He was able to find a way to Pixelshaders OFF, which is causing all of the videocard crashes on ATI Radeon 9200 Series and Nividia pre- Geforce 3 9000 series cards. Any card that only supports Pixel shader 1.4 or lower will crash and run sluggishly after patch 2.4 as they upped the Pixelshader version for WoW.

Follow his directions at this Forum link to turn off both specular lighting and pixelshaders in the
config.wtf located in the WoW game folder.

Video Card Freezes, crashes after Patch 2.4

You can also turn specular lighting off in the video settings withing the WoW client itself through an option. It's also been reported that turning off the glow effects below specular lighting might also be necissary, as post 2.4 glow effects may use pixel shader as well.

Please continue to bump these two theads untill we can get a blue poster to make a sticky.

The nightmare is over, what a horrible night for a curse.

I think Pixelshaders and some more shader effects are controlled by a variable called M2UseShaders. You can turn that to 0 and see what happens. If this is happening to old school DX 8 hardware-class cards, we'll take a look and see what happens. It would help if people could post their character locations and if they're using the default settings (I'm assuming default if they wiped out their WTF folders).

I'm assuming every user is using the latest drivers? In ATI's case, it's Catalyst 6.11

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Q u o t e:


Is M2UseShaders a post patch 2.4 variable? Because if it is then ya, this could be why the posted fix is not working for people who threw away their original wtf file. Or possibly they are having problems editing it. It must be edited with notepad and SAVED as the instructions say.

I edited the config.wtf as he instructed, and ran around in both shattrath, and the throne of kiljeaden where I had crashed before, lighting intensive areas. After 45 minutes, no crashes, and the GUI was running smoothly.

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M2UseShaders existed around 2.0.0 or 2.1.0. It's quite an old variable. Pixelshaders and specular are even older, existing before WoW's release.

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Q u o t e:
I'm going to give this a shot when I get back, but thanks in advance.

Can someone tell me what effect this change will have on the display? I.e. particle glow effects or shading diminished or now nonexistent? I'd definitely play with diminished video or performance than to keep crashing, but I want to know the impact so I can determine if a vid card upgrade is worth it.

cheers

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Shader effects (like see-thru water, some weather and spell effects, full screen glow, shiny surfaces, etc) will no longer exist.

If you're ever interested in card specs, you can check out this handy little summary. http://www.neeyik.info/3dspecs/
If you're interested in an upgrade, any of the cards listed on this link will be leaps over the Radeon 8500 based cards. http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/05/the_best_gaming_graphics/

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Q u o t e:


I think the people the fix didn't work for probably didn't edit the WTF correctly, or are having another issue, that is similar but not the same.

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And some being completely unrelated but want to keep posting anyways :)

The interesting thing is that there have been no reports of the GeForce 3 series nor the GeForce 4 TI series having this issue. It may be something beyond just pixelshader versions. Those are the only GeForce cards in the DirectX 8 family with shader support. It's limited to a single subset of Radeon DirectX 8 GPUs.