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WoW TBC on Mac Pro - Artefacts & Crashes

miniConvert

miniConvert

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Mar 4, 2006
3,264
3
Kent, UK - the 'Garden of England'.
Hey all,

Since I upgraded to World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade I've been experiencing artefacts and screen tearing during play.

This recently became much more of a problem, as the game now either completely freezes, even looping the audio at the time of the crash, meaning the computer has to be restarted by pushing and holding the power button, or crashes in a way that actually stops giving any visual output (black screen, non-responsive) again needing a hard restart.

Is anybody else experiencing this? Does it sound like the X1900XT has simply had it and upping to TBC is just a coincidence? FWIW the fan is still functioning as normal on the ATI card. Playing in full screen windowed mode does not make a difference, but I've never had a crash when in partial-screen windowed mode, perhaps because this is less demanding on the GPU?

Maybe I just need to delete WoW and reinstall it from scratch (god forbid), but I'd really like to hear your suggestions! I want to play on the (until now) unfathomable Mac Pro, not on the iMac's!

TYIA
miniConvert
 
Im not 100% sure but TBC doesn't push your computer any harder. The x1900 is a pretty powerful card.

I had issues like this but on my MBP and tracked it down to the x1600 overheating and corrupting data to eventually crash the computer. I now use fancontrol apps to prevent this and haven't had issues even with TBC. I saw in another forum about controling fans in a MP here so check that out.
 
Thanks, do you have a link? Finding stuff on fan control for the main fans, not so much the X1900XT. I guess if I could manually increase the fan speed it would give me a good indication as to whether the problem is related to overheating. FWIW I do think it's overheating, judging by the nature of the glitches.
 
Thanks :)

Anyone else WoW'ing on a Mac Pro experiencing any similar issues of late?

I'm on a 30" ACD, full resolution. Was fine for a long time, even during prolonged playing periods, before this started - now it happens pretty soon after I begin playing.
 
My apologies for stating the obvious, but my guess would be that the GPU is overheating.
Is the thermal paste on the 1900 on nicely ?
 
I wouldn't know. Do you think it's worth getting on to Apple and asking for a replacement? On a PC I'd reinstall drivers and wotnot and try another card, but the first doesn't seem applicable in OS X and the second isn't possible as I don't have any other available Mac cards.
 
Hah, they don't send out replacement cards - only RAM is 'user servicable' under the warranty agreement! They'd collect and return the system (see :p I knew they still did that), but I can't be without it for the sake of my WoW needs, especially when a graphics card replacement is a two second job.

The guy suggested I buy a new card. Bah. I will if Apple ever release an updated card for the Mac Pro, but lets be honest - is that even likely to happen ahead of the next Mac Pro revision?

Grr! :D
 
miniConvert said:
Hah, they don't send out replacement cards - only RAM is 'user servicable' under the warranty agreement!
Grr! :D
Click to expand...

Thats really stupid, considering they sell the upgrade kit right on their website for anyone to buy and put in.
 
I have a 2.66ghz, 2gb RAM, X1900 system...

I actually run WOW-TBC 2 and three times at the exact same time.... I have never had any issues either in full screen or windowed mode...

when running more than 1 instance of WoW, I run in windowed mode... no problems there..

In full screen, I have only locked up once and that was due to a plug in issue.
 
Thanks for your input.

I'm going to try swapping the card with another X1900XT quickly at the weekend. If all's fine and I can confirm it's the card that needs replacing I might be on a better footing with the Applecare boys and girls, though to be honest I don't think they're going to move on it :(

Am I asking too much of the card to play on the 30" ACD at full resolution? In terms of frame rates it handles it easily, giving anything from 60-100fps, but perhaps fps isn't the best indication of whether i'm loading the card too heavily? I don't know.
 
I have the following machine and am having the EXACT same issues...

Mac Pro 3Ghz
ATI X1900
30" Apple Display

I found this tread on WoW's forums...

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=64187208&sid=1&pageNo=1

Apparently this is happening to a LOT of people right now. My machine ran WoW perfectly until either the 2.03 patch or installing BC....which were about the same time. Ever since then, i get a lot of graphic annomolies and an eventually lockup causing me to hard boot the machine. I took someones advice and took the cover off my case to keep things cool and that didn't help at all.

I even have the Accelero X2 cooloer on the X1900, which keeps it cooler than the stock fan that comes with it. This is really frustrating because my machine simply does not crash or have problems with anything else i have on it. I'm 99% sure my video card is not the problem here.

I may just try to reinstall everything for WoW without BC. I'm only lvl 47 anyway so I can't go to Outland yet. I wonder if that install is causing all the problems.

Also, I even unloaded all Addon's and reduced all the graphic settings so I wouldn't push the card too hard...that didn't work either.
 
some points:

a) some MacPro / 1900 users have arrived at the conclusion that overheating is involved, because they tested their machine with side panel off and an external fan pointed at their GPU and problems subsided. We have a bug filed with Apple on this issue, it may involve the automatic fan speed thresholds set by the OS. I'd recommend this type of test to any user with this type of config. We would not suggest this had we not already seen some positive results along these lines.

b) WoW 2.0.1 and 2.0.3 both provided performance improvements to the engine with measurable frame rate increases. However both these features are optional and if they react adversely on your hardware, it is easy to turn them off.

in the chat panel:

/console glfaster 0
/console uifaster 0

or put the equivalent "SET" statements into config.wtf while WoW is not running:

SET GLFaster "0"
SET UIFaster "0"

and then relaunch.

If you are playing WoW and need further assistance, we'd welcome a visit at our tech support board, as we only come by this site every so often.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11111
 
Hey rbarris, thanks - I've tried with the side panel off and it doesn't help me, I still get the same problems and the eventual system lockup. Again, everything was flawless and beautiful before recent updates and TBC, so maybe my card really is fine...

wfehres - is it possible to play an upgraded account without TBC installed then? When I tried it prompted me to download the required files, but I don't remember if that was optional or not.

I'll try disabling those options as you suggest and get back to you.

Thanks,
miniConvert

(edit: I can't log in to that forum, btw, I assume because I'm Europe and not USA?)
(edit again: Btw, it was all fine after that multithreaded open gl patch - only since I installed TBC and whatever patches were applied at that time have I had these issues)
 
miniConvert,

So you're saying it won't let you login into WoW without the BC addon installed because your account has been upgrade to BC? If that's the case then I'm dissappointed because I was hoping to just install WoW without BC to see if my problem goes away. I'm seeing more and more of these post's show up and more are saying heating isn't an issue because the problem is persisting even with the case off and fans blowing. Some even verify thermal temps while playing and are within acceptible limits.

I hope we find an answer soon. There is nothing worse than spending that kind of money on the top of the line Mac Pro and I can't even play a $40 game...which I love playing.

Concerning their Forums...you should be able to just login using your WoW account information (user/pass). Hopefullly it's not restricted to just the US.

(edit): Same here...the OpenGL additions improved performance and i played for probably a good month without a problem and really enjoyed the performance boost. The BC patches and addon's definately cooincide with my problems. I turned those setting off in the config.wtf file and it didn't help at all. It just dropped my frame rates.
 
Let me know how that works out for you. I plan on taking my side panel off again but this time put an external fan on it just to test. I honestly doubt it'll make a difference. I really think this over-heating thing is wrong...just from what I can tell but i'm willing to verify it for myself.
 
When you guys are talking about hard resetting the machine, are you talking about Kernel Panics? Because if so, I've had 2 of them while playing WoW, last Thursday and Friday, but I assumed it was due to the new ram I installed last Monday.

Other than that, I've noticed no graphical problems since the big update in early December, other than a noticeable DECREASE in performance if I go from full screen mode to windowed, and then back to full screen, which never used to happen (though the addition of 2gb of ram fixed this).
 
No kernal panics...screen just locks up mid-game. Have to reboot using the button the computer.
 
Yes...it does :). Considering i spent 7k on this machine and I had an uptime of 55days and counting until WoW crashed it. Last night it crashed 6 times in an hour and couldn't play more than 5 min without the graphic glitches showing up. If i don't play WoW the machine will run forever without a crash...including a lot of Aperture and PS work.

I guess I get irritated when they say my card might be bad or it's a heating issue. If that were the case I wouldn't be able to run 5 1080p trailers at the same time without a problem...know what i mean?
 
Damn I'm glad you found this thread wfehres, my machine had also been up for a considerable amount of time before WoW started crashing it. As there are usually clients connected to it, even at the weekend, I can only play on it very rarely at the moment :( Fortunately it doesn't seem to affect the network clients connected at the time, but I'm left sitting in front of either a black screen or a frozen screen with looped audio :(

With the 30" ACD I really can't describe how amazing my WoW experience was before all this started happening. Playing on anything else just isn't the same. I hope this gets sorted soon.
 
Yea....WoW on that 30" with all the settings max'd out is pretty amazing!! You get spoiled. I was irritated last night because I finally had to play on my MacBook Pro because I didn't want to leave in the middle of a raid. So there i was sitting next to this monster machine with a 30" monitor and was forced to play on the notebook...LOL. You get spoiled.
 
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