World of Warcraft Tips

Crossover & Wine have most of the limitations of 32-bit Windows including running out of memory when trying to load too many textures into memory. Here are some tips you can try to minimize WoW crashes.

• The Large Address Aware modified executable (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1658706617?page=6#101)

This is not a supported alteration and will probably cause problems when patching occurs, so you would want to make sure to revert the change when a patch is released.

Finally, this is not a WoW "bug", it is an OS setting. And the reason that it is not set by default is that there are a large number of 32 bit OS users who could have serious issues. Increasing the addressable RAM for the game reduces the amount of RAM available to the OS kernel. There is a maximum of 4gb of addressable memory available in a 32 bit OS. Changing this to 3gb for the game leaves only 1gb to the OS kernel.

Do not make this change on a 32 bit OS.
Do not make this change unless you have a minimum of 6gb of RAM.

At this time there are no plans to create a 64 bit executable as this would need to be tested along side of a 32 bit executable, effectively doubling the testing that our QA team would need to do before releasing any anything to the public. Since the game is fully compatible with 64 bit Windows, this does not really make sense until such time as a 64 bit OS is the minimum system requirement.

But there are some things that you can try before making this change to the game executable:

• If you have an older video card, use the DirectX 9 graphics API: SET gxAPI "D3D9"
  
  
• Make sure your video drivers are up to date. If your video card runs our memory because the driver is not allocating it properly, you can get this same error.
  
  
• Reduce the graphics settings. Most notably Shadow Quality, View Distance, Texture Resolution and/or display resolution.