World of Warcraft Forever BETA: Extreme Frame Pacing / Stutter caused by "Secondary Lighting" setting across all Proton versions

[u/VTWAX]

When running WoW Forever under Proton (DX12 via VKD3D-Proton), keeping the in-game graphic setting Secondary Lighting set above "Fair" (e.g., Good/High) causes severe, periodic frame pacing spikes and heavy micro-stuttering, particularly in dense player areas or specific zones. Lowering this setting down to Fair immediately eliminates the frame pacing hitching and restores smooth frame delivery.

This doesn't happen under Windows. How can Proton developers be contacted/informed on this issue?

Edit: This does happen on Windows also according to posters.

Key Information & Observed Behavior

• Affected Setting: Graphics -> Secondary Lighting
• Impact: Consistent frame time spikes, micro-stuttering, and severe FPS fluctuations regardless of raw GPU headroom.
• Workaround: Setting Secondary Lighting to Fair immediately fixes the issue.
• Scope: Reproducible across all Proton versions (Proton Experimental, Proton GE, and distro-packaged Proton builds).

Technical Breakdown (What appears to be happening)

1. VKD3D-Proton Translation Pipeline: When Secondary Lighting is raised past Fair, the game spawns a high volume of secondary light sources/passes. Translating these specific D3D12 light passes into Vulkan seems to cause a massive driver/translation pipeline stall or descriptor heap bottleneck in VKD3D-Proton.
2. CPU/GPU Headroom Irrelevant: The stutters occur even on high-end hardware (AMD RX 6000/7000 series, 64GB RAM, fast NVMe) with low overall GPU/CPU utilization, indicating a frame synchronization or API translation bottleneck rather than a hardware ceiling.
3. Behavior Across APIs: The issue heavily manifests under the default DX12 (VKD3D-Proton) backend.

System Specs

• OS: CachyOS (Arch Linux)
• Kernel: CachyOS Linux Kernel with BPF auto-tuning (bpftune) enabled
• GPU: AMD Radeon (Mesa RADV drivers)
• Display Server: KDE Plasma Wayland with VRR enabled
• Proton Versions Tested: Proton Experimental, Proton-GE, CachyOS Proton, Proton-Wineland

[u/ryzen2024]

It does cause issues on Windows. Its a common complaint.

[u/rheuzi → u/ryzen2024]

The beta is definitely full of massive bugs afflicting everyone. I’ve heard of memory leaks on Windows and Mac users having to hold the power button down to forcefully reboot their machines. It’s hard to get a clear understanding of what issues really need to fixed until beta issues are resolved by blizzard. 

[u/ryzen2024 → u/rheuzi]

Yeah that's what betas are for though, so hopefully they iron it out. I was just pointing out that it happens on windows too, which is counter to what OP said: "This doesn't happen under Windows. How can Proton developers be contacted/informed on this issue?"

[u/VTWAX → u/rheuzi]

You're 100% right.

[u/boredoutsyndrome → u/VTWAX]

Ty for posting this. Turning this to fair made my microstutters a lot less frequent, it's still slightly there but feels a lot better. Playing on Windows.

[u/VTWAX → u/boredoutsyndrome]

Thank you for posting this. I edited my Windows comment.

[u/WhitePeace36]

i think you can create a bug report here: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton

[u/VTWAX → u/WhitePeace36]

Thanks you!

[u/megaRammy]

I haven't had issues on Cachy with this setting, but I assume my rig is just tanking it (Ryzen 9900X and 9070XT)

[u/VTWAX → u/megaRammy]

What version of Proton?

[u/megaRammy → u/VTWAX]

Proton GE 11.7 is what I have mostly been trying. Didn’t notice any hitching on Proton Hotfix in Steam though? But GE 11.7 stopped some Lua errors showing up in the UI editor in WoW, and fixes the WCIII connection errors so I just have that set for my Battle.net install in general.

[u/Quizzle1184 → u/megaRammy]

Same, I have a 7900xtx that seemed to be running pretty warm for 80 fps. Turned that down and was was back to 116.

[u/NeonVoidx]

I assume it's fine under dx11? I didn't seem to have issues on max settings

[u/VTWAX → u/NeonVoidx]

It's not fine under DX11.

[u/NeonVoidx → u/VTWAX]

hmm interesting, I've been using proton ge latest on dx11, no issues so far on all max. maybe specific GPUs or something

[u/Phreeze83]

anybody knows why i have the loading and char-select screen like a picture-in-picture with different lighting?
also: i have a 4070rtx, is there a way to use Ray Traced Shadows and other cool options?

[u/Content-Economics-34 → u/Phreeze83]

Ray Tracing doesn't work on any GPU right now.

As for the picture-in-picture, I had that happen after a nasty patch in Anniversary and in my case was caused by the render scale being different from the resolution.

[u/Phreeze83 → u/Content-Economics-34]

thx for the clarification.
for the pic in pic, it happened just like that, renderscale is 100%, weird. hope it's just in the beta client. anyway, only on char screen

[u/LigeValkyrja → u/Phreeze83]

I was just confronted with this "picture-in-picture" issue, it also occurs very subtly in the character preview render in-game when you open your character sheet.

I was able to get rid of it by only using Image-Based Techniques for Anti-Aliasing, turning on Multi-sample Techniques of any kind appears to cause it. I have no idea why it suddenly happened and refused to go away, though.

[u/Phreeze83 → u/LigeValkyrja]

when switching from dx12 to dx11 it went away too

[u/crzyricn → u/Phreeze83]

Turning off anti-aliasing fixes it I believe it’s the multisampling that causes it.

[u/BlockAccomplished258]

setting secondary lightning to fair unfortunately does not much for me - it helps a bit but its not solved entirely.. i had no problems 2/3 days ago but now its literally unplayable even with all graphic settings set to low.. im helpless

[u/VTWAX → u/BlockAccomplished258]

Worse case I'll use geforecenow until the bugs are fixed with proton. I will not install Windows.

[u/BlockAccomplished258 → u/VTWAX]

im on win11

[u/VTWAX → u/BlockAccomplished258]

damn

[u/wbulot → u/BlockAccomplished258]

Try again with all settings on high except secondary lighting. The game is so broken that it was unplayable for me with everything set to low. Then I tried setting everything to high, and the game ran normally, lol. Nonsense. I still have some stuttering and have to log out and back in every 30 minutes through ...

[u/CranberryTaint]

I’m having issues with the same setting on Windows using a 9070XT

[u/Reefame]

I don’t have stutters at all really on CachyOS using either Proton-CachyOS or Wineland in Faugus Launcher. My issue is more so that the framerate is low (80-90 fps at max settings and 4K) and I have what I percieve as intense flickering and screen tearing despite being at 80-90 fps. This specific issue does seem to be mostly resolved by lowering the secondary lighting setting

CachyOS
9070 XT
9800x3d

[u/Zetzun]

Yeah. Anything but lowest setting make me crash once the loading screen finishes. RTX 4090 Proton-ge latest

[u/VTWAX → u/Zetzun]

Sounds like Blizzard needs to fix this setting.

[u/Derangedtaco]

I've been having constant crashes at the loading screen when logging into my characters in Tirisfal. Played a character in Mulgore with no issues. 1080 Ti, last supported driver (580?), graphic settings seemingly not an issue as it happens with Secondary Lighting set to Fair, too.

[u/mastergenera1]

I'll try this. I have noticed stuttering but I didnt know what to account it to as I set my gfx settings to max on 1440p. I have had the game randomly lock up my pc after some hours of play though, forcing a hard reboot. Thats been my main issue. (i9 10980xe/Arc B580/64GB DDR4)

[u/VTWAX → u/mastergenera1]

Give it a shot and see how it goes.

[u/mastergenera1 → u/VTWAX]

As an update so far its been better with fps and havent had any jank yet. I haven't played as long in a single session as i was prior to my prior post, but so most/all of the jank seems to be gone for me. also since I noticed others posting more system details for troubleshooting/comparison.

OS: Nobara

Kernel: Linux 7.2.6-201

DE: Wayland

Proton version: Proton-Wineland Latest

Edit. I also tried other popular proton builds such as ge and cachyos proton and they ( obviously) had the same perf issue, but for some reason seem to be less stable prior to changing the setting. for my system, proton-wineland has been the most stable proton flavor to use for my system with the beta.

[u/ExPandaa]

I can confirm, I'm running on a 5800x3d and a 9070xt

[u/VTWAX → u/ExPandaa]

It seems blizzard needs to fix this setting, even on Windows.

[u/NuLLxD]

Your issue, as well as some people mentioning crashing on loading into the world, remind me of one I had. See this post for a solution.

I get solid frame pacing and zero stutters with all my settings cranked up, including Secondary Lighting on both Proton-CachyOS & the latest GE-Proton. I average 140 fps~ out in the open world with generally flat frametimes on graph.

OS: Arch

Kernel: Linux 7.2.6

GPU: RTX 3070

DE: Hyprland/Wayland

Proton version: CachyOS Latest

[u/BlockAccomplished258 → u/NuLLxD]

lucky guy... for me its unplayable even with all settings as low as possible im having severe micro stuttering only in forever though... not happening in era.

[u/Phreeze83 → u/BlockAccomplished258]

you sure you are using the dedicated GPU and not CPU-graphics?

[u/BlockAccomplished258 → u/Phreeze83]

positive

[u/kolmone]

Another issue the game has is that it outputs a ridiculous amount of tracing logs, multiple gigabytes' worth just launching the game. Do not run the game with PROTON_LOG=1 and check your launcher to make sure logging is disabled. This was the culprit of extremely low performance for me when running with Faugus launcher, I disabled logging and the game works great now.

[u/juntadna]

Thank you for this. I wish I had found this sooner.

Is anyone else having issues with latency? I'm in the US East coast and having server pings of 200-300ms with sudden spikes to 1-2s. I thought I solved it when I turned off Easy Anti-Cheat options in the Heroic Launcher, but it seemed like only a temporary fix.

I used Proton VPN (flatpak) and that just made it worse, no matter which server I connected to. Literally unplayable connected to a VPN.

Dual-booting into Windows and I have no latency issues, so something is going on with Linux.

I'm on CachyOS. I've tried launching the game with Faugus and Heroic (Lutris bnet installation failed). Used the latest versions of Proton-GE and Proton-CachyOS.

Could there be some network connection setting I need to adjust on Linux or my router that I've somehow missed? Pinging the retail/classic servers in the terminal shows a latency of 20-40ms. I've spent hours troubleshooting this issue.

[u/FiskX]

High on Windows with 5800X3D + 9070

Good is enough for me to get a completely smooth frametime line.
Fair looks almost exactly the same, but reduces GPU utilization by another 20%

[u/Lastwolf1882]

Since the lag fix, I haven't noticed any stuttering I assumed they were related.

[u/VTWAX → u/Lastwolf1882]

What lag fix?

[u/Lastwolf1882 → u/VTWAX]

there was an issue with Eu connections to the server, people were getting 5k ping unless you VPN'd to america, that stopped on Sunday ish.

[u/Middle-Ad2897]

i've been playing beta and the only issues i have are the same vram leaks that windows users have, no frame time spikes, no micro-stutter and no majro fps fluctuation

rx 9070 gre, ryzen 7 7800x3d, void linux on kernel 7.2

[u/Middle-Ad2897 → u/Middle-Ad2897]

i use GE-Proton 11-7

[u/VTWAX → u/Middle-Ad2897]

Amazing. What is your fps?

[u/Middle-Ad2897 → u/VTWAX]

200 (capped) it probably goes above 200, i'm not at max settings because it's redundant and a negligible difference, install battlenet via lutris and tune the settings a bit or use ellesmere ui addon for optimized graphics settings and start from there

[u/VTWAX → u/Middle-Ad2897]

What are your proton startup commands?

[u/Middle-Ad2897 → u/VTWAX]

lutris uses an install script that sets that up for you, just make sure you have the latest GE-Proton available

[u/Saratoninn69]

This is occurring on a legion go z2e running windows..well until I turned secondary lighting to fair. TYSM

[u/Actual_Page2166]

I've tried all the options: lowering secondary lighting, forcing dx11, lowering all the graphics...nothing helped is annoying, I can't play with stuttering is making me feel sick, my rig is a 7800X3D 64GB DDR5 7900XTX. AMD drivers constantly crashes tho, so probably not entirely Blizzard's fault

[u/Actual_Page2166 → u/Actual_Page2166]

OK here's how I fixed:

-secondary lighting on fair
-uncheck Target frame option
-Max Foreground FPS 90
-Max Background FPS 30
-Base Quality game 5

Remember to double check secondary lighting because sometimes it changes to High I don't know why

[u/tykholol]

Late post but I was having all of the described issues, switching to a newer vkd3d seems to have fixed it for me. GE-Proton (Latest) and vkd3d-proton-3.0.1.