Guild Wars 2

In the last days, perhaps since 1 week ago, I experienced this problem more than once (while it never appeared in the years before):

• in the middle of playing, suddenly fps becomes noticeably slow (usually I have 50-60, with the bug only about 20 even in dungeons)
• sound has disappeared, suddenly the game is silent. Sometimes the sound isn’t totally silent, it is looping through the same ~1 second long noise.
• the longer I play in this game state, the lower the fps get. I once played until the fps reached 10, which is a better slide show.
• restarting GW2 helps. After restart the sound is back and the fps is back up to normal.
• if GW2 was fullscreen, it isn’t possible to terminate GW2. It hangs at ALT-F4, and it isn’t possible to open Task Manager to kill gw2.exe. The only option is to reboot.
• the music that I’m playing through my media player isn’t affected at all while the bug appears. I am also online with Teamspeak at the same time, which isn’t affected as well.

Running under Windows 10, Nvidia GTX 670. The sound driver (Realtek HD Audio) is the Windows 8.1 version for my motherboard, since there is none available for Windows 10 yet.

Every now and then the sound will stop working correctly. As in only the background music will be playing, everything else stops. And then my FPS will start to drop a lot. Over time it slowly get’s lower and lower. I play at an average of 45fps in EoTM, but when this happens it drops to 15fps instantly, then slowly goes down. After about 5min it’s at 6fps. Then you have to force close the game for it to shut down.
Specs:
I7 3770k @ 4.2GHz
GTX 970
8Gb DDR3 1333MHz
ASROCK Z77 extreme4
Samsung 840Evo 250Gb SSD
Samsung u28d590d (4k monitor)

Does this only happen after youve had guildwars running for a long time. Or does it happen rather quickly?

Because I have noticed that if I start up guildwars and play a bit and go back to character screen and play again later my memory will eventually fill up and the only solution I have for this at the moment is to exit the game entirely and just start it back up again.

Oh wow, so glad I’m not the only one who’s encountered this. What the OP has described is exactly what’s happened to me a few times. So few, that I hadn’t reported it yet, wondering if it’s my hardware that’s causing the problem.

It has always happened after I’ve been playing for a couple of hours. Once the sound fails and fps starts to plummet it doesn’t recover. It happened once during Vinewrath so I had to fight the Trasher with 5 fps. It. Was. Epic. But not something I’d like to repeat…

Any thoughts or advice on how to prevent/fix this?

Cpu or Gpu throttling due to an increase in build up heat ? Have you checked your temp yet while playing for a while ?

I have also encounter the same whereby at times during combat i can only hear the background music, no sound coming out from the character, weapon or even the monsters.

This does happen after playing for a while. Just had it happen again and I’ve been playing for 2 hours right now. Usually takes longer than that.

As for heat, that’s not the issue. I have a massive CPU heatsink (Noctua NH-D14) which Prime95 never got it above 75c and no game is going to push it as hard as Prime95 does. And GW2 is CPU intensive so my 970 isn’t even at 100% usage even while playing at 3840×2160 resolution. So heat is not an issue. I do only have 8Gb of 133MHz DDR3 ram though, and if it’s that there is a memory leak somewhere, that could very well be causing the issue. I haven’t checked for that yet though.

Desenski.3091:

This does happen after playing for a while. Just had it happen again and I’ve been playing for 2 hours right now. Usually takes longer than that.

As for heat, that’s not the issue. I have a massive CPU heatsink (Noctua NH-D14) which Prime95 never got it above 75c and no game is going to push it as hard as Prime95 does. And GW2 is CPU intensive so my 970 isn’t even at 100% usage even while playing at 3840×2160 resolution. So heat is not an issue. I do only have 8Gb of 133MHz DDR3 ram though, and if it’s that there is a memory leak somewhere, that could very well be causing the issue. I haven’t checked for that yet though.

What are your ingame settings, your Audio quality and the other slider towards latency or balance ?

Besides are you absolutely sure its not cpu throttling based on activity at the moment maybe related to bios settings like speedstep ,c1 etc ?

Graphics settings: Everything as high as it goes (FXAA antialiasing, Native Render Sampling (as I don’t think this does anything at 4k resolution)), Best Texture Filtering checked, Depth Blur checked, Effect LOD checked, High-Res Character Textures checked. I play in Windowed Fullscreen with default refresh rate and unlimited frame limiter.
Auido settings: Sound Quality slider all the way to Highest Quality, Music Interval is in middle, Mixing Buffer Size is all the way to Most Stable.
And I don’t have this issue on anything else that I do/play so I can safely say it’s not a cpu throttle, but I will monitor that and check/report it here next time this happens to me.

I’ve had this bug before too, it tends to happen to me when engaging in large group content (i.e. WvW zerging).

Setting the sound quality to “low” and the mixing buffer to “most stable” alleviates the problem for me. However, this has other ramifications, most notably causing NPC voiceovers to misfire during cutscenes. However, I just turn the sound quality up when I’m doing that, and if I’m doing large group content I turn the quality down.

Multiple people have had this happen. Often it’s related to windows updates and/or overwolf updates, oddly enough. I’ve had it once or twice. Sometimes it can take a reboot, or at least a log out from windows to allow it to work properly again.

Wish knew what directly causes it, because about once a week it hits one of my guildees.

Desenski.3091:

Graphics settings: Everything as high as it goes (FXAA antialiasing, Native Render Sampling (as I don’t think this does anything at 4k resolution)), Best Texture Filtering checked, Depth Blur checked, Effect LOD checked, High-Res Character Textures checked. I play in Windowed Fullscreen with default refresh rate and unlimited frame limiter.
Auido settings: Sound Quality slider all the way to Highest Quality, Music Interval is in middle, Mixing Buffer Size is all the way to Most Stable.
And I don’t have this issue on anything else that I do/play so I can safely say it’s not a cpu throttle, but I will monitor that and check/report it here next time this happens to me.

Try switching from windowed fullscreen to fullscreen and set the Player quality and limit both to low.

I had this happening a few days back everytime I entered SW. Weird sound fps till like 5fps and then client would just close. Its not your CPU or VGA etc cos other places in the maps, game works fine. To me it seems like something to do with patch that has been downloaded by the client. Please try do a repair of the client, this fixed my issue.

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/28148006-Repairing-the-Game-Client

Bump. That bug is still around, just experienced it few mins ago (again..)

I have had a problem several times now that my fps suddenly drops to about 7 (even when its all set to lowest), sometimes this is accompanied by the sound just stopping. If this happens an I try to exit gw2 nothing happens, i have to kill the process.

Got the same problem here. Started today in PvP.
Also have realtek HD Audio from my motherboard.
Windows 10 Professional 64-Bit
Nvidia 560-TI

same here …
i hope some one answer and give us an solution soon
(win 10
i7 4771
asus mars760 dual gpu
16 gb 1600
ssd 240gb)
this game just start being unplayable .
also i notice the fps issue is more like on afternoon , since on mornings i dont have real problems whit fps even on full map events like teq
ty

same for me, happened twice now, once in the silverwastes while using an arrow card and the second time while using the tailoring station in LA.
win 10
i5 3350P
AMD Radeon HD 7800 2 Gb VRAM
16 GB RAM
If i close the game via ingame exit to desktop, the game becomes unresponsive, if i then open the taskmanager i can see my desktop, but cannot interact with anything on it with my mouse except for the task bar, as GW2 doesn’t seem to minimize, but just becomes invisible. However i could run cmd.exe with “win+R” and kill the process that way.

Silmar Alech.4305:

Running under Windows 10, Nvidia GTX 670. The sound driver (Realtek HD Audio) is the Windows 8.1 version for my motherboard, since there is none available for Windows 10 yet.

What Version is that i actually use the one that WIN 10 installed me but it seems
there is even a newer one from July 7th.

I get this bug 2-3 times a week, have to hard restart my computer every time. Reinstalled the game, repaired the game, cleared the cache, nothing helps.

Had this a couple of days ago in a fractal. The only thing I could hear was the mesmer portal noise. Frames dropped from 60 to about 15. I let it go for about 5 minutes and it never corrected itself. Client froze when I tried to close it to desktop, and had to open the task manager to kill it.

Yep, I get this a few times a week. Really frustrating mid-PvP match as I rely on sounds for queues and having 15 fps hurts. I’d like to see some acknowledgement of the bug.

I have the same problem lately, or actually after i got the expansion, and mostly it happends during the beta (with beta character).

Edit: im with graph card amd r9 270.

I had the same issue about 3 times after upgrading to Windows 10 about a month ago. Even choosing the lowest graphics settings did not improve the performance, just a restart helped. It feels like there is a memory leak on the graphics card or something. I have an NVIDIA GeForce 650 Ti Boost.

same issue

Sound freeze and drop 10fps

I’ve had this happen one time about 2 months ago and never again. But it was the same issue. For me though the sounds stopped first, and then the fps dropped. Had to endtask the game and restart and that fixed it. No clue what could be causing it multiple times for some folks though.

My husband and I have both had this happen at different times over the past month or two. First the sounds goes, then the FPS tanks and the Ping skyrockets. Try to close the game then it freezes completely. We’ve only had it happen in the silverwastes.

I hope they can fix this soon. It’s really frustrating. I guess next time it happens I’ll do an in-game bug report before force-quitting the game. Hopefully that’ll give them some more clues as to what’s going on.

Same issue, been getting it for months and months, it doesn’t happen very often thankfully.

I’ve only had this happen on Beta characters in Beta maps, but I’ve had it twice now for this BWE, once yesterday on a Rev character fighting the Champion Terragriff by the Ordnance camp, and once just now on a brand new DragonHunter which hadn’t even gotten out of the Silverwastes yet. Both times my combat sounds disappeared suddenly, leaving only quiet, non-combat music playing and a really quiet sound like faint water which I never notice normally, if it plays at all normally, followed shortly by an FPS plummet from 50-63 (I have it capped) down to 7-10. If I continue to play the game it keeps functioning but never recovers. If I log out and choose Switch Characters the FPS will jump up to 63 (highest available with capping) and my character portraits appear at the bottom, but the screen behind them remains completely black. If I choose Log Out from the character select screen, my whole computer freezes up and both times I’ve had to fully restart, as Task Manager has not responded.

I’m running Windows 8.1 with all updates and 4095MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 745 with the most up-to-date drives available with the GeForce Experience software prompter.

Same, this happened a few times but these past two days happened about 5 times.

Ambient sound still keeps playing, but everything else mutes (sound and music). Also seems like there’s a memory leak because once I’ve tried to play through it, even with the FPS drop (10~20, and I usually play at 120) and when it became unbearable and I quit, it said my “System” process was using 75% of the RAM (8gb) with only Windows and a Browser open…

Also, if it helps, I think all the times it happened it was on Silverwastes (normal and beta), but I spend most of the time on these maps so…

Happens to me not only when playing beta, mists , regular pvp maps , map change doesnt helping and i have to close game and then game cant close properly , have kill process ._.
happened on windows 8.1 and 10 as well, pc/laptop . Fix this pls

I’ve had these issues lately as well, can’t exactly say when it started but the sound bugs I’ve noticed during the BWE2 – cutscenes only played music but no voice over, or another time I’ve had the music come out of the speakers while I had my headphones selected in the sound options (ambient music and some voice overs came out of the headphone). Today in the middle of an event all sound suddenly stopped except ambient and some effects. FPS drops weren’t too frequent or anything I’d call out of the ordinary, but I did notice GW2 having to be forced to close which until recently never happened.

Running on Win 8.1, Nvidia GTX 760 (updated to latest drivers), 8GB Ram

This sound issue is called (or related) to the Sound Bug. I have been having this myself since the latest match more and more. I dont find a possible way to fix it yet, though I reset my Audio Drivers today (Maybe fix).

Rig:
CPU: i7 – 4790K
GPU: Windforce GTX 970
Mobo: Asus Z87-A
RAM: 16GB 1600Mhz Kingston

This is still around, it’s happened to me 3 times today.

I’m having this crash too

I keep having this problems in areas with firepit or torch ambient sounds, such as Fireheart Rise and the Ascalonian catacombs. The game will keep spawning and playing more and more instances of torch fire sounds until it crashes. I then have to kill it from the task manager.

This has only been happening to me since the last patch.

Have you tried turning it off an on?

Confirmed here aswell, just had it today. Got from 80-90 fps to 10-15 fps and no sound except music.
4790k, gtx 980, 16gb RAM, win 10 x64 pro.

First time it happens, seems new bug from last update?

+1 , same issue. fps dropped to 10 and sound disappeared completely except i could still hear combat music. going to options and twiddling the sound volume on various slide bars didn’t have any effect

Do you have automatic updates? Happened to me with Windows 10 (7 looks much better but sadly lacks DirectX12) and found Windows was updating.

I have been having some increase of Sound Bug / Memory Leak, its either of the two. Sound Dissappears, FPS starts to lower to 20 and feels like gigantic laggfest. Only game close helps.
Any fix?
I did Rollback GPU drivers, Audio Drivers and completely reinstalled GW2

Restarting client seemed to fix this for me also. No clue why it occurred to begin with/ maybe I was alt-tabbing out too often??

Hiya,

So I was doing AC P3 today and the audio crashed with the exception of the music. I have my audio at default settings. Then the game went down to 10fps in the dungeon. When I exited the client the game crashed and I had to relog in to windows(*10) to get back my gui.
This happend a few days ago as well doing normal pve running around.
This seems like it is a new issue as I haven’t had audio issues in a long time.
My party member for AC said this happened to her yesterday as well.

Yup same here..

Also using win10.

lol. 6 month old post merged into this.

It’s not a memory leak but it is some kind of bug between gw2 and sound drivers that is very rare for many, and far too common for some. Overwolf can exacerbate the issue.

At one point it tended to require restarting the computer when it happened, but for those that see this issue, it ‘seems’ that you only need to close the client and restart it.

Alt-tabbing from full screen also exacerbates the issue, playing in windowed ‘seems’ to minimize the chances of it doing it.

I’ve had this issue in other MMOs too.

It might be the same issue here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Return-of-the-old-Sound-Bug/

But now it’s moving over to PvE. Anywhere where big scale battles are happening. Can we get some traction on this? So we can get a fix?

I never even noticed the lag because I just quit the game as soon as it happens.

Yep, my sound just dissapeared while chestfarming and fps dropped to 10

Interesting to see my opening post suddenly aged by 6 months

I may have news on the issue. It may be connected to outdated sound drivers or improperly matched sound drivers for your mainboard or sound chip. I don’t know if there is some kind of bug in GW2, or with the sound drivers, but having the proper sound driver for your mainboard and for your operating system seems to prevent the problem happen.

The “sound bug” started to happen for me after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It never occurred on Windows 7. Under Windows 7, I used the Windows 7-certified sound driver for my Asrock mainboard that was available for download on the Asrock webpage. In the past 3 years, Asrock provided some updates for the driver, and I always updated them as well. All was perfectly fine.

After the update to Windows 10, the Windows 7 sound drivers were still present and seemed to work ok. But I found that Asrock provided newer sound drivers for Windows 8.1 for my mainboard, but no Windows 10 ones (yet). So I thought that the Windows 8.1 drivers were more similar to Windows 10 that the Windows 7 drivers, so I updated to the Windows 8.1 drivers.

Now the “sound bug” occurred in GW2 for me. And I saw a small change logging on in Windows: A small delay of about 5 seconds before the desktop appears that was not present with the older drivers.

On the Audacity website (Audacity is a audio recording and cutting application), I found some information about the sound system of Windows 10, and they said there were subtle changed in Windows 10. Additionally the advice to seek for Windows 10-certified sound drivers – all older sound drivers may exhibit strange behavior now and then.

A few days ago, Windows 10 drivers appeared on the Asrock download page for my mainboard. I updated immediately to these drivers. The 5 second delay at logon was gone, and the “sound bug” in GW2 didn’t appear yet. It’s too soon to give a definite answer, but I have a good feeling about that it will not return.

If the manufacturer of your mainboard does not provide Windows 10 drivers that were tested with your mainboard, try a generic one from the sound chip manufacturer. But first seek on the download page of your mainboard or your laptop support.

If you have the Realtek HD audio system, look here on the official download page of Realtek:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsview.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

There is an alternative set of drivers, version 6.0.1, available from Realtek as well, and WHQL’d (certified by Microsoft) as well, but not advertised anywhere – to be found here:

ftp://spcust:hwwk758z@ftp3.realtek.com.tw/Realtek/GeneralRelease/

The funny thing is that nearly nobody here posted what soundcard / driver
they use, even since this is clearly a problem related to sound.