So I started playing the game a couple days ago after taking a couple months off. I started the game normally to play but noticed now that I get weird sound distortion and a slight FPS drop in cities when facing certain directions, as well as randomly outside of town. I do not actively play with the game sounds on but when i noticed it with my media player I turned on the in game sounds and it did it with that as well.

This is a weird issue for me because it is completely random and seems to be exclusive to the WoW client. I generally play in windowed mode and while the distortion is going on if i alt+tab or hit the windows key to take the focus off the window it goes back to normal. The same happens when changing a video setting that would otherwise take a second or two to implement. But then once the window is active again the same thing happens.

So far I have tried everything I could think of, as well as other remedies found from surfing the net and the forums alike. Along with this I reformatted as well as updated drivers, re-installed WoW multiple times beforehand and currently have no addons or any modifications at all or any extra processes running in the background.

Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated, I will be checking back so I can provide additional information if needed. Thanks!

Hi Kerrante,

Sound and video timings go hand-in-hand for this game. If one of them isn't happy, it might drag down the other part. You haven't provided any hardware information so it'll be hard to guess at what is happening. Can you tell us more information about your computer? You can find most of the information if you go to Start -> Run -> dxdiag (or on Windows Vista, Windows Key + R -> dxdiag)

I'll need the following info:
System tab
Operating system:
System Manufacturer:
System Model:
Processor:
Memory:
DirectX Version:

Display tab
Device Name:
Driver Version:
Driver Date:
Driver DDI Version:
DirectDraw Acceleration:
Direct3D Acceleration:
AGP Texture Acceleration: