Guild Wars 2

So, I recently upgraded my GPU to a 4GB GTX 980, and upped the graphics settings in GW2.

Since then, I’ve started having issues with GW2 OOMing in very large group content (world bosses like Tequatl) – as far as I can tell, this is not an issue with actual RAM in my system (16 GB at the moment), nor video RAM usage on the GPU itself, but just an issue with GW2 on higher settings hitting somewhere around 3.2-3.3 GB heap and dying, badly, on allocation failure.

I’ve tried a repair just to be sure nothing is awry in my installation itself, but to no avail.

I’m running on Windows 7 64-bit, so this isn’t “just” an issue with only ~2GB of per-process address space.

Any plans on the horizon for either a native 64-bit build or possibly leveraging AWE to get more than a few GB of memory from a 32-bit build?

(Or just a method of more robustly handling this than crashing out to desktop, I suppose…)

Are you using DSR (Dynamic Super resolution) on the GPU, perhaps in combination with the game’s render sampling set to supersampling? I don’t have a GPU that supports the feature, so I’m not sure how it interacts with the game’s own over-rendering/downsampling setup.

mrstealth.6701:

Are you using DSR (Dynamic Super resolution) on the GPU, perhaps in combination with the game’s render sampling set to supersampling? I don’t have a GPU that supports the feature, so I’m not sure how it interacts with the game’s own over-rendering/downsampling setup.

I have it set at “native” for texturing, and no DSR configured in the NVIDIA driver, so I don’t think that’s biting me.

You could try a different driver version. Either an older one, or a beta driver if one is available.

And have you tried lowering graphics settings to see if the issue persists with your new GPU? Since this is happening at larger events, character model limit/quality would probably have the biggest impact.

mrstealth.6701:

You could try a different driver version. Either an older one, or a beta driver if one is available.

And have you tried lowering graphics settings to see if the issue persists with your new GPU? Since this is happening at larger events, character model limit/quality would probably have the biggest impact.

I did lower both of those, yes, on the same logic, and it hasn’t crashed since.

But I’d prefer to not have to lower it when I seem to have sufficient resources that aren’t being utilized.

I understand that, and would want the same. I wasn’t suggesting it as a proper solution, just a test and potential work-around.

Unfortunately, you’re likely right about being out of luck unless Anet actually makes a 64bit version of the game(or implements limits on the 32bit client). If you’re seeing 3.3GB RAM usage, not including GPU memory, you’re probably just hitting the 4GB memory addressing limit on 32bit applications. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that yourself.

Are you running the game at an extremely high resolution, or across multiple displays? I’d expect to be hearing more reports of this if it was happening at 1920×1080 with those settings turned up.

mrstealth.6701:

I understand that, and would want the same. I wasn’t suggesting it as a proper solution, just a test and potential work-around.

Unfortunately, you’re likely right about being out of luck unless Anet actually makes a 64bit version of the game(or implements limits on the 32bit client). If you’re seeing 3.3GB RAM usage, not including GPU memory, you’re probably just hitting the 4GB memory addressing limit on 32bit applications. I don’t think there’s anything you can do about that yourself.

Are you running the game at an extremely high resolution, or across multiple displays? I’d expect to be hearing more reports of this if it was happening at 1920×1080 with those settings turned up.

I’m only at 1920×1080, no 1440p or multi-monitor setup here.

Yeah, I’d guess it’s just trying to allocate a chunk and failing to allocate a contiguous chunk in its address space that size, and bailing, but don’t know. Womp womp.

I did a Tequatl run with settings nearly maxed (reflections on terrain/sky). I ended up dropping the character limit settings down just before the first defense phase, but they were at the highest levels during the 100-75% HP zerg DPS race. Those two settings definitely seemed to impact RAM usage, but it was less than a 200MB difference between highest/highest and low/medium.

Physical memory usage never went over 1.8GB, despite having at least another 2-2.5GB of RAM availabe. Virtual size (as reported by Process Explorer) got to around 3.1GB, which I think includes GPU memory usage. I’m not sure what the actual GPU memory usage was, and I don’t have a way to figure it out after the fact because virtual size also includes unused page file allocation.

This was a fairly fresh start of GW2, and I know its RAM usage can get up around 2.1-2.2GB in some areas. Adding that extra use onto what I saw could put the total memory allocation up to around 3.5GB. If GPU memory use can also see a similar increase, then I can see the game maybe hitting the 4GB ceiling. But that’s a big jump from what I saw tonight.

It’s probably worth checking to see if your RAM and GPU memory total is hitting the 4GB limit for the game. Process Explorer doesn’t show GPU by default, but the column can be enabled to show it along with RAM use. If it’s really hitting that limit so easily, make sure there isn’t some GPU feature enabled that might be eating up more memory on the card.

So, I turned the texture levels down, and did Teq again, and got through it without the game dying.

Shortly thereafter, though, it crashed, so I screencapped procexp and copied the crash text.

CPU/Private Bytes/WS/PID/Desc/Company/GPU/GPU System Bytes/GPU Dedicated/GPU Committed
http://i.imgur.com/rxGMpRj.png
http://pastebin.com/J0r9eqP5

It looks like it was indeed failing to allocate memory for graphics effects and bailing out…

e: For my next trick, I’ll see if an ETW trace has anything more to say.