World of Warcraft: Forever Beta Crashes on AMD RX 9070 XT

The beta test for World of Warcraft: Forever is causing severe stability issues for players using specific AMD graphics cards. Users report that launching the game triggers black screens and driver crashes, effectively locking them out of the experience. This problem is particularly acute for owners of the RX 9070 XT, which appears to be the most vulnerable model in the current lineup. Gamers relying on DirectX 12 should adjust their settings immediately to avoid these interruptions.

Lowering indirect lighting or switching to DirectX 11 resolves the issue

The crashes primarily affect AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT, RX 9060 XT, RX 7800 XT, and RX 7900 XT GPUs. Players encounter a DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG error when the system attempts to render the game under high graphical loads. The issue stems from the new Indirect Lighting feature, which triggers a driver failure when set to High in DirectX 12 mode. While the RX 9070 XT suffers the highest frequency of these failures, other models in the list also experience similar breakdowns.

Users can resolve the crash by lowering the Indirect Lighting setting to Low or Medium within the DirectX 12 configuration menu. Alternatively, players can force the game to run in DirectX 11 mode by adding the -d3d11 parameter to the launch options. Switching to DirectX 11 bypasses the problematic lighting engine entirely, allowing the game to load without triggering the device hung error. These workarounds provide a temporary fix until a permanent patch is released.

Neither Blizzard Entertainment nor AMD has issued an official response or patch addressing these crashes as of the report date. The situation highlights ongoing stability challenges in the beta phase of the game. We looked at the last World of Warcraft: Forever update earlier while tracking similar balance and stability themes. Players must manually adjust their graphics settings to continue playing until official support arrives.