Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I’ve been having this problem where my screen just turns black and then everything would be back to normal after a few seconds. This only happens when I’m playing the game. It seems that the display driver crashed or something. I tried playing in the lowest settings, playing in window mode, and updating my drivers but nothing works. Any help would be appreciated since I really want to play this game.

Here’s my DxDiag:

Usually, a driver crash is caused by some sort of hardware failure and the two primary causes of that are too much heat or too little power.

Are you sure that the airflow in the case is sufficient to keep the entire graphics card cool? Are there any other components in the computer (DVD drive, HDD, SSD, etc) that could be causing extra heating on the graphics card?

What Power Supply do you have? Are you sure it’s powerful enough to handle your PC’s needs when the GPU starts doing a lot of work? It doesn’t take much of a dip in power to cause the graphics card to crash. If your power supply has multiple rails, you might want to look at how the components in your computer are getting power from the power supply and try to rearrange the connections so that the graphics card isn’t sharing its power with anything else. (this is most important if the PSU doesn’t have dedicated power connectors for the graphics card. if it does have dedicated connectors/cables, then it should be separating the power distribution internally.)

AMD have released 12.9 in beta, if you are not running these go get them.

Hello,

a quick google search of your installed display driver number brought up this:

AMD ATI Catalyst 12.8 (19 July 8.982.0.0 RC1)

Update your drivers.

I had the same problems with my AMD Card with an older driver. The driver was buggy.

After a proper de-installation and installation of newer drivers this error was gone.

If drivers aren’t the issue, one or more of the following is out of tolerance with respect to the other two:
- Temperature
- Power (GPU)
- Clock (GPU, VRAM, Shader)

Lowering clocks will address all of those.

Well, I’ve updated my graphics driver and the good news is that the driver no longer crashes (I think). The bad news is that now, my game crashes to desktop. So I’m stuck looking at my desktop while the music from the game is still playing, forcing me to use windows task manager to close the game.

For fun, if you can call it that, you might try downgrading to the 12.6 driver from ATI. That’s what I’m using on my 6870 card, and it’s running very well and very stable.

Turns out I was wrong. The driver’s still crashing, even when I’m using the 12.6 driver. Is there any way to know if the one that’s causing the problem is the hardware? Oh and if it will help this is my power supply:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171048

I haven’t had any experience with that particular PSU, but it looks like it should do just fine. As a sanity check, are you plugging the graphics card into the PCI-E (6-pin) ports or are you powering it through one of the SATA cables?

I’m plugging the graphics card into the PCI-E ports.

Edit: I’ve updated my driver and tried playing the game at the lowest settings again. So far, no crash. Which kinda defeats the purpose of me buying a new graphics card if I can only play on the lowest settings.

I would be very careful of jumping to “worse case scenario” and starting to spending money on things, when you don’t actually know what is wrong.

I would expect to see hard reboots or blue screens if it was hardware or even software related.

That being said drivers/software are the very best place to start. Since they only cost you time.

Get an application called Driver Fusion, reboot your PC into safe mode and run the application. Select AMD, Nvidia and Intel graphics drivers (Not chipset) Let Driver Fusion purge your PC of everything.

Get the 12.9 beta drivers and do a fresh install and reboot.

Then try a repair of GW2. Create a new shortcut and add -repair after the “…gw2.exe”

Example: “c:\my games\guild wars2\gw2.exe” -repair

Must be after the " "

And if all that doesn’t work you might want to try a fresh install of windows.

I know this sounds like a lot of work, but it still not going to cost you anything.

garethedwards.8145:

I would be very careful of jumping to “worse case scenario” and starting to spending money on things, when you don’t actually know what is wrong.

I would expect to see hard reboots or blue screens if it was hardware or even software related.

That being said drivers/software are the very best place to start. Since they only cost you time.

Get an application called Driver Fusion, reboot your PC into safe mode and run the application. Select AMD, Nvidia and Intel graphics drivers (Not chipset) Let Driver Fusion purge your PC of everything.

Get the 12.9 beta drivers and do a fresh install and reboot.

Then try a repair of GW2. Create a new shortcut and add -repair after the “…gw2.exe”

Example: “c:\my games\guild wars2\gw2.exe” -repair

Must be after the " "

And if all that doesn’t work you might want to try a fresh install of windows.

I know this sounds like a lot of work, but it still not going to cost you anything.

Tried all of that, nothing works. What’s worse is that the driver crashes even though I’m using the lowest settings. Just not immediately, probably around 5-10 minutes. And I tried to see if this would happen to other games so I tried playing playing Skyrim and wouldn’t you know it, the driver crashed. I’m pretty sure this means that this isn’t a Guild Wars 2 problem.

Maybe your video card is taking a crapper. If you have a older one try installing that and see what happens.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any other video card. Unless you count the Intel HD Graphics 4000. But then when I try to play using that, the game crashes on start-up. Can’t even log-in and play.

I have a brand new PC I built..
i7-3770k running at 4.5Ghz
32gb of ram
P8-Z77 deluxe Bored
and a 6870 MSI card 1Gb

I can run Crysis 3 Maxed out -the mssa but anyway..
i crash on lowest settings every 2 mins cant even play and its not my hardware
i used to play fine but not anymore… why?

sounds like heat issues with the card, what model is it?

try msi afterburner and set the fan speed to 100% and game, if its a videocard heat issue, this will solve it.

if that turns out to be the problem setup a custom fan ramp in afterburner for the card that keeps the fan at 20% till it his 40c, then ramps to 100 as the card reaches 60c, many cards today come with horrible fan ramps.

and btw with that cpu, you should clock to 4.5-4.6ghz, and also I would have gotten a 7870xt they are the best bang for the buck if you got the cpu to push them(you do)

http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm
it works with any brand of card.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=375494 use that driver.

update your dx9 install
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35

run ccleaner over the system(both file and reg cleanup
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

run a checkdisk on your hdd’s
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/guide-to-using-check-disk-in-windows-vista/
use the command line method so you can see the results as the scan happens.

and delete the locals.dat in the my documents>guild wars 2 folder

That 6870 can heat up to 100c, i think it is hardlly the problem. Check for directx, MS framework 3.5 and 4.0, all that MS crap must be up to date, also the drivers, try different revision, use driver sweeper or revo uninstaller to completelly remove the drivers and install them again (normal uninstall won’t do). It is most likelly a sofware related issue.

dont use driver sweeper unless your willing to take the risk of needing to reinstall windows, sometimes it pulls way to much out and…..well, over the years i have had to reinstall windows to many times thanks to that kitten program.

drivercleaner.net works fine, as does revo, atiman is also excellent.

Rampage: I have 6870’s as well as many other cards, just because the gpu can take 100c, dosnt mean the other components on the board can, my 7870’s cores never get hot even at stock fan(20% max) but the VRM’s on the card get so hot they can cause the blue/grey screen effect(one screens grey/black the others blue)

honestly, 9/10 times when I see the problems mentioned above, its the card getting to hot, either core or vrm’s…..some cards also have kitten poor cooling on their vrm section…..some of the worst for this are some of the factory overclocked nvidia cards, but amd cards have the same issue if the OEM dosnt set proper fan ramps.

its very easy to setup ramps for cards using afterburner or trixx, and it will avoid alot of issues(and keep the cards working happily for years to come)

think the worst card I had for heat issues was the 8800gt…..after the 4th one I had cooked itself….bfg sent me a 8800gts 512mb that I have to this day, all jeff could say was the cooler on the 8800gt was “sub optimal” (aka it was crap)

I have the same problem but just now started. I have been monitoring my pc when it happens and its not over heating. specs are..

amd A6-3670k @3.3ghz 41-45C @ load any game
HD6850 @ 900Mhz /1100Mhz 61C @ load on GW2 / 71C @ load on BF3
8gb ddr3 @1600mhz
Coolermaster 600watt PSU with aftermarket fan (old fan bearing went out)

I dont think i am having over heating issues and getting proper voltage. GW2 is the only game it crashes on. I can play BF3 or arkham city no problem. I have latest drivers and had this problem with previous drivers. The game will freeze, audio is ok, then black out and come back on. i get the error message the display driver has crashed and recovered. weird thing is i can play for hours and no problem then sometimes cant take a step forward without this happening.

Exact same problem here, AMD Radeon HD 4870. Overheating is not the problem, I’m quite positive. It’s a software issue, maybe the AMD driver but, since this is the only game that doesn’t get along with my driver, I can’t help but think It’s something gameclient wise, for I’ve been dragging this error for several driver updates now.

Any of you using a dual monitor settup?

Salutes,
Crp

Setting post-processing and shaders to its minimum value seems to alleviate the problems.

You’re stuck in hell with us.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Black-screen-don-t-think-it-s-network/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/No-video-signal-at-random-intervals

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Freeze-and-Black-Screen/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Black-Screen-Crash-Issue-I-just-want-to-play-my-game/