World of Warcraft: Forever

Title: Xid 13 GPU hang / hard system lockup on WoW Forever (Classic Beta build 69913) — GTX 1070, both DX12 and DX11

GE-Proton version: GE-Proton10-34 and GE-Proton11-7 (both tested, same result)

Game: World of Warcraft: Forever (Classic Beta), build 69913, launched via Battle.net

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Pascal), driver 580.178.04, PCI ID 0x1B81

System: CachyOS (Arch-based), kernel with CONFIG_NTSYNC enabled

Launch options tested:

• PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=0 %command% (DX12)
• Same but DX11
• PROTON_USE_NTSYNC=1 (default, no NVAPI)
  All three produce the same failure.

Behavior: Crash is immediate and consistent — login, choose character, and the game locks up on the 100% loading screen/bar itself before ever visually entering the world. This is not a crash after play — it happens on the loading screen, every time. Most attempts result in a full system lockup requiring a hard reset; one attempt was instead caught by the game's own internal watchdog as a "graceful" crash to desktop (see below) rather than hanging the OS.

Kernel log (every crash):
NVRM: Xid (PCI:0000:01:00): 13, pid=, name=WowB.exe, Graphics Exception: channel 0x..., Class 0000c1c0, Offset ..., Data ...
Preceded by:
nvidia-modeset: ERROR: GPU:0: Idling display engine timed out: 0x0000927c:...

Game's own crash log (from the one graceful catch):
ERROR #109 (0x8510006d) A thread has become unresponsive.
Freeze Detected: thread frozen for 20 seconds
Stack: winevulkan.dll -> d3d12core.dll (x2 frames) -> dxgi.dll (x3 frames) -> WowB.exe
Also notable: GxRestarts: 2, GxFailedFrameStartRestarts: 1, GxDeviceLostCount: 1 — the D3D12 device was already lost and recovered once earlier in this same short session before permanently hanging. Note the log's internal TimeInWorld counter shows a small nonzero value despite the loading screen never having visually cleared — this appears to be an engine-side counter quirk, not an indication of actual world entry.

Reproduces on both DX12 (vkd3d-proton) and DX11 (dxvk), suggesting the fault may sit in winevulkan.dll's interaction with the Pascal driver rather than being specific to either D3D translation layer. No other games (No Man's Sky, Diablo II: Resurrected) exhibit this issue on the same system.

Not yet fully isolated: whether PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 is a contributing factor, since it was present in the one graceful-crash case; the hardest lockup occurred on DX11 without it, so it doesn't appear to be the sole cause.

Start by reproducing the loading-screen lockup with the listed DX12 and DX11 launch configurations, then inspect the reported winevulkan.dll, d3d12core.dll, dxgi.dll, and WowB.exe stack context alongside the NVRM Xid 13 kernel log. Done means isolating whether the failure is in the Vulkan/NVIDIA interaction or a translation layer and documenting a confirmed fix or minimal reproducer.