Guild Wars 2

Problem: every few hours a crash because the game ran out of memory. only happens after zoning around a bit and participating in large events.

Question to playerbase: which settings should I change to reduce the memory footprint by as much as possible while still maintaining graphics as good as possible?

Plea to ANet: please either deliver a 64bit client or take a good long look at your garbage collector/memory management – it simply doesn’t do it’s job, at all. if you limit the amount of ram you can use by deciding to stick to 32 bit, you really should take better care of memory consumption and free up unused assets before throwing an ugly exception like this.

while it sure is a lot of fun having 20 gigs of unused ram sitting around and seeing the so loved out of memory exception from guild wars 2 again (usually just when scarlet finally shows up), how hard can it be to deliver a x64 client? I mean we’re in 2013 now, or did I miss something? even the 12 year old software I’m maintaining, which has to support some really old hardware, is fully x64 capable.

How much RAM do you have? Are you on a 64bit OS? How much RAM on your system is GW2 eating? Why do you think 64bit will help? A 32bit exe can use 4GB of RAM, I have yet to see GW use more than 2GB on my system.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

How much RAM do you have? Are you on a 64bit OS? How much RAM on your system is GW2 eating? Why do you think 64bit will help? A 32bit exe can use 4GB of RAM, I have yet to see GW use more than 2GB on my system.

sorry, I thought mentioning that there are ~20 gigs of idle ram would be an indicator of me using a 64bit OS and having about 24 gigs of ram.
I’m currently using Windows 8, though I’ve had the same problems under Windows 7 – both of them 64bit obviously. I haven’t used a 32 bit OS for years now (though I mainly stick around in linux, where 64bit aren’t such an apparent novelty anymore).

The problem arises when the 32 bit gw2 process tries to allocate more than his 4 gigs – which he does frequently in large events (wvw or invasions). it does not happen immediately, so it most likely has to do with their garbage collector not cleaning up as much as he could.

I assume the game caches at least some stuff, so my question: which settings would make most sense to reduce (currently everything’s on high) to reduce the memory footprint to something the game can handle without throwing unhandled exceptions

There is no basis for your nonsensical request for any overhauling of their client. I mean really?
I certainly frequent the heavy populated areas and in game events and never crash due to this “memory conundrum” you’re having.
Is there anyone else having this issue ?

Maze.3825:

There is no basis for your nonsensical request for any overhauling of their client. I mean really?
I certainly frequent the heavy populated areas and in game events and never crash due to this “memory conundrum” you’re having.
Is there anyone else having this issue ?

sorry if developing software to the standards of the current millenium is a nonsensical request. I’m sure 16 bit would be even better, why even 32, they could’ve just packed it to a boot disk with dos 6.2.

good to know you’re not having the same issue. instead of insulting me, you could tell me which settings you lowered, as this information would actually be helpful. the problem with running on a decent machine is autoadjust just selects everything on highest. which also uses the most memory, compared to say, limiting characters on screen etc.

Wish I could help you out man, I almost have the same setup as you. But I am not on windows 8, still on the 64 bit version of 7. And I have not done anything to adjust memory usage. Almost everything is on high or highest.

And the 32 bit part, it pretty much shows that Anet decided to use the old engine instead of building one from scrap. But looks like you know a hell of a lot more about this than I do.

With 6GB i have so far never ran out of memory. GW2 has no big memory leakage. Did you disable the page file? Some software just cant do without it.

In any case i agree a 64bit client would be nice. It is 2013 and only complete PC illiterates still use 32bit OS.

SonicTHI.3217:

With 6GB i have so far never ran out of memory. GW2 has no big memory leakage. Did you disable the page file? Some software just cant do without it.

In any case i agree a 64bit client would be nice. It is 2013 and only complete PC illiterates still use 32bit OS.

I don’t think it leaks too much actually, it usually happens after a few hours of normal play when entering largescale events. the temporary consumption during big events should be pretty high, I assume the small leakage from the gameplay before is what’s pushing the game over it’s limits.

if I just start the game and enter for example an invasion, nothing bad happens. after 2-3 invasions though the risk rises.

while other factors could play into it, the most common reason would be a small memory leak when dealing with assets, which is why lower specced machines don’t run into it as much as those which can handle highest res textures etc.

limiting a game (not even available to consoles) to 32 bit in this age is rather shortsighted in in my view as a software developer myself rather unprofessional. it directly limits textures, polygons and possible graphical complexity by an immense amount while only having the doubtful pro of supporting near-death hardware (and those who use such old hardware usually aren’t the biggest spenders when it comes to microtransactions anyways).

@Oranisagu.3706

in the game’s folder there is a crash log . can you post it ?

The highest usage I’ve seen from GW2 is roughly about 3 Gigs and that is with all settings at max. Lowering graphics settings will (of course) lower RAM usage.

As someone else asked – Did you disable your page file?

No matter what some [dubious] sources on the internet say – you should NOT disable the page file or set it less than the amount of RAM. Windows is designed to use the page file and it is always being used – even when there is plenty of memory. In fact, some programs won’t work properly with the page file disabled.

if they made the engine 64bit that would be saying allright so everybody running win xp win7 or vista 32bits cant play this game you do know most game run on 32bit engines dont you? even crysis 2 runs on a 32 bit engine and that looks significantly better then guild wars

Yes I was going to mention the page file as well… you need to have a functional page file. It doesn’t need to be the absurd default page to ram ratio but certainly something. I’ve found nearly all applications work without issue with at least a 1GB page (ran a 1GB page on a plethora of systems and Windows variant over the last decade and didn’t have any issues). In the cases where you will be loading nearly all your physical memory you will likely need a larger page (multilayer RAW image edits, encoding, rendering etc )

Windows is designed to use it and have access to it at all times regardless of your physical memory pool. Yes its true that you can often get away without one but don’t let anyone fool you that you’ll be without issue in doing so.

Also for those with SSDs, page access frequency with any decent physical memory pool is quite low so don’t buy into " oh no my page file is going to burn out my SSD!" Unless you are doing some very hardcore 24/7 workstation type stuff… you won’t exhaust your NANDs write endurance in the systems life time. The sheer amount of writing required to do this on even mainstream flash chips is extremely high… like over 10GB a day… for over 5 years.

Same thing happens to me, only a lot more frequently (1 invasion is usually enough to start off the blue-green tint skin effect covering other players and NPCs which tells me the crash is imminent).

Even though I’m using WinXP I agree there should be a 64bit client at this point. And a fix to the memory handling which is clearly not working well at the moment.

It’s 32-bit because NCSOFT is an Asian company, GW2 is coming to Asia and XP is still 30% of the OS market share there.

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

How much RAM do you have? Are you on a 64bit OS? How much RAM on your system is GW2 eating? Why do you think 64bit will help? A 32bit exe can use 4GB of RAM, I have yet to see GW use more than 2GB on my system.

My game actually ate 2.7 GB one time. I can’t remember where I was but I’m sure it was in a stupidly high population count area.

I get this still, got it 10 mins ago in SparkFly Fen while fighting Scarlet, logged back in and got overflow so missed reward ( thanks anet )

Win 7 64bit
16Gb RAM

It doesn’t seem to matter what system you have, or how good it is, its the limitations of the client that we have, and these big world events will continue to cause crashes.

I have never seen an out of memory error with GW2, and I use a computer with 8GB of RAM. I took part in the SparkFly Fen Scarlet event earlier too. Roamed a bit in Lions Arch before that.

I run with most settings on High/Ultra also (Shadows Medium, Reflections Off) at 5040×900 resolution (Eyefinity). Video Memory usage at times was up around 1100+MB even lol.

I currently use Windows 7 x64 + Radeon HD 7850 (2GB)

So either i’m just lucky, or there’s a hardware/driver factor contributing to GW2 running out of memory. Point being, this doesn’t happen to everyone it seems.

Behellagh.1468:

It’s 32-bit because NCSOFT is an Asian company, GW2 is coming to Asia and XP is still 30% of the OS market share there.

ORLY ? tell us n mmo that has 64 bit client PLEASE ….

i am still waiting to see the crash log from the open poster …..

Reborn.2934:

Behellagh.1468:

It’s 32-bit because NCSOFT is an Asian company, GW2 is coming to Asia and XP is still 30% of the OS market share there.

ORLY ? tell us n mmo that has 64 bit client PLEASE ….

i am still waiting to see the crash log from the open poster …..

World of Warcraft

That’s all I got lol

Espionage.3685:

Reborn.2934:

Behellagh.1468:

It’s 32-bit because NCSOFT is an Asian company, GW2 is coming to Asia and XP is still 30% of the OS market share there.

ORLY ? tell us n mmo that has 64 bit client PLEASE ….

i am still waiting to see the crash log from the open poster …..

World of Warcraft

That’s all I got lol

the 64 bit version client for WOW was in BETA STATE for 1 YEAR from 2012 until this year from a company that had for 8 years from their subscribers a monthly fee and with a huge budget behind !!!

good try wow-troll but you failed because this game is in its first year …. anet is not even in nasdaq as blizzard is .

i would like remind you that wow servers on its launch in 2004 was down every day for one month …

personally i don’t want quote me again > https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/Espionage-3685/showposts

next time you think that you can “play” with me, i will report you

Reborn.2934:

Espionage.3685:

Reborn.2934:

Behellagh.1468:

It’s 32-bit because NCSOFT is an Asian company, GW2 is coming to Asia and XP is still 30% of the OS market share there.

ORLY ? tell us n mmo that has 64 bit client PLEASE ….

i am still waiting to see the crash log from the open poster …..

World of Warcraft

That’s all I got lol

the 64 bit version client for WOW was in BETA STATE for 1 YEAR from 2012 until this year from a company that had for 8 years from their subscribers a monthly fee and with a huge budget behind !!!

good try wow-troll but you failed because this game is in its first year …. anet is not even in nasdaq as blizzard is .

i would like remind you that wow servers on its launch in 2004 was down every day for one month …

personally i don’t want quote me again > https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/members/Espionage-3685/showposts

next time you think that you can “play” with me, i will report you

Hey now, chill out lol. You wanted to know a MMORPG that had x64, I told you. I wasn’t in any way taking sides or praising WoW either. Couldn’t care less about the downtime of WoW or anything (trust me, I don’t even play WoW anymore).

I’ll quote who I want when I want (like I just did). Normally people I quote though don’t just go all out.. for no reason at all though (like I said, was just answering your request with no bias or anything).

The game uses the cpu instead of the gpu, which can result in 100% cpu usage and crashing.

chris.9142:

if they made the engine 64bit that would be saying allright so everybody running win xp win7 or vista 32bits cant play this game you do know most game run on 32bit engines dont you? even crysis 2 runs on a 32 bit engine and that looks significantly better then guild wars

Windows 7 is both 32bit and 64bit.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Windows 7 is both 32bit and 64bit.

Windows 7 32-bit is Windows 7 32bit. Windows 7 64-bit is Windows 7 64-bit. It can’t be both at the same time if that’s what you’re meaning.

Avelos.6798:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Windows 7 is both 32bit and 64bit.

Windows 7 32-bit is Windows 7 32bit. Windows 7 64-bit is Windows 7 64-bit. It can’t be both at the same time if that’s what you’re meaning.

What he means is probably that it comes in both variants.

Anyway, OP, you’re not the only one with the issue. While I don’t have it myself, I’ve tried to help a few who had it, assuming something was eating up all their RAM. A guy in my guild has the bug every few hours. While he only has 4 gb ram the game never uses over 1.5gb (thus he’s using a total of around 3.1 of 4gb ram. Running 64bit as well, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the message still appears randomly.

Never experienced a game as bugged as GW2

Treeline.3865:

Avelos.6798:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Windows 7 is both 32bit and 64bit.

Windows 7 32-bit is Windows 7 32bit. Windows 7 64-bit is Windows 7 64-bit. It can’t be both at the same time if that’s what you’re meaning.

What he means is probably that it comes in both variants.

Anyway, OP, you’re not the only one with the issue. While I don’t have it myself, I’ve tried to help a few who had it, assuming something was eating up all their RAM. A guy in my guild has the bug every few hours. While he only has 4 gb ram the game never uses over 1.5gb (thus he’s using a total of around 3.1 of 4gb ram. Running 64bit as well, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet the message still appears randomly.

Never experienced a game as bugged as GW2

That’s what I mean.

All software has bugs, what infuriates me is Anet just dismisses it and tells us to get a better system. I hope I live long enough to see a worldwide implementation of a set of rules and guidelines, or laws as it were governing software, it’s support, and so on. There may be a ray of hope, the FTC is starting to investigate gaming co’s, we’ll see where that goes.

I’ve visited the most populated city and gw2.exe*32 has reached up to 3,2 GiByte (!) after 2 scarlets invasions.

Then back to divinity’s reach → up to 2,9 GiByte.

status update: activated culling again (medium settings for the time being) helped a lot. the game still leaks memory but restarting after 2 or 3 invasions made sure I didn’t get any more crashes.
a crash report (as someone requested) is unfortunately useless, which is why I didn’t post one. it’s an unhandled out of memory exception, it’s been sent to ANet, my mem is fine (and tested) and there’s nothing more the community can learn from a crash report.
I was hoping to get a few pointers which settings were most prone to memory leaks in order to reduce those settings specifically instead of randomly setting stuff down and playing on the level of wow graphics.

for those who claimed a 64 bit client would make it impossible to play under several versions of windows:
since windows 2000 there have been 64 bit versions of every (desktop) windows version except millennium, which was the last (stillborn) non-NT windows.
so no, none of the supported versions of windows would be excluded. what you were thinking about is the architecture.

except a 64bit client in no way excludes 32 bit enthusiasts, and it doesn’t force ANet to maintain two codebases or other very uninformed stuff I’ve read here.
while it would make sense to not support 32 bit from the beginning, they dropped the ball on that one, so the only option would be to support both, which is the only sensible option now.
developing a software in 32 and 64 bit is possible, most of the code will be identical, the difference happens when compiling, not when coding. there are some areas where specific code for each supported architecture is needed (usually everything where hardware is directly concerned), so SOME code will have to be written again/changed to support both architectures. also there’s some overhead in buildscripts etc. it’s not a one afternoon task, but it’s hardly impossible.

while it’s acceptable to release a game with only a 32 bit client to bring in some revenue before improving the engine, they should and hopefully have already have laid down the basics to add in 64bit support later on, as well as other optimizations they knew they had to do but didn’t have the time/funding yet – that’s normal procedure when developing a complex system and wanting to get usable output fast. if they intentionally ignored 64 bit when designing their software, they got a useless architect who should’ve replaced by somebody who knows what he’s doing.

do what WoW did

give advanced players the option to use a 64bit client while letting the “lesser” casual players on “lesser” hardware still have access to 32 bit client.

infact when they beta tested 64bit client all they did was give u a few files to add to the game folder and bam it ran 64bit mode

thos solves both the low end users and asian user issues and lets us high end users make the most of things.

also direct x 11 support please

WoW can do it!

its dx11 that’s needed much more then 64bit that and better multithreading

those of you with crashs have you tried increasing your page file size

Did you disabled Pagefile? If you did… that would be the problem.