Guild Wars 2

I have a fairly low specced machine (by todays standards) which has been working fairly well up until last night. ( Specs below)

AMD ATHLON 64 X2 Dual Core 3800+ 2.0 GHZ
OEM Radeon HD4670 AGP 1GB Ram
3GB Ram
Win 7

I know it’s old but I can’t justify the cash at the moment to buy a new system so I’m stuck with it but so far I’d been managing to keep GW2 running fine at medium to low settings.

Anyway, after the Oct 22 update the client downloaded last night I found that I was getting constant black screen problems so after checking the sticky I tried downloading the application profiles and installing that and on reboot got the dreaded BSOD

After a lot of uninstalling, reinstalling, system restores etc I now find that my PC refuses to run with anything other than VGA compatible drivers otherwise it will just BSOD everytime windows starts.

I wouldn’t have thought installing the application profiles exe from AMD would have corrupted anything ( I had the Catalyst 12.6 drivers installed and working fine ) but thats the only change I made before the BSOD issues so thats the most obvious cause that I can see.

I’m pretty much at the point of blowing everything away and trying a fresh Win 7 install as I suspect that theres a corrupt file or setting somewhere unless theres a method of restoring the drivers that someone with more knowledge of AMD graphics cards/drivers can offer me.

If I do go for the fresh install of Win 7, whats the best/latest drivers for the HD4670 AGP card to install?

I’m hoping I can find a fix for this otherwise I won’t be playing GW2 much for a bit

Are your speaking of the Crossfire profiles? Why would you install those? Those are the profiles for games when using two or more cards in Crossfire mode. If you only have one card there’s no need for em. I would uninstall them and see what happens. In fact I would just run Drivesweeper and uninstall all graphics drivers to include the profiles, reboot, then reinstall just the graphics drivers.

While it’s true that the application profiles are primarily intended for Crossfire setups, they are also useful for single card setups. So they shouldn’t be the problem unless there is a compatibility issue between the newest CAP files and the 12.6 driver. (I’m running the ATI 12.6 driver with the 12.7 CAP files and I haven’t experienced any crashing problems on my 6870.) That said, it might be worth removing them or at least reverting back to an older version, to see if that helps.

Before you wipe your entire operating system and start over, have you tried using a program like CCleaner or DriverSweeper to cleanup the graphics driver files? Configure Windows to use the generic video driver, uninstall your current ATI driver (if it’s still installed), then reboot the system and use CCleaner/DriverSweeper to make sure that the driver is completely removed, then reboot the system and install the ATI driver and see what happens.

One thing I did notice after the Mad King event went live is that the fan on my graphics card ramped up in speed/noise, so the card is clearly doing more work with the extra effects in the game. Is it possible that your card might have been running a bit too hot after the patch, which caused the crashes? If so, you might want to manually boost the speed for the cooling fan to see if that works, or open the case and blow out all the heat sinks to make sure they’re cooling things like they should be.

Rabbiddog.7690:

Are your speaking of the Crossfire profiles? Why would you install those? Those are the profiles for games when using two or more cards in Crossfire mode. If you only have one card there’s no need for em. I would uninstall them and see what happens. In fact I would just run Drivesweeper and uninstall all graphics drivers to include the profiles, reboot, then reinstall just the graphics drivers.

Yeah, I realised it probably wasn’t a good idea after I’d gone ahead and installed (that will teach me not to read things carefully ).

I did try to uninstall them – Win 7 wouldn’t let me do this in safe mode strangely so I had to delete the card in device manager (including drivers) until I could boot into Windows normally to uninstall.

That didn’t help so I’ve tried uninstalling all the Catalyst stuff including the drivers, and then reinstalled just the drivers after rebooting but got the BSOD back again.

I’ve also tried to use a Driver Remover program called Driver Fusion (found it on another forum) but that hasn’t helped either.

If I have to reinstall Windows it’s not too bad as I don’t have much other than Guild Wars 1 & 2 installed on it.

Just frustrating that a simple uninstall didn’t solve the problem.

mathisk.6427:

One thing I did notice after the Mad King event went live is that the fan on my graphics card ramped up in speed/noise, so the card is clearly doing more work with the extra effects in the game. Is it possible that your card might have been running a bit too hot after the patch, which caused the crashes? If so, you might want to manually boost the speed for the cooling fan to see if that works, or open the case and blow out all the heat sinks to make sure they’re cooling things like they should be.

I ran GPU-Z and the card temp seemed ok but that wasn’t when the game was running, the case I have is pretty well cooled but I’ll definately check the temperature when I get the game running again (hopefully).

Ok, I tried drivesweeper and ccleaner with still no luck at reinstalling the drivers so went for the fresh Win 7 install.

Windows won’t recognise the card now and I get BSOD’s if I try to force install the AMD drivers so it’s looking like the card’s got a problem although the temperature’s sitting at 45c so it should be ok heat wise.

Considering the age if the PC I’m thinking I may have to bite the bullet and go for an upgrade of the motherboard / cpu/ memory and a new PCI-E graphics card if the credit card can cope…….. :/

Your not the only one having this issue. Theres tons of us having the same issue with NVidia and AMD cards alike and multiple versions of drivers. I’ve reformatted and reinstalled windows 7 completely myself with no luck at all as well. From all the digging through forums and fix attempts I’ve done over the past 3 days I’m led to believe it has more to do with the GW2 graphics engine than anything on our end specifically.

Hi,

I also has a near hardware specs and encountered the same problem after update. The game even crashed the amdkmdap driver then blue-screen crash my computer.

After rebooting and un-check deadlock check for the driver, the game stutters to the point of nearly impossible to play

I’ve seen alot of the threads about how widespread the black screen issues are and it’s obvious that the update’s caused a lot of problems from low specced machines to higher specced machines which in theory shouldn’t have problems

My card however won’t work outside of GW2 now at all with a fresh install of Windows so I’m left wondering if the card was on the way out already and/or the update pushed the card to it’s limits and that’s what prompted it’s demise.

Either way I’m not going to get too upset as the card was a cheap OEM card bought with the purpose of prolonging the life of an old gaming machine but now have to make a decision on what to upgrade in order to play the game at a decent FPS/graphics level without breaking the bank and then hope that it too doesn’t have problems with the GW2 graphics engine :/

Interestingly enough I tested running GW2 off a USB HDD on my work laptop as a test :

NVIDIA NVS 3100M 512 Mb Ram

Intel Core i7 M640 2.8 Ghz

4GB System Ram

No black screen or crashing issues with it at all although the FPS wasn’t great but still playable.

@shadowblue, Yeah it’s sounds like your issue just happened to coincide with the update but is indeed a hardware issue with your GPU. Constant blue screens after a fresh build would be a good indication. Just to be sure you could also throw in another video card (if you happen to have one) even if it’s older and see what happens. Just to rule out that it is indeed the video card and not some other hardware. If with another card it boots up and displays fine then it’s the other GPU for sure. If not, then you might have other bad hardware.