Guild Wars 2

Since the last update, perhaps it’s a coincidence, I’ve had problems with GW2 and the video driver random crashing. Sometimes it’ll go an hour or two or longer, and sometimes it’ll be only minutes between. Sometimes the display will recover and continue, Sometimes the display will recover, but not the game and it must be killed through the task manager, sometimes the machine will just freeze and need to be reset, and other times the machine spontaneously reboots. No BSOD, the screen usually turns black, but sometimes white. It’s the familiar unknown error caused by nvlddmkm.sys that’s been around and unresolved by nVidia for at least 5 years. It seems there’s a fairly even split in the tech community as to whether this is caused by faulty drivers or faulty hardware.

So far it has only happened in GW2 and it seems only in the last week or two. I have not seen this happen in Darksiders 2, the other game I’ve been playing fairly regularly. It is more graphics intensive than GW2, and after an hour the GPU temp was just over 70C, so I don’t think it’s a GPU heat issue. I have read there were issues with the December nVidia driver, but why would I only recently experience issues? I’m hoping the driver that was just released will fix the issues, but I’m not holding my breath since there was no mention of such issues in the release notes. I’m more curious if anyone else has experienced issues since the last game update.

Hardware:
Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 MB upgraded to newest bios
i7-3930K processor + big honkin’ after market cooler.
eVGA geForce GTX 670 4G
32G RAM (8Gx4) speed matched to the MB bus speed (Either Patriot Viper or Corsair Vengeance…don’t remember)
Corsair Professional Series Gold AX1200 Modular Power Supply
ThermalTake Level 10 GT case

You can try underclocking the GPU or even bumping the voltage a smudge. Could also try checking/swapping the PSU.

I believe i have the exact same problem. When the game freezes the mouse stops working and the game sound gets strange (almost like a 56k dialup modem). Sometimes the game recovers (significantly slower), sometimes i need to restart the computer (it might not even boot afterwards), sometimes it restarts alone, and the times i manage to close the game, the problem will persist even when the game is closed with episodes of max cpu usage + mouse freeze.

I have already formated the disks and installed a fresh windows copy that has only GW2 installed. I tried nvidia drivers 310.90 and 310.70. The problem still persisted.

I have noticed that this problem happens more often when the chareacter is changing maps and when the map display is open. However it might also happen during normal play.

The problems only started happening recently and have not manifested in any other game.

My Hardware:
Asrock Z77 Pro4 Intel Z77 SK1155
i5 3570k
Asus GeForce GTX670 DirectCU II 2GB DDR5 PCI-E
Corsair Vengeance 2×4096MB (8GB) DDR3 1600Mhz CAS9 1.5V
PSU OCZ ZS SERIES 550W

This is exactly what i am experiencing too. I run with an Nvidia GT540. Its really weird since the crashes only started in the last week or so. I’ve been monitoring my GPU temp and it seems to crash even at low temperatures. Once time I just logged in at mount maelstorm and rotated the camera angle before it crashed. Sometimes I can go 6 hours straight and its fine. Could someone please look into this thanks.

Alot of the posts on the forum are essentially the same problem of late. One second Guildwars 2 ran fine, next constant crashes. I have the same crashing problems and the game needs closed using the task manager. I have tried everything the support team has asked clean installation of drivers, disable start up programs nothing works. I believe this is something to do with the game itself and not my system as every other game which are more spec heavy run fine.

Essentially we all have the sam problem here…
See my post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Game-keeps-freezing-Need-Help/first#post1270907

As of now I’ve tried almost everything that comes to mind and everything anyone ever suggested on related topics. Nothing works, at least for me.
I’m going to switch PSU and in a couple of weeks I’ll change my GPU too, just to see if it is something hardware related.
It sucks. And an official statement SHOULD be done about this!

Endy.

kirito.4138:

You can try underclocking the GPU or even bumping the voltage a smudge. Could also try checking/swapping the PSU.

This is a brand new machine, not even two months old and the PSU otherwise seems fine. I don’t know how to bump the voltage. Haven’t tried underclocking, but the problem only seems to occur in GW2 and much heavier games such as Rage, Skyrim and Darksiders 2 all with the graphics maxed out, seem to be fine. However, if it’s a game issue rather than the GPU, ANet has some buggy graphics code. What I don’t understand is why it only seems to have surfaced in the last week or so. GW2 has been extremely stable for me.

This is what I’ve tried.
I removed the December drivers I had installed and applied the new drivers that were just released. I’ve since removed the 3D vision drivers since I don’t have a 3D display and have removed the nVidia HD audio driver, which also has known issues. I am using the much more established Realtek instead. I’ve turned v-sync off and limited the game to 60fps, tried various modes of anti-aliasing, which hardly taxes the GPU. It doesn’t seem to be getting terribly hot…low 70s under a heavy load, which seems fairly average. 50s and 60s running GW2 with no v-sync and the hacked down frame-rate. I’ve tried different areas, different toons…same thing. I also ran Intel’s IPDT tool to ensure my processor is stable and all tests passed.

This is the error that the crash puts in the Windows event log. Most resources I’ve found on-line say to RMA the card at this point but, otherwise very little information is available. I will try RMAing the card, but am doubting it will fix the issue.

—Windows Event Log Error— (nvlddmkm is the nVidia display driver)

The description for Event ID 14 from source nvlddmkm cannot be found.
Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your
local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or
repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had
to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

\Device\Video7
An uncorrectable double bit error (DBE) has been detected on GPU (02 00 00).

I’ve emailed both eVGA and nVidia asking them if they have any more information on this error or if it indicates a faulty card. I’ll post their replies, if any, here.

Now last night I was able to play as normal. I probably played 3.5 hours without issue. Two things happened. First I removed the 310.90 driver and installed 306.97. Second, upon starting the game, it went and downloaded a small update. Unfortunately ArenaNet tends to be somewhat hush about what is in their “routine maintenance” patches. Perhaps I was just lucky, but that’s the first time in over a week it’s gone nearly that long without crashing. I’m going to test a couple more days with 306.97, if it’s stable I’ll reapply 310.90 to see if it remains stable.

Before applying the 306.97 drivers, so, using the 310.90 drivers. I did some testing on the card.

1. I ran the benchmark test in Nexuiz on “Stupid Mode” on max detail about 6 times, then played 10 mintues, again on max detail. Elapsed time, about 30 minutes. No Issues.
2. I played Warp, which is oddly graphics intensive for such a simple looking game…played for about 30 minutes. No issues.
3. Skyrim with HD textures and detail on ultra. Stood in the middle of the river between Riverwood and Whiterun, then let it go to screen saver mode. Left it run for about 60 minutes. Card temp was a constant 74C so it was working hard. No issues. (GW2 typically runs well under 70C)
4. Played Left 4 Dead 2 with all details maxed out for about 45 minutes. No Issues.
5. Ran FurMark tests with different anti-aliasing settings, but not burn-in portions of the test. No Issues.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FAQ-Frequently-Asked-Questions-Compilation/first#post1095415

Part 5.3 Computer/Laptop shuts down while playing

• This is a hardware issue. Could be due to either CPU/GPU/PowerSupply etc. Can be either Heat or stability issues. Many causes, but the auto shutdown is a safety mechanism to prevent damage.

What I’m experiencing is a crash/fault that causes a reboot, not an auto shutdown. This a completely different thing and, again, it only seems to be happening in GW2. I’ll continue testing with the 306.97 drivers, but would be surprised that this point, if it turned out to be something other than the game.

Given the results of the above testing, is it more likely a hardware issue or a GW2 issue?

ANet, can you tell us if there was anything in the Jan 23rd patch that addressed crashing issues? Are there proper release notes somewhere?

“We’ve just updated the game for routine maintenance only. No content changes were included.” is not very descriptive. I’m trying to isolate whether it is/was a game/driver issue or whether I simply got lucky last night and it is actually a card issue. I don’t want to pursue an RMA or return the PC to the vendor for debugging, which with put my PC out of service for a week or more, if I don’t have to.

Reply from eVGA:

In order to try and pin point the issue, can you please try the following troubleshooting steps:

Please re-install the latest official driver version, please choose Custom Install and make sure that the “Enable Clean Install” box is checked. Also, please uncheck the HD Audio driver found on the list and click on next to install the drivers.

Download OC Scanner from our website: http://www.evga.com/ocscanner/ Once downloaded, run the program, make sure that “Enable Scanner” box is checked and click “Start GPU Stress Test.” Please be sure to run the program for at least 30 mins and report any artifacts that may occur.

Please make sure that you check and manually set the voltage, timing and frequency on your memory is set to the manufacturers specifications. Also, please test each memory module individually in your system, boot up and see if your system crashes. This will help us eliminate the possibility of a bad memory module. You can also try downloading Memtest from the following site http://www.memtest.org/ to test the memory with 3-5 passes.

Please also check your power supply connections to the motherboard and the +12v reading in your BIOS. To find the +12v reading, enter your BIOS, look for PC Health Status or HW Monitor, look for the 12v and report the reading. A healthy power supply reading should be stable in between 11.4v-12.6v. Any fluctuations would be a sign of a failing power supply.

I would also recommend testing the card in another computer, or another card in this computer. This will give you a better idea if the problem follows the card or if it may be another component in the system causing the issue.

Please follow the suggested steps above, and contact us again with your results.

Regards,
EVGA

My card is still factory default. The other things, I’ll have to check tonight.

BTW, have anyone elses crashing issues stabilized since last night’s (Jan 23rd) patch?

Leamas.5803:

BTW, have anyone elses crashing issues stabilized since last night’s (Jan 23rd) patch?

I’m testing right now.
Usually it happens right away so it’ll not be much since I report back

Endy.

Yep.. still crashing as Usual.

Yep.. still crashing as Usual.Endy.

Hmmmm, nVidia? Are you getting the same behaviour and message in your Windows Event Log? If you don’t mind playing with the drivers, try going to the 306.97 display drivers…don’t install the 3D vision drivers if you don’t need them, and don’t install the HD audio drivers unless you need them (These are known to cause black screen issues)…you’re most likely using RealTek drivers and do not require the nVidia ones. Choose custom install, remove the said drivers and choose clean install. Like I said, I may have simply gotten lucky last night…

Ran the OC Scanner provided by eVGA

• Furry Stress Test – Ran 30 minutes with no artifacts, no problems
• Tessy Stress Test – Ran 30 minutes with no artifacts, no problems
• Furry-Tessy Donut Stress Test – Ran 30 minutes with no artifacts, no problems

My feeling is that with all the other tests ran using other graphic intensive games plus stress testing the card with both FurMark and OC Scanner, that any problems here lie with GW2 and ArenaNet.

Still waiting for comment on the problem and an answer to my question(s) about the Jan 23rd patch.

Also, in your GW2 options for Graphics Options, try setting the frame limiter to 60fps. Literally within minutes of setting it back to unlimited the driver crashed and recovered twice within 3 minutes of each-other. It’s been now running over an hour without incident with it set to 60fps. I shouldn’t have to gimp it down given the card I have, but it seems to help. Again, this might simply be luck, but it seems ANet and/or nVidia might have introduced some buggy graphics code. Doing this did not help with the 310.90 driver. I still have the 306.97 driver installed.

well i have had this game crashing on me ever seince i got it bout a month after it came out.
just keeps freezing or crashes every day, whe mine freezes i either have to alt F4, or Ctrl-Alt-Del or do a hard restart, however with the hard Ctrl-Alt-Del i have to restart anyways cause the Gw2.exe prossess cannot be closed and uses heaps of memory.

i have a Dell XPS L502X with:
CPU : Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM CPU @ 2GHz (can boost to 2.9GHz)
RAM: 8 GB
OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Edition Service Pack 1, 64-bit
video card: NVIDIA GeForce GT 525M

it runs every other game i have just for with no lag even Borderlands 2 with everything on high even max physx online with no lag, yet guild wars crashes.
i put the game away hopeing to come back with this problem patched as its got to be something on their end but even after a few months still no change.

Guess ill be putting it away for longer then i thought unless theres a fix out there.
i really want to play GW2 so i hope i can find a fix some time soon.

Set your GPU fan to manual, put it on full high. Something I noticed in the past was that for whatever reason my fan was not kicking on to the appropriate level while in GW2. In no other game did I have this problem, I suspect this is why some peoples GPUs fried.

It may be noisy but I make it a habit to turn my fan on 100% now whenever I play.

Guy Sintrail.8352:

Set your GPU fan to manual, put it on full high. Something I noticed in the past was that for whatever reason my fan was not kicking on to the appropriate level while in GW2. In no other game did I have this problem, I suspect this is why some peoples GPUs fried.

It may be noisy but I make it a habit to turn my fan on 100% now whenever I play.

At 1680×1050 I’m not really running a very high resolution. Heat isn’t an issue for me. I’ve run GPU-Z in the background and GW2 doesn’t even come close to making my GPU work hard. I’m typically well under 70C with aGPU load around 45%, while Skyrim, which seems to have no issues, typically hovers around 74C, even then, the fan is spinning at less than 50% capacity. The above stress tests, using OC Scanner, barely made it heat up to 80C and that was with an average GPU load between 93 and 95%, with a fan speed about 55% of max. I’ve become convinced it’s bugged graphics code, most likely on the part of ArenaNet.

Could very well be. Can you log your memory usage on start up? Have you tried rolling back your drivers, doing all your windows updates or running in compatibility mode?

Guy Sintrail.8352:

Could very well be. Can you log your memory usage on start up? Have you tried rolling back your drivers, doing all your windows updates or running in compatibility mode?

See above…Driver version 306.97. Physical memory, I have 32G of RAM, this should not be an issue. During random monitoring over the last while, I’ve not seen it use much more than a gig of RAM at any time. Or, are you looking for GPU memory usage?

Leamas.5803:

Also, in your GW2 options for Graphics Options, try setting the frame limiter to 60fps. Literally within minutes of setting it back to unlimited the driver crashed and recovered twice within 3 minutes of each-other. It’s been now running over an hour without incident with it set to 60fps. I shouldn’t have to gimp it down given the card I have, but it seems to help. Again, this might simply be luck, but it seems ANet and/or nVidia might have introduced some buggy graphics code. Doing this did not help with the 310.90 driver. I still have the 306.97 driver installed.

My Windows updates are always up to date. Haven’t tried compatibility mode. That said, I have not had to limit the frame-rate on anything else. Was getting nearly 900fps with the the Tessy benchmerk test. Averaged 350fps, or so, with the furry-tessy donut benchmark test. High frame-rate doesn’t not appear to be a problem.

I would say try

1. Update your flash
2. Turn off / on HW acceleration for Flash
3. Run it in compatibility mode.
4. Try booting up with 1 stick of memory
5. Check the sticky on frame rate issues and adjust your settings.

Guy Sintrail.8352:

I would say try

1. Update your flash
2. Turn off / on HW acceleration for Flash
3. Run it in compatibility mode.
4. Try booting up with 1 stick of memory
5. Check the sticky on frame rate issues and adjust your settings.

Why would flash have anything to do with anything? They can’t be using flash in GW2. I’m not having frame-rate issues, I’m having crashing issues, nerfing the frame-rate in combination with the old driver simply seems to stabilize it. I have done most of the things in the the thread however…except that I’ve turned v-sync off altogether. As I said, I think I’ve managed to stabilize it, but as it’s the ONLY application I’ve tested that manifests these issues, it certainly points to some buggy code.

Which reminds me, I have to message my vendor to let them know I won’t be bringing the card in for RMA, at least not until I’ve done more testing.

Apparently there is some issue with flash supposedly, I have no idea why. If you’ve stabilized it, problem solved I suppose! I agree there’s some weird code issues with this game.

Guy Sintrail.8352:

Apparently there is some issue with flash supposedly, I have no idea why. If you’ve stabilized it, problem solved I suppose! I agree there’s some weird code issues with this game.

Agreed,
I’m going to leave it open for the weekend at least to see if any problems resurface and I’m still hoping for an answer from ANet regarding the release notes.

I have the same problem, except, my game is crashing with different colour. My computer is not react tgo the Ctrl+Alt+Del combination, theese kind of stuff, I must restart. It’s wierd, because this topic hadn’t updated 6 months ago and the issue is still here.

Hey,
i’ve exactly the same problem. Does someone has another graphic card type than Nvidia Geforce GT- series? Maybe GW2 only has some trouble with GT- series or does someone has those crashes with ATI?

Also happening here. Running on NVIDIA 550TI. GW2 is the ONLY game where this happens. Temperature and PSU are fine…

Any new news???

dielizzy.5938:

Hey,
i’ve exactly the same problem. Does someone has another graphic card type than Nvidia Geforce GT- series? Maybe GW2 only has some trouble with GT- series or does someone has those crashes with ATI?

it is not your Gt card, i have a Gtx series. I can play 3 MMo’s with ultra max settings without experiencing laggs, crashes and so forth, whatsoever

but

only with Guild Wars 2.

Yet, even with low settings; > crashes, disconnections, laggs, bleeding screen, freezings..

Once more, it is not Ati nor Nividia cards or their drivers, it is Arena.net servers

Burnfall.9573:

dielizzy.5938:

Hey,
i’ve exactly the same problem. Does someone has another graphic card type than Nvidia Geforce GT- series? Maybe GW2 only has some trouble with GT- series or does someone has those crashes with ATI?

it is not your Gt card, i have a Gtx series. I can play 3 MMo’s with ultra max settings without experiencing laggs, crashes and so forth, whatsoever

but

only with Guild Wars 2.

Yet, even with low settings; > crashes, disconnections, laggs, bleeding screen, freezings..

Once more, it is not Ati nor Nividia cards or their drivers, it is Arena.net servers

Yeah, but that doesn’t make sense. Granted, it’s not like we can start it up with networking turned off or something to test. But I’ve never seen something like network errors cause hard reboots like only Guild Wars 2 does on my system. I mean, if it was a network issue, wouldn’t the client just throw up an error message and try to reconnect? Not bluescreen Windows.

I’ve followed the advice of someone in another thread here and turned off Automatically Restart under System Failure in advanced system options, so I can see exactly what the error is that’s causing my shutdowns. Like everyone else here, I’m using an nVidia Geforce GPU, Windows 7, plenty of temperature overhead, only GW2 does it, system acts as if the “shut down” shortcut key was suddenly pressed yet doesn’t shut down cleanly, etc.

Just happened to me again. Good to see the problem has never been resolved. (insert sarcasm here) I’m going to try Newest driver, 331.58. Right now I’m running 311.06, I thought I was running 306.97. If the newest driver doesn’t work, I’ll put 306.97 back on and see if it stabilizes again. I still think it’s an ANet problem. My machine is 10 months old now and I’ve never had this happen with any other game or any piece of software for that matter. My machine is slightly different now though as it’s been upgraded to 64G of RAM.