same here. Flickering with the latest drivers suddenly. I think Nvidia have gone and messed up again. It was fine till I udpated graphics driver.

3060 here and not using any kind of vsync, gsync etc etc

I got the same issues u.u
gtx 1060

Hello everyone,

This kind of issue is usually caused by the drivers. If you updated them recently, installing a previous version/doing a rollback might solve the problem.

Else, you should be able to circumvent the problem changing directX. Lowering the game settings to the bare minimum can help sometimes, if it works, you can raise the options one by one to find the culprit.

Could also be an overheating issue.

This has happened so many times now, is it a case of Nvidia somehow resetting the driver profile for WoW?

Anyway for me the flickering stopped when Wrath pre-patch came out, but I also updated driver to 516.94 around the same time.

When I switch to DX11 it has no effect however when I change it back to DX12 it crashes my game. Also the flickering in question, is it literally flickering black block textures or in my case it’s like pixels are dancing on my screen on distant objects, like in stormwind for example, the city gates have awful aliasing all over the edges, even though I use msaa x8 at 4K - also staircases in the game flicker terribly with the worst aliasing I’ve ever seen in WoW…

People with 3000 series cards are reporting the flickering is gone with the latest driver 522.25. For Classic at least.

Thought I’d fixed this issue by disabling Triple Buffering but its returned.

Only thing that seems to stop it is going from DX12 to DX11, which isnt the solution I wanted, but oh well :frowning:

Also, it seems there are 2 different “flickering” issues people are getting, based on the videos I’ve seen. One is that objects are flashing black, as if their model is disappearing. The flickering I’m getting is more like bright flashing on objects.