Guild Wars 2

Last week I’ve run some updates on my PC, now the 64bit client won’t work. It logs on, but when I press Play…nothing happens. When I open my Task Manager, I can see the game process but I still can’t open it.

I tried to play the game on the 32bit client again, but it has a really weird texture problem where textures randomly go chess-like blue and green, and the water is always that way. Not to mention that every time it changes maps, it freezes once the loading has finished and I have to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to break the freeze since Alt+Tab doesn’t work when it’s frozen.

Let me guess .. you have an NVidia GPU ?

Beldin.5498:

Let me guess .. you have an NVidia GPU ?

Yes…
why?

Because nearly all problems with Win 10 i have read from, were related to NVidia drivers.

Could it be that the win update has maybe installed you another driver version ?
If so install either the newest drivers or maybe older or whatever version is known
as “stable” at the moment.

Yet another reason to stay away from win10…No wonder M$ was so eager to give it away for free.

Anyway, the only thing you can do is download/install the last known stable drivers and hope for the best.

For me its more another reason to stay away from NVidia .. have never had any
problems with my R9 290x under Win 10. And 99% of the win 10 problems i saw
in the forums were related to NVidia.

its a Nvidia issue, not a MS or windows issue. Nvidia’s drivers are junk right now and with Windows pushing down a reference Nvidia driver that is severely broken, you kinda wonder why Nvidia doesn’t do something about it.

what YOU can do is disable the driver auto updates on win10, and then roll back the driver to one that is known to work.

? Latest driver with Windows 10 Pro + GW2 64bit… no issue at all.

This is a problem with GW2 specifically and mobile Nvidia gpus since the November Windows 10 update; it actually started after a Gw2 patch though. Solution to get your game running for now is either to a) play without vsync or b) play in Windows 7 compatibility mode (even if you have never had Windows 7).

NO Nvidia driver will work, as repairing the game, reinstalling windows and any other fixes will work. This is something that I feel needs to be sorted out by all 3 parties, but despite numerous threads and bumps from myself Anet has stayed very quiet as usual and done nothing. I’m not blaming Anet entirely but this happens in ONE GAME. Which is Guild wars 2. They need to do something about it and for me they are doing their best to hide it. Telling their support staff to say “The game doesnt run well with Windows 10” (which it does….just not on this hardware config) and denying there is this problem is not a good look.

To be clear, there is no rolling back solution to a driver that works for this problem. It will continue regardless and has to be fixed at developer level. There is no problem for AMD laptop users; Nvidia/AMD desktop users.

As NilStatis said, rolling back didn’t work, so GG ;-;

NilSatis.6720:

This is a problem with GW2 specifically and mobile Nvidia gpus since the November Windows 10 update; it actually started after a Gw2 patch though. Solution to get your game running for now is either to a) play without vsync or b) play in Windows 7 compatibility mode (even if you have never had Windows 7).

NO Nvidia driver will work, as repairing the game, reinstalling windows and any other fixes will work. This is something that I feel needs to be sorted out by all 3 parties, but despite numerous threads and bumps from myself Anet has stayed very quiet as usual and done nothing. I’m not blaming Anet entirely but this happens in ONE GAME. Which is Guild wars 2. They need to do something about it and for me they are doing their best to hide it. Telling their support staff to say “The game doesnt run well with Windows 10” (which it does….just not on this hardware config) and denying there is this problem is not a good look.

To be clear, there is no rolling back solution to a driver that works for this problem. It will continue regardless and has to be fixed at developer level. There is no problem for AMD laptop users; Nvidia/AMD desktop users.

report it to nvidia, they are letting the code for this game to rot probably

Reporting it to Nvidia is great, but why should customers do this when it is happening in this game only? It is up to Anet to correspond with Nvidia and Microsoft over why the changes have affected Guild Wars 2 directly in this way and no other game.

Recently Fallout 4 has displayed bugs in AMD drivers to do with the compass. Instead of hiding this issue, Bethesda worked with AMD to sort this out over a couple of drivers for all cards. Why cant Anet do the same? This is a massive problem for them as a lot of people play this game on laptops; a game that otherwise works very well on a decent gaming laptop; and as Nvidia is the way to go regarding a gpu on gaming laptops, they will have a LOT of people with this problem.

In any case, I’m sure (I hope) people have reported this to Nvidia, as I have; and they are aware of the issue but as it is directly related to one game I hope Anet is also on the case. Also this is not fixed by any older Nvidia drivers…..so it is hardly fixable in that way.

I had same issue but got resolved after updating to the latest nvidia drivers on my gfx.

“but it has a really weird texture problem where textures randomly go chess-like blue and green”

I got that myself in one single encounter. Molten Boss Fractal, both bosses combined to the flying one, while it’s doing the spinning attack.
(in my case x64 client btw)
This seems more like corrupt files than anything else.
(Like the bad UV maps in foothills after HoT release)

" nVidia’s drivers are junk right now and with Windows pushing down a reference nVidia driver that is severely broken, you kinda wonder why nVidia doesn’t do something about it.

There was one broken nVidia driver through windows update and that was pretty close to Windows 10 release. It was also fixed after ~2 days with a new nVidia driver (through Windows Update).
I was running old Nvidia drivers from Windows 8 for Win10 with no issues either back then. If you can’t/don’t want to handle minor issues yourself – wait.
(I do hate the auto update policies aswell.)

Always using the newest drivers on a couple systems btw – no issues. And yes 3 of them have nVidia GPU’s.

The x64 problems with nVidia GPU laptops.

It was about the new .exe not being recognized as GW2 so the nVidia driver “thought”: Just another program. Let’s use the iGPU, this won’t need a lot of processing power.

You were able to easily fix it by adding the .exe manually to a profile.
It was also fixed a while back – even stated in the changelog of the drivers.

All I want to say:

It’s not that simple. And it’s obviously not a common, wide spread error. If everyone with Win10+nVidia GPU would have this problem hell would break loose. But that’s not the case.

And (apprently?) NilSatis has a solution for this problem.

Turning off Vsync or using compatibilty mode is not the end of the world. It’s also not only a thing in GW2. The list of games you have to play around with settings is endless (& not nVidia exclusive!)

Generalized rant against nVidia(or the evil, never working Windows 10) won’t help.

A-Net Support might be of more help (the real one – not robot replies).

Sassy.1697:

"
A-Net Support might be of more help (the real one – not robot replies).

Those only exist in fairy tales and gemstore posts…

I have windows 10, and Nvidia, and up to date, and play Guild Wars 2 64x to casually play PvE. Why do I not get these problems? :Ua

Because you dont use Windows 10 OS (with November update) on a Laptop with an Nvidia Gpu Loli? If you did, you would be getting this problem; if anyone is using a Windows 10 based laptop with a 8 or 9 series nvidia gpu (800m or 900m) and are not getting these problems please let us know.

It is something to do with the Optimus driver system and the latest update. If you look on the laptop when the map stops loading you will see the dedicated gpu light come on and then go off again. When you alt tab and click the non responding game in the task bar, this will fire up the dedicated card again and it will work. Alongside this texture corruption.

Unless you use the steps I specified i.e. compatibility mode (only windows 7 works) and alternatively turning off vsync. Nvidia desktops and AMD desktops do not have this problem. It is mobile Nvidia gpus that do. Why that is…Im afraid, is beyond me. By now though this problem should have been fixed. It wasnt my laptop that I was working on to solve this problem so I haven’t tested this current Nvidia driver, but Im pretty sure it will have the same problem since even going back to drivers before Windows 10 has no effect; also several slightly older drivers before now either. Even reinstalling windows 10 and gw2; and completely clean installing drivers (including intel too) has no effect.

To op, if you are indeed using a laptop gpu then I would revise the title of your topic if you can to “Nvidia Mobile gpu drivers dont work with GW2 on Windows 10”.

Nvidia drivers work fine on desktops which is what most people will be gaming on and therefore will reply about “theirs working fine” which is absolutely true but not relevant to your problem. Please, please also report this to Anet. The more people that report it, the more likely they will have to do something.

To Sassy…there are far more problems than that issue with Nvidia laptop drivers, which to be honest is to be expected and advanced users would have picked up on that and gone into Nvidia control panel and selected for the gpu to be used on the new .exe file. The other problem is non fixable by the user and has as much to do with Anet and Microsoft as them. See posts above.

NilSatis.6720:

-snip-

Okay I’ll get my HP Envy out with it’s Nvidia 840M and Intel Core i7 4510U, check for updates, and play some GW2. But I’m doing this after some sleep tho, end of day now.

NilSatis.6720:

Nvidia drivers work fine on desktops which is what most people will be gaming on and therefore will reply about “theirs working fine” which is absolutely true but not relevant to your problem.

My desktop has frequent driver crashes (Nvidia, win 10, 64bit client) in just gw2. The newest driver (361.43) is virtually unplayable for anything more than casual mapping, while a November driver (358.91) gets hiccups, but is otherwise functional. I’d go back further if I knew one was specifically better.

The problem may be more common with the mobile gpu’s, it doesn’t seem limited to them.

I have w10 + nvidia gpu +64 bit client. Works flawless.

serapheles.5409:

NilSatis.6720:

Nvidia drivers work fine on desktops which is what most people will be gaming on and therefore will reply about “theirs working fine” which is absolutely true but not relevant to your problem.

My desktop has frequent driver crashes (Nvidia, win 10, 64bit client) in just gw2. The newest driver (361.43) is virtually unplayable for anything more than casual mapping, while a November driver (358.91) gets hiccups, but is otherwise functional. I’d go back further if I knew one was specifically better.

The problem may be more common with the mobile gpu’s, it doesn’t seem limited to them.

Yours is a different problem if you do not get hanging on map load only and when alt tabbing and highlighting the gw2 running process and loading back in get freezes and texure corruption. Im 100% sure this problem happens only on Nvidia mobile gpus and Windows 10 after the November update. All other games work fine.
Your problem sounds like something else entirely tbh.

Starting a new thread would be better with the exact problem if you cant confirm this is EXACTLY the same issue you are having, and my advice if you haven’t done it yet is to disable driver updates for 3rd party apps in Windows 10, use DDU to completely nuke your current (and past) Nvidia drivers and the registry entries after downloading the latest driver, and start again by installing the latest driver. IF you are still then having problems you need to look a bit more at a hardware issue or if the problem only happens in gw2 try underclocking the card if it has a factory overclock (shouldnt have to do this but can help). Again this last part is if the game only crashes in gw2.

Malediktus.9250:

I have w10 + nvidia gpu +64 bit client. Works flawless.

This is what I meant with the opening posts title lol.

Again…how is this useful? You don’t have a laptop with a mobile gpu. Thanks for telling us though :P Got to love people that read a title and reply without reading anything.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that GW2 is taking longer to “fully load”. What I mean is I can go into the game and move around..but there’s really weird “sound” and graphic lag.

If I jump into a PvP match right away, my character is doing fighting but the screen is not showing whats happening. Its like theres a 2-3 second delay to both sound and graphics. I’ve learned to wait about 3-4 minutes after the game launches before doing anything to make sure everything gets loaded.

Also, when I leave the game, I’m getting the “Guild Wars 2” crashed screen displaying for about 5 seconds and then it closes itself down before I can enter anything. So something is going wrong when the game loads and it seems to eventually correct itself.

With Windows 10, you don’t know if the system “updated” itself and changed some drivers or something. At least this is what I assumed. I’ve done a -repair and downloading the latest Nvidia drivers and we’ll see.

NilSatis.6720:

To op, if you are indeed using a laptop gpu then I would revise the title of your topic if you can to “Nvidia Mobile gpu drivers dont work with GW2 on Windows 10”.

Nvidia drivers work fine on desktops which is what most people will be gaming on and therefore will reply about “theirs working fine” which is absolutely true but not relevant to your problem. Please, please also report this to Anet. The more people that report it, the more likely they will have to do something.

To Sassy…there are far more problems than that issue with Nvidia laptop drivers, which to be honest is to be expected and advanced users would have picked up on that and gone into Nvidia control panel and selected for the gpu to be used on the new .exe file. The other problem is non fixable by the user and has as much to do with Anet and Microsoft as them. See posts above.

I would, but there’s a 45 word limit in titles.

Regardless, it’s been a fluffing month of playing on and off with the buggy checkers wars 2 32bit client . And no word from neither Nvidia nor Anet…
Why can’t we have good things? ;-;

Is there going to be an official response to this problem? Its a rather large one for a lot of your customers, and you aren’t letting us know whether you are able to fix the problem?

It is easy to replicate on multiple systems and yet its like Anet are denying it exists. Even chatting with support, via a friends account who has EXACTLY the same problem its clear that they wont admit this is a known issue yet will say to avoid using Windows 10. This is the CURRENT operating system and while I understand GW2 was not out when Windows 10 was introduced this is the only problem of its kind I have seen on close to a library of 200 games since moving to Windows 10.

@NilSatis

Did you try setting up a modified gameprofile for GW2 using nVidia Inspector yet?
Did you investigate this issue further?
Can you provide insights on energy behavior, latency, timing and clocking while experiencing these things maybe even WPA logs?

I got curious in this matter and only have a 750M available at the moment.

Regardless – A-Net definitly has to act and provide informations. These are the problems that matter and should be priority.

“they wont admit this is a known issue yet will say to avoid using Windows 10”

Very, very dissapointing.

There is also a very recent Hotfix driver called 361.60 dealing with alot of clocking and management based issues. Maybe give it a try.

NilSatis.6720:

Is there going to be an official response to this problem? Its a rather large one for a lot of your customers, and you aren’t letting us know whether you are able to fix the problem?

It is easy to replicate on multiple systems and yet its like Anet are denying it exists. Even chatting with support, via a friends account who has EXACTLY the same problem its clear that they wont admit this is a known issue yet will say to avoid using Windows 10. This is the CURRENT operating system and while I understand GW2 was not out when Windows 10 was introduced this is the only problem of its kind I have seen on close to a library of 200 games since moving to Windows 10.

There was a time when Windows ME was the CURRENT operating system, but many people will remember how awful it was. Just because it is current doesn’t mean it is the best to use. Windows 10 has a lot of updates that happen without most users knowledge, and it also still has an issue with the automatic driver updates.

That’s a windows issue, not a game issue. You really should take your problems up with Microsoft. Anet can only do so much. They can’t go and make the drive work for their game. Especially when it works for so many others.

I was having issues with my nvidia driver so I rolled back to an earlier version and haven’t had any issues so far.

uhohhotdog.3598:

I was having issues with my nvidia driver so I rolled back to an earlier version and haven’t had any issues so far.

Thats great, but did you read the thread? This is a problem with Windows 10 and mobile Nvidia gpus…..if you don’t have these specs then you wont have a problem. Rolling back to an earlier Nvidia driver does nothing to correct this problem.

Ellieanna.5027:

There was a time when Windows ME was the CURRENT operating system, but many people will remember how awful it was. Just because it is current doesn’t mean it is the best to use. Windows 10 has a lot of updates that happen without most users knowledge, and it also still has an issue with the automatic driver updates.

That’s a windows issue, not a game issue. You really should take your problems up with Microsoft. Anet can only do so much. They can’t go and make the drive work for their game. Especially when it works for so many others.

Sorry, we have moved on from Windows ME; this is an issue with Guild wars 2. It happens in one game. “the drive”…..not sure what this means. If you mean the Nvidia driver; then its “drivers”, as none of them work. It beggars belief that people like you try to stick up for Anet on issues like this. They have made a great game, but this is a real problem that THEY need to deal with, and we would like to know they are dealing with. Shifting blame here isnt going to help. Are you suggesting people should switch os’s back to inferior earlier ones due to one incompatible game? That I will add was compatible at Windows 10 launch and in Beta.

To repeat again, this happens only with Guild wars 2. There are a number of threads on it in these forums. There are no threads about any other game. That suggests it is specific to a coding problem with Guild wars 2 and the way it uses Vsync and detects mobile gpus. This also suggests it can be fixed….

Im actually not sure if this affects AMD mobile gpus but since the problem is related to Optimus I dont think it will.

For gaming Windows 10 is the best OS to use, no question about it. It is also the OS MOST people are going to be using, if they havent made the switch already. Automatic driver updates can be switched off by users and you can uninstall any drivers updated and reinstall anything you like. I have done extensive testing on this problem and it is SPECIFIC to Guild Wars 2. That isnt a Windows problem, its an Anet problem. The fact that they havent even acknowledged there is an issue is both very poor from a customer service perspective and also a marketing perspective. If you buy a new gaming laptop, chances are it will have Windows 10 on it. Their game will not work…..they might want to think about that. In fact Im sure they do.

Whether they actually read these forums when the issue isnt to do with gem store stuff or account problems is another matter as it seems this sort of thing gets completely ignored.

Sassy.1697:

@NilSatis

Did you try setting up a modified gameprofile for GW2 using nVidia Inspector yet?
Did you investigate this issue further?
Can you provide insights on energy behavior, latency, timing and clocking while experiencing these things maybe even WPA logs?

I got curious in this matter and only have a 750M available at the moment.

Regardless – A-Net definitly has to act and provide informations. These are the problems that matter and should be priority.

“they wont admit this is a known issue yet will say to avoid using Windows 10”

Very, very dissapointing.

There is also a very recent Hotfix driver called 361.60 dealing with alot of clocking and management based issues. Maybe give it a try.

Yeah, I have investigated this a lot. I will state that I investigated it on a machine I bought for my girlfriend before; on my machine which is a desktop using Windows 10, the game works fine. There really isnt a lot you can do to test it further however as the game simply will not use the Optimus system to switch the gpu on right from the login screen. It works on the login screen, and character select screen and then crashes loading any map. This is when the light to the mobile gpu goes out; suggesting either it has stopped responding or there is some switching issue. When you then go out of the game using alt tab and click on the unresponsive gw2 icon in the taskbar it will fire the game back up and load the map.

Then you will see texture corruption on things….maybe not straight away; but shortly after, or when loading a new map (which will hang again). It all points to drivers but I tried every known Nvidia driver (this was a month or so ago) and nothing worked. If they have released one now I am yet to see it. I have been keeping an eye on the changes but have not actually tried the latest hotfix driver; as it seems Nvidia support is mostly for desktop gpus.

Nvidia settings/ inspector settings do not work on this game (maybe since this problem?) examples being vsync and forcing other graphics changes. This might also be specific to mobile gpus, but nothing I did changed the behaviour of the problem. This included fresh Windows 10 install and driver uninstallation/installation of every driver on the laptop. Also a game repair, and a complete reinstallation of the game.

Also worth noting is injector based software such as reshade will also no longer work on mobile gpus since this problem. It simply will not load the game up at all with the .dll files present. On my desktop I can use Reshade with no problem (variant of Sweetfx). This is the good part…..on ALL other games reshade will work fine. Something is borked with Gw2s coding.

I have tried going into the registry and deleting all old gw2 files after uninstalling; also appdata/temp files…everything. Nothing changes the problem. Deleting local.dat helps so far as the map loads with default gpu settings. As soon as you touch vsync (or sometimes other gpu settings) the game will freeze. The same problem can then be seen again.

Remedy for the error is run in Windows 7 compatibility mode…..really? This is on a system that never used Windows 7. It used Windows 8.1 before the upgrade to windows 10. Using compat mode for 8.1 doesnt help the problem. Only 7……wtf?!

Another remedy is to not use Vsync. WTF? If Vsync is not used then the game works fine, with horrendous tearing that cannot be avoided other than using borderless windowed mode. So there we have it. Pretty much an essay on the exact problems with this game. Hopefully someone at Anet can bother to test and work out the problems as much as I did. Again….all other games on this system work perfectly. Nothing like these issues.

NilSatis.6720:

uhohhotdog.3598:

I was having issues with my nvidia driver so I rolled back to an earlier version and haven’t had any issues so far.

Thats great, but did you read the thread? This is a problem with Windows 10 and mobile Nvidia gpus…..if you don’t have these specs then you wont have a problem. Rolling back to an earlier Nvidia driver does nothing to correct this problem.

Why would anyone downgrade to 10?

Did you read the thread? The op was not talking about a problem with Nvidia drivers. I didn’t mention a “downgrade to 10” whatever that means. Windows 10 is an operating system, not an Nvidia driver. This problem isnt solved by rolling back to an earlier driver at all. Yours might be different.
If you are suggesting Windows 10 is a “downgrade” from other operating systems, you might want to check again. Its much better; coming from someone who has used all of them since Windows 95.

Just as addition:
It’s the same problem for 750M so I guess every nV Optimus system is “stuggeling”.
iGPU mode is the only thing working fine. (super low fps ofc)

Since WDDM2.0 got introduced in Nov it’s probably related. Recent driver updates expanded said supported gpu range.

Pretty sure all involved parties are working on a solution. crossed fingers

I do not know if I can be of help because I do not understand much and in advance excuse my english . I have w10 – Nvidia 820m – 64bitclient and each loading screen freezed the computer . I clicked the right button on the link of GW2 , properties , compatibility , run the tool for a resolution compatibility issues . At the end of the test the problem would not show up and no longer appears .

No; thanks Drugo…anyone with this problem posting is help as Anet will eventually do something about it. This confirms another case where Windows will (using compatibility troubleshooter) default the game to work with Windows 7 compatibility mode on and therefore work correctly as suggested before.

As a side note, latest Nvidia driver installed and tested….same problem as usual. On an 870m. Firing up a laptop today which has an AMD 7970m in to test. Currently updating Guild wars but am interested to see if it has the same problem. Ill bet it doesnt.
This laptop is running using a 7970m but Enduro features are not present which are switchable graphics like the Optimus system Nvidia uses to detect whether an application should be using onboard graphics or the discrete card and I believe this is part of the problem on the game/drivers(/Windows 10?).

We will see…gonna post an update later. Again this system is running Windows 10 on the latest build; and I will test with the x64 bit client not that this matters.

So…tested the game on a laptop with similar specs to the one with the problem aside from having an AMD 7970m installed rather than an 870m. Both running Windows 10 fully updated with the latest drivers. The AMD gpu based laptop works fine. No hanging on map load, no corruption, and actually very decent performance on the x64 bit client.

This is a non enduro based 7970m but I will add this suggests the problem needs to be sorted out by ANET AND NVIDIA. So please Anet….do something about it. How many people need to have this problem before something is done?