Guild Wars 2

Game keeps crashing after a few minutes, it shows nothing but black.
I tried lowering the graphics and it didn’t do anything, any ideas ?

it is a sign of a dying graphic card… trust me.. been there…

it happened to me once when I entered a raid wing. It also happened to another person in a raid wing. Do your screen go black shortly after entering a raid wing ?

No it happens even when I am afk in heart of the mists too..

This happened to me a couple of years back. It’d also crash my computer and I’d have to restart.

I fixed it by redownloading my graphics card drivers. It seemed like a previous patch hadn’t installed properly or something. Anyway, that helped at least.

I hope you find your solution soon, OP. Crashes are terrible, especially if it causes you to worry about the state of your PC.

There are two different black screens you may encounter. If the entire screen goes black, your GPU is possibly failing or there’s a problem with the drivers. If only GW2 goes black, where the game is actually still running and you can press F12 to bring up the logout menu for example, it’s a problem that can be caused by packet loss.

I updated my drivers, not sure if it fixed the problem but it’s not crashing for now

It still crashes for some reason, this is really frustrating

Do you get a Crash Report window? If so, click ‘Show Details’ and post the first part here.

If not, you might consider contacting the Tech CS Team via the ‘Support’ link above/below and ‘Submit a Ticket’ for assistance.

Good luck.

Hey i’ve been having a similar problem with screen blackouts. I can still pop up the options menu even though it doesn’t respond and can hear faint ambient game background noise but nothing else. I’m 100% sure the gw2 is going black and not my comp simply because i can Alt+Tab to desktop and use my comp as normal.
If it’s a case of packet loss how do u fix it? Sometimes gw2 crashes and gives an error log, it’s as follows:

• Crash <—*
  Assertion: !m_handle || m_handle→IsIdle()
  File: ..\..\..\Services\Asset\Asset.cpp(111)
  App: Gw2-64.exe
  Pid: 3864
  Cmdline:
  BaseAddr: 000000013F750000
  ProgramId: 101
  Build: 73275
  When: 2017-03-05T09:14:45Z 2017-03-05T11:14:45+02:00
  Uptime: 0 days 0:00:23
  Flags: 0

Hope this helps.

An assertion failure like that is some sort of … not exactly bug, but “this is impossible” problem inside the game client.

Assuming you can reproduce it with DPS meters, reshade style graphics things, etc, removed, then submit the full crash report to anet.

You might also try the standards, repair on the client, ensure drivers are up to date, etc. (Because a corrupted asset of some sort could lead to an “impossible” situation happening.)

Actually, I have some hope for you. Set your subsample to native. I had those crashes but this fixed it.

Don’t know if this helps but I occurred crash on exit 9 months ago and just last week, as in proper exit game from options menu, where the game would black screen on desktop, lockup the pc for at least a minute then recover. I would get gw2.exe crash in in Event Viewer. Happened with 2 diff cards, a 560TI and and 950. I don’t update Nvidia drivers contantly if everything is running stable, I leave it alone.

Both times, my HDD was fragmented over 11%. Both times I de-fragged and it went away. I can guess with all the patching, perhaps textures or data wasn’t loading fast enough. Maybe try that and see. Also as one other suggested, running the -repair on a copied shortcut may fix it as well.

Here’s what i did. I updated the drivers, fixed the game client, changed from native to subsample and even uninstalled and reinstalled the game. The screen blackouts STILL happen. At this point i have no clue as to what the problem is. All i know is that the issue came soon after the latest living world update and continues still.
The rest of my comp and all it’s uses work just fine, even when playing other games.
I do not use any 3rd party software such as dps meters, reshade, etc.

If you guys have any idea what i can do besides buying a new comp, i’m all ears.

What did the Tech CS Team have to say? Did they help you troubleshoot the issue?

shalev.1694:

Here’s what i did. I updated the drivers, fixed the game client, changed from native to subsample and even uninstalled and reinstalled the game. The screen blackouts STILL happen. At this point i have no clue as to what the problem is. All i know is that the issue came soon after the latest living world update and continues still.
The rest of my comp and all it’s uses work just fine, even when playing other games.
I do not use any 3rd party software such as dps meters, reshade, etc.

If you guys have any idea what i can do besides buying a new comp, i’m all ears.

That’s exactly what I did and it still happens… I play for 5 minutes and I try to log out to characters screen and it shows a black screen. I choose my character and then minimize the game until it loads and after a few minutes I open up the game only to see a black screen.
I don’t know what to do anymore at this point

Check for background apps. Someone else recently reported that “PlaysTV” was a video card related app they didn’t know the purpose of, and caused this. Seems like “video card related things that might adjust driver settings, and/or inject themselves into the rendering pipeline” are a common cause of this.

Afterburner, RivaStatisticsServer, NVIDIA Shadowplay, all also applications known to cause various issues.

Some people report that running the app as administrator (which presumably prevents injecting the code from those things) helps them, maybe try it?

I’m not using any apps I didn’t use before the black screen issue.

Sometimes, app creators change their apps. Something might have changed, and is inconsistent with a GW2 file.

Kaizoku.1298:

I’m not using any apps I didn’t use before the black screen issue.

Well, if you tried all the things other players have to suggest, I’d take this to a support ticket via the website — see if CS have anything else to suggest. (also, if you find out what, report it back here.

>.< kitten all this!!

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I’m also having constant black screen ‘crashes’ on a PC which previously ran the game flawlessly.

The client is causing the ‘video drivers stopped working but has recovered’ error, the screen goes black for a few seconds during which I can tab out and use the PC as normal.

No problems with any other game. The GPU temps are low. Tried several different iterations of Catalyst and Crimson drivers, but all have the same problem to a certain degree. No Graphics related programs running in background. As I said, this exact same PC configuration ran the game flawlessly before I took a break a few months back. I came back a couple of weeks ago and it’s been nothing but frustration since. Tried various in-game graphics tweaks, V-sync on/off, windowed, even added a TdrDelay in registry, nothing has worked.

Considering my GPU is showing no complaints at running far more graphically intensive games despite being under much more duress, I can only conclude Anet have done something to the client recently. Same ISP and network gear as before too, and that’s not showing anything which could be packet-loss or such. Enormously frustrating.

Well, I had been having black screen issues for all year long last year and somehow it gone on itself (for now). I had been working with Customer Support to troubleshoot it and the details and the outcome can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Constant-black-screens-and-discon-Repost/ (and in the former thread linked in the OP there).

Healix.5819:

If only GW2 goes black, where the game is actually still running and you can press F12 to bring up the logout menu for example, it’s a problem that can be caused by packet loss.

In my case it seemed to be pretty much this.

P.S.: I would suggest any one having the issue to run a tool called PingPlotter (or similar) and check if there are any packet loss. At times, the packet loss is happening at some node in the middle that’s not either your direct ISP’s neither Anet’s.

Penny Dreadful.9073:

Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I’m also having constant black screen ‘crashes’ on a PC which previously ran the game flawlessly.

The client is causing the ‘video drivers stopped working but has recovered’ error, the screen goes black for a few seconds during which I can tab out and use the PC as normal.

No problems with any other game. The GPU temps are low. Tried several different iterations of Catalyst and Crimson drivers, but all have the same problem to a certain degree. No Graphics related programs running in background. As I said, this exact same PC configuration ran the game flawlessly before I took a break a few months back. I came back a couple of weeks ago and it’s been nothing but frustration since. Tried various in-game graphics tweaks, V-sync on/off, windowed, even added a TdrDelay in registry, nothing has worked.

Considering my GPU is showing no complaints at running far more graphically intensive games despite being under much more duress, I can only conclude Anet have done something to the client recently. Same ISP and network gear as before too, and that’s not showing anything which could be packet-loss or such. Enormously frustrating.

It’s absolutely possible that GW2 does something graphically that happens to trigger some bug or other in the driver or hardware layer, while other games don’t. Since it actually manages to literally crash the GPU here, I’d certainly eyeball drivers — and see if maybe a more AMD GPU focused forum or something might help?

One point of note, though, is that at least one poster reported that a background GPU temperature monitor managed to crash their GPU/drivers while running GW2. I guess something found a race condition between the two things interacting with the GPU hardware, or the driver, or something.

So maybe see if disabling those, or any other GPU optimization stuff helps? (eg: RivaStatisticsServer, AMD Afterburner, both previously reported by various people as doing undesirable things with some-but-not-all users GW2 stuff, etc.)

Hi Slippy.

I only started using speedfan to monitor gpu temp in real time after the crashes started, and they continue whether or not its running in the background. Thanks for the suggestion though.

When the black screen happens I can press F12 and it shows the menu and that’s just it..

Again, what did the Tech CS Team have to say? Have you tried working with them? They, of all people, know more about fixing the game than anyone else.

Good luck.