Can't run WoW

Just received my M11x R2 this past weekend. Since then, I've already had to have a Dell tech come out & install a new hard drive. Unfortunately the hard drive that was SUPPOSED to be a mirror image of my original HD wouldn't work until the tech hooked up my external optical drive & ran my recovery CD -- causing me to start from a bare-bones Win7.

So I tried getting all of my drivers installed. I grabbed all of the ones I could find at the Dell site, including the latest NVIDIA drivers.

But...when I try to run WoW, my screen flickers several times, and then I get the following error:

"World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration. Please make sure DirectX 9c is installed and your video drivers are up-to-date.

I did a dxdiag and I see that I have DirectX 11. So that can't be the problem. I just installed the latest NVIDIA drivers from the Dell site. So what could it be? Is anyone else seeing this issue?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Did you even read up on Optimus issues, updated nvidia driver, or the huge WoW thread on this forum?

I don't play wow, but I'd say first thing you have to be sure would be Nvidia GPU running wow, not Intel.

 

Oh...sorry. I had looked around a bit about WoW, but to be honest, I saw a TON of WoW info out there and was having a hard time sifting through it. I did a search on the error I was getting and didn't see anything. Maybe I didn't do my search right.

However, I can also tell you that I did make sure to go into my NVIDIA settings and explicitly set the high performance driver to run for WoW. I made sure to do that because I had seen where someone posted on a link to someone on YouTube that had to do that.

 

I just downloaded Portal through Steam and tried to play it. I received the following error:

"Failed to create D3D Device! Please see the following for more info.
http://support.steampowered.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=772"

When I went to that site, it told me to go into the properties of the game I was attemtpting to play in Steam and set the launch options to "-dxlevel 81". I'm not sure what that is supposed to do but it didn't work for me.

So I guess it is not just WoW that isn't working for me. It looks like it could be any game.

(Also, I made sure to go into my NVIDIA settings & set it to use the high performance card when running STEAM games.)

 

looks like directx error. I'm no expert on it. my battery dying. just try to update all you can then try again. It sounds like software problem anyawys. GL.

 

When you start WOW, try right clicking the icon, and choose "run with graphics processor -> High performance nvidia GPU.

It should open it with that. Let me know if it worked, ill install wow and mess around with it. I will tell you that i have not updated any drivers. I dont want to become unable to play any of the games i do, which is what seems to happen.

 

"IF" you have directx 9c installed, sounds to me like your registry may be monkeyed up. quick solution is to download 9c and reinstall then see if you get the same error. If you successfully install 9c, and still won't let you in, go to your wow folder and delete the "cache" and "" directories. This causes the game to re-examine your system and clears any erroneous, i.e., no longer valid, configuration settings. If that doesn't do it, then you're in optimus hell and I can't help there. In fact after reading some of the R2 optimus error threads here, I ordered the R1 which runs wow beautifully.

Good luck.

seer

 

MLM,

Thanks for your response. I really don't think it is a problem with the correct video card not being used. I'll certainly try your suggestion when I get home. But I'm thinking it is more of a problem with my video drivers or something. After reading around in the forums it looks like there is several diferent versions of drivers out there -- all of which require some sort of modifications or something.

I'm incredibly discouraged and pretty much ready to send this paper weight back to Dell.

 

not all PC Technicians are knowledgeable with PCs.
The guy who came out just probably followed some instructions he had; threw in a HDD, cloned your HD and said..there you go.

At this point in time, would stop wasting time trying to troubleshoot your broken system and wipe the HDD and install a fresh copy of your OS. Install the minimum drivers to get your self up and running on the interweb, download Windows updates....Dell drvers...etc etc....re-install WoW (since you should be able to just copy over the World of Warcraft dir to a new system from an old system)...and then verify that your system is running the high performance graphics card.......then start WoW.

 

Its unfortunate that there are some people out there that cant run WoW well...or their expectations are set to high for WoW on this mini gaming rig.

We know that the M11x is tiny in size.
We know that WoW is CPU intensive and does not take advantage of GPU.

So with that...expectations should be set that WoW will not be spectacular if all your graphical settings are set to High. In fact...I set all my graphics settings to their lowest (on both my desktop and M11x rigs) in order to effectively run 25-man raids. Any type of latency..either in your network or in your system leads to lower output in DPS and HPS.

Until Wow can tune their gaming engine to take advantage of new graphics technology, the bottleneck in playing this game will always be locked to the CPU.

Though.....adding an SSD will definitely help in WoW load times and give you a small FPS boost.

 

disco? do you know whether wow has been coded to offload any of the cpu calcs to cuda yet? something is very strange here as I just had my r1 in dal on my server, maybe 50 guys running around and my fps ranged from 154 to about 87. Further, with same settings on two instances of wow in windows (two boxxing both on native res settings) down in stv, the two chars grouped and questing, I was getting 90fps plus on the drone I was dragging around, and mid sixties or so on the active DK I was using to kill everything.

I've done nothing exceptional to optimize this unit, just some internal caching tweaks, hell, I wasn't even running graphics o/c's, so i'm a bit puzzled why some with the r2's are having so much trouble running wow. Are you guys running a ton of addons? If you were healing a 25 man I could see where you might have quite a bit of extras running. Other than that, the compelling conclusion is driver/gpu bios issues.
(and btw, in the beta, the gob frost mages are a friggin riot if u got da skillz

seer

 

Trying to figure out if you actually READ this thread? lol. He literally cant run WoW.

 

LOL. Actually, I'm now finding I can't seem to run any game. I can't even run Portal.
This thing sure makes a cool looking paper weight though...with all the pretty lights & such.

Thanks for all your input guys. I really do appreciate it.

 

Save yourself some headache, and fresh install.

 

Yeah...I guess I'll try one more fresh install. It can't hurt.

However, since the Dell tech who brought me my new HD yesterday & he had me run my recovery CD - which started me out with barre-bones Win7...isn't that a fresh install? That's as close to a fresh install as I know how to do.

I don't know...I realize I'm just coming off as a big whiner at this point. And I guess to a point I am whining. I mean when I ordered this thing I was so excited...and to this point, it has been a major disappointment.

But it's all good. Who knows, I may be able to get this thing figured out.

More than anything, I'm just willing to bet that it has more to do with not understanding this whole NVIDIA driver issue - with where the Dell ones don't work, and the ones at the NVIDIA site have to be modified somehow.

 

Just make sure you download all the drivers, and put it on a USB storage or something.

After your done, make sure there isn't any "unknown devices".

Then install all the directx stuff etc.

I wouldn't even bother w/ stock Dell nvidia if I were you. Download the newer one with modifed inf file, and install that one from the get go.

 

Thank you Achilles. I will give it a try.

 

LETS GO RANGERS!!!!

 

Go Habs Go! (even though I don't like this year's edition...) Tampa is more suited now with local peeps (Quebec)

As for the DirectX problem, if you have Windows 7, it is supposed to be integrated with it, but I would try using the directx web installer from Microsoft :
Download details: DirectX End-User Runtime Web Installer

After that, I would re-install graphic drivers if the above doesn't work right away.

 

Car...i did a clean install and got the same message as you. forget the dx11 BS message, download and install directx9c from the web and you'll b rocking.

As a general rule, MS error messages are only slightly more informative than tossing a coin.....

Seer

as i just posted somewhere else, my guild had another event this weekend and in the middle of a moving fight of some 3 to 400 players, all hunters, all with pets, i was pulling 27fps with my r1.
Here's a video of what we were doing in my guild, WHU.

http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/

cya in cat

 

As for addons, I've got a good handful running to track and optimize the healing. i'm sure some of those add-ons dont help on my FPS either. I do know that the server I am on...Illidan is very populated and I know that the server farms Illidan is populated on is considered 'older' on the refresh cycle.

I wouldn't doubt all these things factor into better/worse game play.

You have to wonder about the quality that goes into these m11x builds. if they can't do a good job on the fragile hinge, what kind of scrap is being used?

I hope the OP is able to get his rig fixed. I can understand his frustration. You pay good $$$ for a system...you expect it to work well.

 

Thanks for your input disco.

Actually, as of this past Friday (9/10), the system has been boxed & is ready to go back to Dell.

Friday evening I spent yet another couple of hours on the line with Dell (much of it on hold). By the end of the conversation they were just wanting to send a tech out to my house again -- this time to replace the motherboard.

This had me very frustrated since I had gotten my system a week ago, and had not been able to play 1 minute on it, but had already had a Dell tech visit me (to replace the hard drive), spent countless hours on hold or talking to Alienware support, and spent many hours trying to do a fresh install (since neither of the hard drives they had given me would boot & setup properly out of the factory).

So I spoke to their customer support & told them I really wanted this system, but I wanted one that worked (I had a few other problems than just the DirectX one). I told them I had paid a lot of money for what has basically become a light-up paperweight. I told them I was sending it back. They could either send me a new one, or refund my money -- up to them.

They seemed genuinely concerned, and said they'd send out a new system within 7 to 10 business days.

I certainly hope this next one is a little better...OK...MUCH better then the previous system. I will also remember what you said about going and manually downloading DirectX9c.

I hate to be a jerk...but if this next system is as poor as the last one, I'm shipping it back & going to Digital Storm.
If it DOES perform well, then I owe a big apology to Alienware for cursing them in my sleep for many consecutive nights.

 

Carnold!

Hey...if I was in your position with the unit I received, I would have demanded the same. All around it sounds like you really got a lemon. I'm glad you have some patience...and I do hope your next unit is top notch. You are not being a jerk...you are just trying to be a happy customer (without said product in hand) even if the company fails with their product.

Keep us updated! GL!

 

Yeah car, sorry bout your experience. I've been trying to figure out why mine appears to be running so well. Near as I can figure, I did a complete fresh install off the included dvd. Went straight to Dell and installed all the listed drivers including the video they have on the site.

I DID install all the physx/cuda stuff, (and notice from reading the box on Mafia 2 that it is equipped to use physx). I then went into bios, changed a few entries, including setting for overclock. Lastly, since I like to run lean and mean, I left out the face recognition bit, went into regedit and stripped out a bunch of useless entries, set everything in the op system for 'performance' , killed aero and went to a slightly modified classic interface, installed Avast (my antivir of choice at the moment), THEN went online and let windows upgrade do its thing, blocking only windows defender which I find slightly worse than useless.

after a few reboots, thru in Agent Ransack, DeFraggler,
ran CC cleaner to get the rest of the crap in the registry I had missed. Reboot, defrag, then hooked up one of backup drives and copied over WOW and the Cat beta.

Deleted my , CACHE, and the other Cache files from WOW, rebooted and fired it up. I was surprised to see that it had selected almost all ultra settings. I kicked down a few like view distance (only a small bump) the shadows, screen glow effect, and another I can't remember, logged out, logged back in and VROOOM. Wow ran GREAT Then we installed and ran Mafia II. Some slight hesitation, a few tweaks in the game settings, then I went into the op system itself and applied a few of my favored adjustments I had forgotten to do, rebooted , started up Maf again. It was running fine so we plugged in the vga to the 50" here, fired up at 1366x 768 on the big screen, and proceeded to play Maf 2 all the way to the end (yes that's a lot of hours) LOL. We caught one main glitch in the game where Joe wouldn't get up on the table to get thru the wall in the skyscraper part. so had to shut down the game and log back in. After that it was smooth sailing to the end which totally bummed me out. LOL. After some sleep, decided to run some benches. As a result I tried a quick and dirty gpu overclock based on backing off slightly from the top settings in the R1 overclock thread overview. Got a 3dmark06 of 6990 and was quite a bit removed from the settings of the top poster who I think achieved around 7100, so was content with that. I killed the gpu O'clock, went back to stock but I DID mod the mem chip timings slightly. Reboot and check for stability and temps, no problem and have been up and running everythying I've thrown it since then.

Bottom line, these CAN run, there are some good if not great ones out there and hope you got a *goodie* headed your way in the post.

btw, I have found no reason to move from my a04 bios, or the posted Dell video drivers.

Seer

oh, forgot to mention, I ordered mine with the 160 but pulled that after establishing that the unit worked and replaced it with a WD Scorpio Black 7200 rmp 500gig drive (nice drive btw), I also installed the full directx9c package after I got the message about not having the proper directx driver. Also, kill v sync in wow. It limits your frames if the system can handle it.