Guild Wars 2

Hi! I’ve been playing guild wars for a few months. From day 1 it had some issues when I was on quite high settings where the game would have weird graphics glitches, etc. I turned down the settings quite a lot (From said recommended settings based on my systems components)

Here are my PC’s Specs:

8GB Kingston X RAM
i5 4430 3.00GHz
AMD Radeon 7970 GFX Double Dissipation

I googled the issue of “Guild wars artifacting” and found people who are linking(Many by the way) a ton of graphics issues tied with AMD cards, which I hope isn’t the case because the glitches occur so often- its beginning to make the game unplayable for me.
I don’t -believe- it’s a graphics card issue, although my graphics card is prone to artifacting since its a 7970(still a great card) it only happens in gw2, and even on mediocre settings and running at a very low temp for such a high GPU/CPU load(65-72(max))

These screenshots aren’t even mine, yet they are the exact same thing I get(Other people with the same issue)
http://i47.tinypic.com/34isavm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/wmjlH.jpg

This is an accurate video on what happens, which is also ANOTHER person having said issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rKL_lSZhNY

I’ve tried SEVERAL different drivers, I’ve tried overclocking my card as well, nothing seems to change and the problems occur a day/hours after I make the changes.

If it’s an optimization issue, unfortunately I don’t have another $450 to chip out for a different brand graphics card, and I would probably have to quit the game.

It makes the game literally, unplayable for me. And I’ve already contacted the company who makes the card to see if i can possibly get an RMA or something of the sort.

First of all revert any OC you’ve done to the GPU.
Graphical artifacts normally occur because of bad drivers, OC or overheating.

1. If you haven’t all ready, Try the -repair command on the Guild Wars 2 launcher (https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/28148006-Repairing-the-Game-Client).

2.Lock the framerate to 30fps and enable vertical sync in the guild wars 2 settings menu and see if it helps.

3.Delete the Guild Wars 2 folder under AppData (This will revert some of your settings in game)
ex : C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2

So a high end card and a non-trash CPU should be forced to play on locked 30 FPS? That doesn’t seem quite good.

Either way, running repair now. I switch Vsync on/off whenever it happens. I truly don’t notice a change in it, besides making the artifacting periodically stop until it happ;ens again, so I’ll definitely just leave it on I suppose.

Yeah, sucks to be running in 30fps, however, it was just to see if it fixed the issue.
So if it helped then it probably means that the artifacts appear when the gpu has a higher load which the fps-lock stops it from. This sounds like the card is overheating.

Are you sure that the temps aren’t going above 70 °C? If it’s above that then you need to check the cooling/re-apply thermal paste. Most GPUs shouldn’t go above 70 °C stressed.

Check with HWMonitor if you haven’t already used that program : http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Card isn’t overheating. Still happens at 30 fps. It’s running at 65 celsius, which is pretty normal, and even low- for a high load.

As for the whole 70 celsius being unhealthy business- completely untrue for AMD cards, especially a 7970.

Even from XFX support: “If 72c is your max temperature under load then you are completely fine. These cards tend to run at 75-78 on full loads, and its even operatable up to 82~ without most issues.”

Three possibilities here:

1) Defective graphics card

2) Defective power supply

3) Defective motherboard

abomally.2694:

Three possibilities here:

1) Defective graphics card

2) Defective power supply

3) Defective motherboard

Can you cite something for this then? Because it -only- happens on guild wars 2, and is the same for the 100+ people that have the same problem on google. Guild wars 2 isn’t some ultimate graphics card destroying of a machine game.

I’m only going by my 30+ years as an electronics and computer technician. My current focus is on computer repair.

It’s up to you whether you choose to believe me or not.

Edited to add: You could try re-seating the card. Bad connections can cause this, but that’s somewhat rare.

A Google search will find you a video from AMD Support on troubleshooting the various types of artifacts issues that occur their cards. I will include a link for ease of viewing.

AMD Support discusses (in this video) the common causes of artifacts for AMD video cards. In the order they listed them (see 1:23 in the video for the list printed nicely on the screen):
Over Clocking
Over Heating
Defective or miss-matched memory
An incorrectly configured BIOS
An underpowered power supply
A non functioning graphics card

Hopefully this information will help you troubleshoot your issue.

This looks very similar (albeit the screenshots look a lot worse then I ever had) to the issues I had with my R7 260×. But turning down the factory memory clocking to 750Hz totally stopped the issue. Not saying that will fix your issue though. Just throwing it out there so you can maybe look into possible issues with the factory settings.

Curious if alt tabbing clears up the artifacts (at least temporarily)? It was one of the strange things that cleared up the artifacts when they started getting really bad in the middle of fights or something. Though sometimes it would take multiple times if it was particularly bad at certain camera angles.

That video doesn’t cover the type of artifacts showing up in game. It is a flickering, checkerboard pattern. I’ve tried everything in the video, including running my memory at standard speeds.

Bout the only thing I haven’t tried is a new PSU. The one I have is a $20 used no name 550 watt, which exceeds the graphics cards needs.

I have a theory: These cards have a low power state, which lowers the clock speeds while idle or light work like browsing. Since GW2 has a browser in the form of BLTP, this might be causing the card to run in low power mode.

There is a registry hack to disable low power mode, but you must re-enable it each time you update your drivers. As of driver 14.12 I haven’t tried this, but when I did use it the black screens stopped.

http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1904869/disable-ulps-amd-crossfire-setups.html