So, I recently replaced my Radeon HD 6450 with a Gigabyte Geforce GTX 750 TI. It’s considered a low end card but it was worlds better than what I had, it fit my budget, and it worked with my hardware, ie I didn’t have to upgrade the PSU or cooling options.
I have a Dell Core 2 Duo E4500 cpu
Corsair 450w PSU
Couple western digital hard drives
DVD drive
I’m using a Vizio flat panel tv for a monitor. My old video card connected to it through the VGA port. My new card had an HDMI option and the tv has a port for that as well so that’s how I hooked it up initially. Two problems were readily apparent: the tv no longer turned on/off automatically with the computer and the desktop no longer fit inside the display area. I had to go into the nVidia control panel and resize my desktop to make it fit within the display area. Minor quirks but they were noted.
With the announcement of the upcoming expansion and at the prodding of a friend I decided to hop back into GW2. I was excited to see how the new card performed. Things did not go well. The first couple times I played there were no issues. I was able to turn up some of the graphics options and I could participate in group events without it turning into a slideshow. It looked promising.
And then I got a strange blue and green checkerboard pattern at the character select screen. I was able to pick a character and log in and things seemed to go normally after that. The next time I played I got my first blackscreen after hitting play in the launcher. I tried it a couple more times. Same thing. Sometimes I could alt tab or use the windows key to get out. Most of the screen was still black but occasionally I could see the task bar or be able to bring up the Task Manager and force the game to quit. Doing so still left graphical artifacts and other weirdness that required a reboot to clear.
I upgraded my video drivers. That seemed to fix the problem temporarily. I was able to log in and play. The next log in attempt after that it was back to a blackscreen though.
I tried the -repair option next. It took awhile to locate the local.dat file so I could delete it. It was not in the My Documents folder on the desktop. Ultimately I found it by going to C:/Documents and Settings/User/Application Data/Guild Wars 2. So it was in the Documents folder….just not the most obvious one. Anyways, ran the repair. No luck. I also fiddled with the 3D settings in the nVidia control panel a bit. That didn’t seem to help either.
I did a little research. Turns out other people have experienced these same problems. Someone mentioned HDMI ports sometimes causing an issue. I figured why not test that so I plugged my old VGA cable back into the monitor, got an adapter for the other end and plugged it into the DVI-I port on my video card. Hey, the monitor is back to turning on/off with the computer and the desktop fits the display like it’s supposed to. No more resizing. Ran the repair option once more for good measure. Booted up GW2. No more blackscreen. Yay!
Now it crashes randomly after a time in game. Locks everything up necessitating a hard reboot. I can still hear the music playing though. No, it’s not an overheating issue. I checked. All my other games run fine. It’s just GW2 that’s having the problem.
So it looks like no more Gw2 for me until nVidia releases a driver fix.