Guild Wars 2

I have an older laptop, which ran Guild Wars 2 on medium settings (in 720p res) just fine. But since about 4 months ago, it began to BSOD complaining about an nvidia dll file in the error. At first it was one a week maybe, but now it’s been increasing to the frequency of once a day if I play GW2.

Specs are: i7 2630QM, 540 GT (1gb vram), 8 GB ram, 1 tb sshd. (running Windows 10 currently)

I use the latest nvidia drive available for my GPU and yes, I made sure that optimus is selecting the nvidia GPU by default and I have even explicitely made GW2 run with it as well. Additionally, NO power consumption restraints are applied so there is no chance of the performance being hindered. Temps are nominal, the laptop has been faily recently cleaned and checked for any cooling issues.

One more thing, this seems to ONLY happen with GW2.

Since I began having this problem, I tried: Updating the drivers, clean installing the drivers (within nvidida geforce exp), manually performing a clean reinstall (including using device manager to uninstall the vga) and using a different OS (win 8.1, from update AND from clean install).

Can anyone help? I’d very much like to continue playing the game, especially now that I have pre-ordered the expansion, but this is severly inhibiting.

Did it start after an update of your NVidia drivers ? Try to revert to an older version.
And avoid installing any extra programms beside the drivers.

NVidia releases crappy drivers all day just to shine in some new games or whatever
but in my opinion it seems only 1 of 10 or 20 versions are really stable and the rest
have always issues for some people.

I cannot tell unfortunately. I know that since I have started to experience this issue, at least 3 versions have been released of the nvidia drive (if not more) but the issue still persists.

I have the same problem. Getting random BSOD’s in Guild Wars 2 (mostly in dungeons) after playing fine for two years. It started to happen since yesterday.

I’m using Windows 10, i7 860 cpu, 4GB RAM, Samsung SSD and AMD Radeon HD 5700. I suspect it has something to do with Windows 10.

I tried reinstalling everything but the problem still occurs. Contemplating on downgrading back to Windows 7.

The problem is really crappy programming by Arena net in particular related to video drivers. If that was not the case then WoW would crash like crazy as well. But WoW is pretty stable and GW2, particularly after yesterdays patch is just crap.

Fallen.4960:

The problem is really crappy programming by Arena net in particular related to video drivers. If that was not the case then WoW would crash like crazy as well. But WoW is pretty stable and GW2, particularly after yesterdays patch is just crap.

The problem is really crappy programming of the video drivers.
An application just calls Direct-X calls but only the driver can cause the BSOD
because some functions are bad implemented.

Last time i had an NVidia Card was when Age of Conan was released and there
i had constand BSODs but only when i used Shader 3.0 and when there were
some special blue shiny effects.
After trying drivers from 173.xx back to 164.xx i found the 164.xx was quite
stable. Oh or i could play with shader 2.0 but that simply looked not so good.

Later in Runes of Magic the GMs also official posted my tip to go back to
164.xx in case you had problems with actual drivers.

And this is typical for NVidia .. i read the same again and again in forums that
Driver zzz is not stable and you better use yyy if you have prolems.
Or just look at all the problems with windows 10 … over 99% is maybe related
to NVidia.

And for WoW :
https://www.google.de/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=TI36VZ3kH-il8wfQkpHwAw#q=wow+bluescreen+nvidia

Nah mate. The problem, for the most common Video Drivers on the planet. Is crap management and very poor programming.

Its sort of like Ford deciding that Pneumatic Tyres are someone elses problem so they are going to stay with steel wheels. There may indeed be issues with Nvidia but Guildwars needs to work with their drivers …… ergo ArenaNet need to sort it out.

Instead. They are totally hopeless. Totally and completely useless.

So every time my game crashes and I get the “Tell us about the problem” I do. I tell them to employ some real programmers and some real project managers. Because the current crop are not worth a pinch of kitten.

Fallen.4960:

Nah mate. The problem, for the most common Video Drivers on the planet. Is crap management and very poor programming.

Its sort of like Ford deciding that Pneumatic Tyres are someone elses problem so they are going to stay with steel wheels. There may indeed be issues with Nvidia but Guildwars needs to work with their drivers …… ergo ArenaNet need to sort it out.

Instead. They are totally hopeless. Totally and completely useless.

So every time my game crashes and I get the “Tell us about the problem” I do. I tell them to employ some real programmers and some real project managers. Because the current crop are not worth a pinch of kitten.

So Anet should change their code whenever NVidia brings out new drivers and
mess up there ? While everything runs great with ATI drivers ?

Then we are back in times where we had to code different stuff for different
hardware before we had Direct-X. And NVidia can also say : No we don’t
support Direct-X .. write our code of the week instead.

Oh .. and what about people that prefer not to use the actual drivers, should
ANet make 30+ different versions of GW2 so there is one for every NVidia
release of the last 3 years ?

Direct-X is there to get rid of such problems. You use Direct-X and Direct-X tells
the driver what to do. If the driver doesn’t support that call its a problem of the
driver that it doesn’t correctly support Direct-X and not a problem of the
application that uses a Direct-X call without investigating if maybe this week
NVidia said : Oh no .. was more important to shine whith good FPS in GTA-20
instead of supporting some standard stuff.

Interesting point of view.

Fact is that from a customer point of view ATI drivers are second class. So ArenaNet need to sort out compatibility for the most common drivers on the planet. Or tell everyone that they are not able to support NVidia and go to AMD. Wonder how that will do down?

There is no half way house. I paid for GW2. It should work 100% reliably on NVidia. I am not that intersted in why ArenaNet programmers and project managers are totally useless. I just care that GW2, that I have paid for, regularly crashes on my NVidia recent card. It matter not whether NVidia is are fault or Arenanet. Because Wow works just fine and has for years. Like about 7 years. Max Dungeons. Max Players.

But Arenanet. Can not keep get its Panties above its ankles.

Reason. Poor project management. Poor implementation. Poor programming. Poor, well non existent QA.

Sort of reminds me, so may years ago, of Mythic [DAOC] and it was a great game and just like Arenanet instead of solving problems blamed customers. And the result?

Nope. IF ARENANET read these forums then they need to start to take note. Starting with the latest patch is a heap of crap. Followed up by “Why dont you simply get your code to play nice with the most common drivers on the Planet”

Pretty simple stuff.

HH

From a customer view personally i had much more problems with NVidia drivers
than with ATI .. and when reading technical help forums also there a masses of
problems with NVidia and so much less with ATI.

And no .. ANet has to support neither of them, they only use Direct-X that has
the purpose that proprietary code for different GPUs is no langer needed.

Else we can scap Direct-X and use Mantle and CUDA.

Issue is not Nvidia’s drivers, its probably the hardware in that aged laptop. Given the specs I am going to guess that the OP has an HP DV6 or DV7 series laptop. Those are known to have thermal issues with BGA soldering on the Graphical chipets. Affects both Nvidia and AMD/ATI cards. The only fix is a new motherboard.

But since the OP did not state what Laptop they actually have, lets say the TIM/Thermal Paste has dried up, Fans are clogged with Dust, and maybe the Fan isnt spinning at the desired RPM’s anymore. The BSOD would be thermal related on those cases. Only fix is to tear into the laptop and clean it completely up and replace the thermal paste. I suggest IC7 series Paste, its not conductive and doesnt dry up for about 3 years in bad thermal areas (Like the desert).

If the drivers were really the issue, then nearly everyone would be having BOSD crashes, and that is not the case.

Fallen.4960:

Interesting point of view.

Fact is that from a customer point of view ATI drivers are second class. So ArenaNet need to sort out compatibility for the most common drivers on the planet. Or tell everyone that they are not able to support NVidia and go to AMD. Wonder how that will do down?

There is no half way house. I paid for GW2. It should work 100% reliably on NVidia. I am not that intersted in why ArenaNet programmers and project managers are totally useless. I just care that GW2, that I have paid for, regularly crashes on my NVidia recent card. It matter not whether NVidia is are fault or Arenanet. Because Wow works just fine and has for years. Like about 7 years. Max Dungeons. Max Players.

But Arenanet. Can not keep get its Panties above its ankles.

Reason. Poor project management. Poor implementation. Poor programming. Poor, well non existent QA.

Sort of reminds me, so may years ago, of Mythic [DAOC] and it was a great game and just like Arenanet instead of solving problems blamed customers. And the result?

Nope. IF ARENANET read these forums then they need to start to take note. Starting with the latest patch is a heap of crap. Followed up by “Why dont you simply get your code to play nice with the most common drivers on the Planet”

Pretty simple stuff.

HH

Anet has QA testing, its just not the best it could be. This has been shown with a few select releases over the years. But they DO get around to fixing stability issues when they are identifiable.

Lets take that nasty UI FPS hit bug from a few months back. They released that FoV change, then fixed something with it which caused the UI to take a 25fps performance hit when enabled.

Took them 2-3 weeks to figure it out and fix it. But they did fix it.

Same goes with countless other issues that have creeped up over the years. the issue here is their limited hardware libary to test against. My guess is they have a few Haswell Dev machines, a couple IVy and many Sandy bridge, and maybe 2-3 of each series of GPUs from Nvidia and AMD from release schedules (CGN1.0 1.1 and 1.2 for AMD, Maxwell and older from Nvidia) so they can benchmark and do inhouse testing when it fits the schedule and the content release.

Issue here is, they are not going to be able to test for every hardware setup scenario out there. Such as 4way CF/SLI setups, running custom drivers (CE), Hacked down version of windows, Or systems that do not have proper power supplies for these newer GPUs being released (I see this one alot hitting support groups).

So you can point fingers at Anet and DX9 coding all you want, but the fact on that is they are doing a good job there. Every machine I have built, rebuilt, tested GW2 on has ran the game with 0 issues with BSOD or CTD. Performance issues is a differnt issue and different topic. But the game IS stable.

If its not stable for you, its because of your system or something running on your system.