WoW randomly freezing [SOLVED]

I recently changed distros from CachyOS to Arch and changed DE’s from KDE/Plasma 6 to i3WM (don’t know if it’s relevant but those are the only changes i’ve made)

Since then WoW just randomly freezes. lutris log here: 2024-09-03 15:47:02,923: Command 'vulkaninfo' not found on your system2024-09- - Pastebin.com

it’s a completely random freeze. sometimes I can go a couple hours before it freezes, sometimes a few minutes. It doesn’t lock up the system or anything and I can still move my wow cursor around the screen, just the actual visuals are frozen. I can still switch workspaces and what have you.

At a loss right now as to what the issue is.

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I have been searching the internet every day since The War Within released and I’m (un?)happy to see that I’m not the only one having these issues.

I can play WoW for a couple of minutes to a couple of hours, but it will inevitably crash. For me it crashes the entire system and I have to do a hard reboot. My system will loop the last second of audio and not respond to anything else.
Unfortunately, I have no idea what causes this either but I’m open to helping somebody who has more knowledge about these issues than I do.

My current guess is maybe a bug in vulkan. I had the exact same crash when I alt-tabbed from Astral Ascent but that happened only once, whereas WoW has a guaranteed crash when I play.
Hopefully somebody will know where to look for this.

Edit: perhaps relevant. I am on Arch with KDE 6 and Wayland.

Well I can potentially rule out that it’s wayland as I was on i3wm with my crashes but switched to hyprland and, thus far at least, I haven’t crashed. Granted I haven’t been playing for hours but for the brief time I was playing it didn’t crash. The only thing we have in common right now is we’re both on Arch.

The thing is when I was on CachyOS (which is Arch) and KDE 6/Plasma I wasn’t crashing. so perhaps you’re right that it might be something to do with Vulkan OR it’s a patch from blizzard.

the ONLY thing I could think of was it had something to do with Picom and the recent animation updates or just Picom itself. As my WoW wouldn’t really “crash” but rather freeze as I could still switch workspaces, audio would still play, just the visuals for wow would freeze or the entire thing would “vanish” but I’d still see the WoW cursor. Thus my switch to hyprland which doesn’t use Picom and has it’s own compositor.

I’ll do some further testing today with hyprland and just let WoW run for awhile in it’s own workspace (briefly did that yesterday) and see if it freezes/crashes again.

UPDATE: So I’ve been playing for a few hours this morning and haven’t had any issues. even switching workspaces hasn’t caused the freeze. I’m starting to lean towards it being either picom or i3wm or maybe both but I’m strongly leaning towards picom.

Hi! For me it takes down my whole system since yesterday - completely random but frequency increasing. The display freezes, the sound is looping the last second. I cannot switch to another VT. I already did “Scan and repair” from inside Battle.net client and I ran a btrfs scrub. I tried RADV_DEBUG=hang but i don’t get any dumps. Kdump doesn’t even create a file - devices reset (keyboard backlight flickers) and then screens turn off (no signal).

Here’s my system:

  • MB: ASRock X570 Taichi
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
  • RAM: 32 GB of G.Skill Trident Z RGB RAM (2x16 GB DDR4-3600)
  • GPU: XFX Radeon RX 6900XTX EKWB Edition
  • SSD: WD_BLACK SN850 1TB
  • Sound: ASUS Xonar Essence STX II 7.1
  • PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 12 1000W
  • Screen: LG UltraGear 34GN850-B (144 Hz with FreeSync on) + LG
  • OS: CachyOS (x86_64-v3, daily updated, no overclocking through ppfeaturemask)
  • DE: KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland)
  • Runner: wine-ge-8-26 (x86_64)

WoW Config:

  • API: DX12
  • everything maxed out
  • no v-sync
  • low latency mode: built-in
  • anti-aliasing: CMAA 2 + Color 4x / Depth 4x
  • no ray tracing
  • no VRS
  • ambient occlusion: FidelityFX CACAO
  • optional GPU features: enabled
  • async resource creation: enabled
  • multithreaded rendering: enabled
  • frame overlap: enabled
  • advanced work submit: enabled

EDIT: added info about kdump

try fxaa not cmaa - there is a bug fix pushed 2 days ago with vkd3d-proton for msaa (cmaa) in Wow explicitly - I have been testing it in TWW.

Also, if you are using lutris git or AUR, switch to Proton Experimental or if you have 0.5.17 from repo/deb, get protonup-qt and install the latest wine-tkg version (shown below) for use with Wow - ignore the DXVK NVAPI version I am using, it is a fix for Hitman 3



Well I’m just fed up now, nothing I do changes anything. The only thing left: turn every graphics option off and reenable them one by one, day by day. Maybe next year I’m done and have found what’s wrong.

try using X rather than Wayland with the settings I showed above - these work on Ubuntu 24.04 with either my 6700xt (kisak mesa) or 4070 ti (nvidia 555 drivers, 560 are broken for me on Ubuntu)

Also you can use protonup-qt to add vkd3d-proton 2.13 which is release before the patch I am using

Turns out my issue is completely unrelated. I finally got kdumps working and it seems a null pointer dereference happens somewhere inside amdgpu, most likely it’s this one here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3142.
I’m out of this thread now.

Thanks again for all the suggestions and help :slight_smile:

Just as an fyi - check phoronix.com - I saw a patch from AMD for an issue about to land in 6.11 kernel. I have been running 6.10.x kernels with my 6700xt - good luck (stoopid amd gpu bugs in the damn kernel)

Also going to note my original issue is solved too and was unrelated to Mr_nUUb.

seems mine had to do with the recent Picom update. (verified it lastnight by going back to another DE with picom running as the compositor) and sure enough my WoW would freeze and oddly so would my steam and lutris. Ditching Picom or simply turning it off solved the issue.

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I have the same problem, and looking at the logs, the same graphics card.

I read somewhere that this problem can be due to optimus driver (the one when there is an APU and a dedicated GPU). In my case it has been happening for a couple of months, before it worked correctly. I don’t know if it’s something in WoW or Wine.

Create a new support request - this one is closed