Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I came back to Guild Wars 2 for the expansion, enjoying it etc, etc. I’ve been playing it for a few days now, have gotten to level 70 something, done tons of different dungeons and gone through many zones, everything is great. I play for hours in a single sitting.

However, in two very specific locations, my computer will straight up shutdown: on, then off. I’ve had this happen:

-In a Sylvari personal story quest. It makes you go through a mirror and into Orr. At a very specific spot in the mission (while fighting mobs, give or take ~5 seconds being in that part of the mission), my computer will shut off. It has happened in that same spot 3 times consistently. I still have not cleared this mission.

-In the Eye of the North. I’ve had this happen once (I’ve gone there once). I was checking out the vendor and moving around a bit before it happened.

Everywhere else the game is perfectly fine. My computer temperatures don’t seem abnormal. I’ve also not had this happen in any other game I’ve played (which is a large variety of computer games, including ones more graphical intensive than this). Any idea why this could be happening?

My computer:
i7 4790k
GTX970 x2 (SLI)
1600 32GB RAM

Game settings:
All set to highest except:
Shadows (High)
Depth blur (Off)
LoD reduction (Off)

EDIT: Happened again during the story mission “Dead of Winter” in the tomb.

bump, still an issue. :|

I figured it might be heat or power related, but as far as I can tell, it’s not.

My CPU can reach about 72C, but why is it only this game that has a problem? And why only during certain content? That is a “warm” temperature, but for an 4790k, I’m being told they can go up to 90C before it starts to become an issue.

My only guess is it might be power, as I only have a 750W PSU, but different websites are giving me conflicted estimates on how much I truly need. I also have played much more graphical intensive games than this (Battlefront 3, FFXIV, other games with max GPU load nonstop) and I never crashed in those.

:\

Couple suggestions.
Try turning off the SLI. WAY back when I had a pair of 275GTX cards in SLI GW2 HATED them, ran at like 5FPS and I had to put it in single card more. Actually I think I had to physically remove one of the cards.

If this doesn’t work, try lowing the GPU clock speed on your video. I know, not an ideal solution, but after fighting with my machine for 3 years, this is the ONLY thing that worked and like you, the problem ONLY affects GW2. Here’s a link to my solution post, but read through the thread if you’re interested in all what was tested.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Crash-to-blank-screen-with-sound-SOLVED/5755714

My driver doesn’t crash, the entire computer crashes. But, thanks for your input.

Crevox.5806:

My driver doesn’t crash, the entire computer crashes. But, thanks for your input.

But the driver crash can cause hard crashes. For me, this was especially true if the frame limiter was set to unlimited and graphics options were set quite high (When I was trying to trigger a crash). Some driver versions were also more susceptible than others. Being a hard crash, depending on the severity it may not have time to write to the event log and may not generate a minidump file.

First, try taking it out of SLI mode. On my old 2600k with a pair of 275gtx, GW2 didn’t work at all in SLI. My issue was not crashing, but a frame rate under 10 with SLI and normal without. I like to think they’ve resolved this by now. If this doesn’t work, try lowering the clock speed on video card. You have nothing to lose other than a few minutes of your time. Even at a 20% reduction (which I’m running on my single 670), which is overkill, your setup is so powerful you shouldn’t see any reduction in performance for GW2. Normally a 5%-10% reduction is sufficient to resolve crashing issues according to nVidia support. Changing the clock speed with nVidia Inspector will literally take less than a minute after you’ve downloaded it and you can create a desktop shortcut to do it instantly. I have two shortcuts, one to reduce it and one to set it back to normal. You’re not going to damage your video card lowering the clock speed. I know you shouldn’t have to do these things, but if it works, it saves a lot of frustration.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Crash-to-blank-screen-with-sound-SOLVED/5755714

I was stubborn for years and brought the computer in for service twice to have the hardware tested. I have replaced my monitor, keyboard, mouse, memory and hard-drive, and even lowered the clock speed on my motherboard (Which I still have to set back to normal). I’ve tried unplugging peripherals, killing extra processes, moving hard-drives around, disabling various BIOS features, such as USB3 and Marvell controllers. All the time insisting that I should not have to lower the clock speed on my video card because every other game works. To this day, it’s the only thing that has really worked for GW2. Other things, such as those mentioned above may have reduced the crash rate, but nothing never fully got rid of the crashes other than reducing the clock. I haven’t had a single crash since reducing the clock speed and I have frame limiter on unlimited and most of the “graphically pig” options like shadows, shaders and post processing on the highest settings.

I found this interesting bit here,

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Crashing-Issues-1/first#post4146866

“You may also want to check to see if any of your hardware is overclocked or is utilizing a Turbo Boost feature. If so, consider returning to stock settings, because Guild Wars 2 is sensitive to overclocking.”

What “sensitive” means and why GW2 is sensitive to it when nothing else is, is anyone’s guess. Who knows. But, my specific card is an eVGA nVidia 670gtx SC. The SC stands for superclocked, which is presumably over-overclocked (I really didn’t look in to it). I do know that reducing the clock speed fixed my crashing issues.

The eVGA 670gtx SC is one of those cards that has known stability issues and even eVGA removed them from their product list early on as if to ignore the fact they created them. That said, when I was dealing with nVidia tech support over the last couple weeks they told me outright that 3rd party manufacturers often overclock too aggressively creating stability issues.

Since the PC boots up normally,and then shuts off during a demanding operation,
this is 99.9% hardware related.
First off,did a quick search,and the max operating temp for an i7 4790k is 72,72C.
In Intel’s site the max allowed temp at the heat spreader of the cooler is stated at 74C.
Try Intel’s support or Forums to double check this,these Temps seem a bit low,
but if they are correct maybe the PC is shutting off to prevent the CPU from overheating.
Also check at your BIOS to ensure all PC Health/Temp settings are set properly.
If it’s not the CPU overheating or a BIOS setting,it could be the PSU.
Disable SLI,and remove one of the GPUs from the mobo,as a quick
way to test it’s not the PSU maxing out and shutting down the PC.
You don’t need 2 970s to run GW2 anyway.
The think with SLI and GPU profiles in particular,is that unless someone spent time to optimize them in order to really increase the performance,in most cases they are simply set to ensure that a game runs smooth,and the performance increase is minimal if non existent at all.And in some cases it just causes problems.
If the problem ceases,then you’ll know you need to get a bit more powerful PSU
to run the 2 GPU set up.
If it persists,you’ll need to get the PSU checked.

Shutdown and not lockup or reboot pretty much rules out software. I’d say you don’t see this on other games because other games don’t load your CPU nearly as hard.

750W might be alright for powering SLI 970s and a 4790k at stock (I say might but I wouldn’t be running performance range SLI/XF on anything less than 850-1000). Given that this always happens in certain “spots” it’s possible that it could be from a lack of power. Fastest way to check that would be as mentioned – disable SLI or go for a hefty (30-40%) underclock on your GPUs and run through those same spots.

72c on haswell is also fine; 95c is your throttling and 100c is your shutdown point. Most of the stress on the chips comes from thermal cycling moreso than heat (cold→hot→cold etc.) so it’s still in your best interest to not run it so high hence why you’ll see people say the low to mid 80’s as the “safe” range.

‘Sensitive to overclocks’ happens because everyone’s definition of ‘stable’ is different. Some do narrow-op stress tools (prime, IBT, everything else in this category). Others specific games. Chances are that no matter what you do some part of the die isn’t actually stressed; the most popular case of haswell and up is no one bothers to use the FMA/AVX options (prime has them) because they add ~.1v and major heat. Given the 1D crashes people are seeing with the x64 client it’s safe to assume that GW2 does use these for optimization (at least on a compiler level).
This doesn’t apply here since you’d be seeing watchdog or WHEA BSoDs or lockups/reboots if edge stability was the case. Shutdown from overclocks mostly happen when your chip is well past it’s clock wall and won’t do that MHz no matter how many volts you run through it.

Disk errors are probably the last obscure but still possible shutdown cause so a chkdsk /f c: wouldn’t hurt. HTH

deltaconnected.4859:

Shutdown and not lockup or reboot pretty much rules out software. I’d say you don’t see this on other games because other games don’t load your CPU nearly as hard.

Not necessarily. I could do the settings in GW2 such that I could reliably trigger a hard crash requiring a hard reset. This would also sometimes cause the crash to automatically reboot the computer. Settings were unlimited framerate, Shadows on ultra, shaders on high, post-processing on high, adaptive lighting on and most other graphical options on high or enabled. This was always cause a hard crash (Or reboot) within 15 minutes. Since lowering the clock speed on the GPU for GW2, I haven’t had a crash in 10 days with all the same settings.

I do agree that a 750W PSU might be a little underpowered for two 970s under full load though. ROG ASUS Realbench stress test will load the memory, GPU and CPU at the same time. If the problem is PSU, this may shed some light on it.