Nvidia Drivers & WoW Freezing Up
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I have been having problems with WoW freezing up after a few minutes. At first I thought maybe my graphics card, an EVGA Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT, was overheating. I thought it would be unlikely, but I ruled it out by monitoring the temperature.
Then I remembered I had updated my graphics drivers. So I began testing drivers out. This is what I’ve discovered:
All drivers listed on Nvidia’s website that are the 18x.xx series will cause WoW to freeze. In order to get access to other drivers, you have to look at their Beta and Archived Drivers page and search for drivers based on your video card. I am currently using driver 178.13 and WoW has not locked up once.
If you are having freeze up issues with WoW, I suggest you use the 178.13 driver.
Blizzard is there something with the game that you guys can look at to fix this issue for Nvidia card users? Its obvious that WoW and the 18x.xx driver series do not work well together.
UPDATE 6-12-2009:
After a couple of days of running fine the freezing problem came back. Since then I have noticed that the game may run fine if not minimized or ran in windowed mode. If I launch the game in full screen, and never minimize or change it to windowed mode, it seems to run without issue…mostly. If I change to windowed mode or minimize the game eventually it will freeze. The audio may or may not continue or get stuck in a loop when this happens. This looping audio also applies to Ventrillo when WoW freezes. I’m going to keep testing.
UPDATE 8-6-2009:
The freeze up problem got horrendous last night, so I thought I would try a different approach. I went into the device manager and completely uninstalled my Nvidia video drivers. I then restarted my computer. I then installed the latest drivers from Nvidia, the 190.38 driver. All my problems stopped. So obvious it was a corrupted driver that was causing the problem. I suggest anyone else having this problem do the same as I did.
UPDATE 9-16-2009:
The problem remains…I uninstalled the drivers and the card in the device manager screen, then rebooted in safe mode and ran a driver cleaner. I then rebooted and did a fresh install of the drivers. Ran fine for a day or so. But the problem came back. I have no idea whats causing it. I’m about ready to order a new card…
UPDATE 9-26-2009:
Problem solved. I ordered a EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked. My game has not frozen once since I installed it a week ago. I’ve come to the conclusion that the Geforce 9500 GT is a piece of crap. Don’t buy it.