Guild Wars 2

Hi there, I hope you can help me with a problem I have experiencing every know and then.

My specs are:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti (newest available drivers)
Intel i5-2400 @ 3.10 GHz
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Now the problem: In certain instances my GPU crashes (or more likely the drivers, since my GPU still works and doesn’t have any issues in other games or apps). So far the instances that caused a crash were Arah (when you board the hightech airship and the eye of zhaitan + adds spawns), Ascalonian Catacombs (during the fight with the spider queen at the beginning) and one certain story quest where you have to defend the vigil keep against a horde of risen. Specifically the part where you have to shoot with the catapult from the walls of the keep to destroy the risen catapults, as soon as I hit a catapult from the enemy, I would experience a crash.

Keep in mind that the crashes ONLY happen exactly in the same spots, nowhere else. In Arah, only that event would cause the issue, the rest of the dungeon I could play without any kind of problem. Same with the spiderqueen in AC and the storyquest, before and after those events that caused the crash nothing bad happened.

The crash itself is very weird. First, my GPU seems to shut down. I get a blackscreen and only seconds after that my monitor tells me that there is no signal input. Sound still works for a few moments after that, then I would get a nasty soundloop and a complete freeze of my system. A hard reset is the only way to get rid of it, nothing else works. Any ideas?

i know somebody will argue with this but, my suggestion is to run a chkdsk /f on the drive the games on(or all your drives if you have more then 1 hdd) then run ccleaner on the system and see if that helps…..

Thanks, ran chkdsk /f and ccleaner. I plan on going into AC explo mode again today, hope this helps.

Do you possibly have two conflicting GPU drivers installed? Perhaps an onboard is still running someplace? It’s a long shot but check that out.

No, I don’t have two conflicting drivers installed. I also ran chkdsk and ccleaner but it didn’t help a bit. Quite the contrary happened, actually. Now I got two crashes in AC explo, one at the spider as usual and one during an encounter with normal trash mobs. Don’t think it has anything to do with what I did, though. But I have to say that I almost expected that running chkdsk and ccleaner wouldn’t help, because this measures are the standard things that are always mentioned when any kind of problem appears. But my problem is a very specific one and I doubt I can solve it with the usual stuff.

I lowered all my setting to low and this time no crashes at all. But my GPU doesn’t overheat and I don’t have FPS-issues at all, so this is only a temporary solution because I can play the game on high settings w/o problems and on low it looks like poo. But since I want the stuff from the dungeon I will just play on low during my time in a dungeon. Makes is hard to enjoy the dungeon, though.

With lowered settings, the graphics card doesn’t do as much work and therefore doesn’t use as much power. It’s conceivable that your power supply might be right on the edge of being able to provide all the power that your graphics card needs when it has to do all the extra work.

What PSU do you have? Does it have multiple rails and/or a dedicated set of graphics card connectors? If it doesn’t have connectors dedicated to the graphics card, have you tried re-connecting the components in your system so that nothing else is plugged into the power cable that’s feeding the graphics card?

If it is my PSU failing, then why does it only fail in dungeons and story quests i.e. instanced areas? I can run everything on high settings when I am not in a dungeon without problems. Sure, big events like the ones in Orr with 50 players unloading all their AoE skills on 100 mobs drop the fps like there is no tomorrow. But it doesn’t crash. Only in instances where the work the GPU has to do is significantly lower than in big events in open world scenarios. Btw the very first time this happened I didn’t get a freeze, a few seconds after the “no signal input” message from my monitor the GPU started working again and I got the error message that the nvidia drivers crashed. But since then every time this crash happens I get a full lockdown of everything.

I can’t wrap my head around this, seriously. If my PSU couldn’t deliver the power needed, then why does is cause problems when there actually isn’t any heavy load at all? If it would crash in said open world events I would understand. And any other game runs fine. I can even run Battlefield 3 on ultra settings – more or less. I would get 10 fps or so but it wouldn’t crash, I’d just have… low fps. Nothing more.

This just doesn’t make any sense if you ask me. It’s not an overheating issue and it really can’t be my PSU failing because then I would have issues everywhere, not only in one specific game and in that one specific game only in specific areas.

Hanks do this step:
Remove your GPU and CPU fan and clean it.. I have the same problem before, i done a lot of things like reformatting my hard drive, buying new psu, memory ram, and gpu but nothing help me… When i cleaned my cpu fan it seems to solve my problem, it works like a charm!! yes the dusk can kill your cpu and that’s the cause of random crashes you experiencing ..

Hope this help you

Well, the theory is that in story instances and dungeons “there is less work to do, so the graphics card can do it faster, so it does.” The “working faster” leads to higher power usage, and more heat generation. Do you have V-Sync on?

An analogy would be to imagine your graphics card is a car’s engine and GW2 is the car’s driver. Normally, when the car is in an appropriate gear, there is no way the driver can over-rev the engine. But if the car is in too low a gear, or out of gear, there is no load on the engine and nothing to slow it down. If the driver pushes on the gas in this state, the engine will rev dangerously high, use up lots of fuel and generate lots of heat. Eventually, this will cause the engine to overheat and sieze up.

In your computer’s case, GW2 (on high settings and in the normal game world) has enough work for the GPU and CPU to do that the computer is “self-limited” on how fast it can do the work, therefore its top speed is within the power/heat tollerances of the computer. But when you get into story instances or dungeons where there is much less geometry to render and many fewer characters/NPCs to transform and render, there is a lot less load on the CPU/GPU. The fact that the CPU/GPU are now able to render the scene much faster (because there’s less to render) means that it can do more work, so it will. More work means more power being used and more heat being generated, and that might push things beyond the limits of what your computer can supply.

Do you have V-Sync on or are you using the frame limiter? Or do you have Fraps or some other utility that can monitor framerates? You might want to check that out during play in the normal world and in story instances and dungeons to see how the framerate differes in the different locations. That might help prove or disprove the theory.

I had the same issue with an ATi/AMD card and I used this driver sweeper and the problem has gone away.

http://www.guru3d.com/content_page/guru3d_driver_sweeper.html

Follow the steps as instructed. Won’t hurt to try even if it isn’t the fix. Make sure to run it as administrator if on Vista/7. After you’re done, reboot to normal Windows mode and reload the current newest drivers.

Hope it helps, it may not be the global fix for everyone, but it definitely worked in my situation after trying tons of things both software and hardware related.

Tried the driver sweeper, but it didn’t help. Not a bit. Another thing I tried was opening the case and clean everything the best I could. Because, maybe some dust inside the case caused problems. Didn’t to kitten either. Tbh this issue gets worse and worse, today I had 3 crashes alone. One in Lion’s Arch with everything set to the lowest possible setting. FPS limiter and V-sync were activated, had constant 60 fps with no frame drops whatsoever and then BAM, driver crash, please restart. Then one in Gendarran Fields with max settings during a haunted door event, the last one was again in AC explo on lowest settings, right at the beginning where the very first graveling burrow spawns.

I could play the last days without problems if I lowered the settings as much as possible, but it seems like GW2 will be unplayable for me if this continues to get worse. As I see it, it’s either my GPU dying a slow and painful death or GW2 is at fault. Because, like I said, other games run fine – and that’s the reason I believe that this is not a hardware related problem. If this would be a general software or driver related conflict then more games should cause this mess because I do think that most modern games should use the same tech for graphics (shaders, AA, texture filtering yadda yadda) than GW2. Tried everything I’ve read here and nothing helped, sadly. Still very much appreciate the effort, people.

Bump because drivers crashed again in Lion’s Arch. Lowest possible settings, fps limiter set to 60 and with v-sync disabled. I don’t think I am doing my rig a favor when playing GW².

Another thing that I am reluctant to even start GW² because it crashes considerably often. Not that much that it would be unplayable, but for example going into dungeons or PvP where people might rely on me? Can’t do that without second thoughts because I might crash anywhere which can leave my team in a bad spot. This really is sucking the fun out of GW² for me, slowly yes, but steady.

Another bump, another crash (hope it’s not against the rules to bump threads if there is something new to say). This time it happened in AC explo way 3, during the event where you have to protect the ghost essence collectors against gravelings. constant 60 fps, lowest possible settings. Was whacking against one of those burrows when ZAP! – screen went black and I had to reset my PC because the whole system froze.

I have almost the same issue. I crash in some instances and in dungeons (all of them). Have you tried doing other dungeons/stories/wvw to see if it occurs again?

Not saying I have a solution, just wanted to know if we have the same issue.

I am also having a similar issue. I was on my Sylvari Guardian going to AC and once I ported to the Charr city my FPS went below 10. Anywhere else in the world my FPS is quite high. Once I exited the Charr city and made my way to AC my FPS was so greatly reduced (1-4FPS) and my Graphics Card Driver crashed. I’m believe my driver version is 304 or 306 (nVidia GeForce 660 Ti). I didn’t have any issues in AC, but the Charr zone and city are the bane of my computer. Lion’s Arch was slow but there’s a lot of things going on.

any chance of a screen shot of MSI afterburner or something simliar showing fan speeds temps and usage at your normal settings monitored before you crash?

just curious as reading your thread i’m not seeing the bigger picture other than the problem discribed.

Also have you tried multiple driver versions or do you keep reinstalling the upto date ones