Guild Wars 2

Hi there. I been playing gw2 for about 4 months now and always crashing over and over if I try to play on higher graphic settings. I don’t have FPS lag or anything, its just sudden crashing. I’ve been trying countless option settings/combinations and no matter which settings I try, I’ll get crash in less than 30 min if doing pve or stay in town, unless every single option is set on lowest for best performance. I roll only in WvW pretty much and with higher settings, its guaranteed crash in less than 2 mins. With every single option set on lowest for best performance, its usually 30 mins to 2 hours at most until crash occur. But still barely playable when very heavy fights occur with over 120+ people, because movement due to fps drop is hardly controllable and you just run like headless chicken trying to avoid damage and unable to do much. So I am aware that character model quality and limit is the most deadly for me and always must be on lowest or its insta crash in WvW or at world bosses. Really dissapointing me being forced playing on lowest settings when all game looks so shabby. I’ve never had any issues with my graphics playing any other games, nor with my pc. I can load gw2 with 2 other games and play them by switching with zero issues.

My graphic card is designed primary for gaming. I did re-check if it was plugged into x16 slot and I even had it removed to clean dust from it. I did try to tweak with steps specified from another stickied thread “FPS and Performance based issues” and it didn’t do anything at all. Card is fully updated with latest driver and so is DirectX. Windows 7 reinstalled twice now, 2nd time wanted to try load and play gw2 without any windows updates, right after fresh install. Played for a week and still had same problems. Graphic card itself isn’t old, broken or outdated. Bought it about 6 months ago, just 2 months before starting to play gw2.

So from crash logs I know they are related to “OOM” which means Out of Memory. So the question is – could someone enlighten me on how to fix it? I asked several people in-game during the months and I never found anyone having such issue. So makes me wonder why my 4-core decent pc and such gaming card prevents me from enjoying the game?

Install the 64 bit version of Windows 7. Disable unneeded start up programs with MSCONFIG. Increase your page file size to the ‘Recommended’ settings.

Yeah, forgot to mention that current virtual memory is set at 10736 (double size the recommended). I changed it about a month ago to recommended and then doubled, but didn’t made any difference. I been tweaking pc’s for years now and I can assure you there’s not a single program ever running in background whilst playing gw2, except avast anti-virus. I’ve disabled about the half services via services.msc for the best pc performance, knowing they are unnecessary.

Think I start to get it… but still whats up with the crashing…

Ettanin.8271:

GW2 is mainly single-threaded. It’s not your hardware’s fault but how unoptimized the software is. You’d need a Tianhe-II supercomputer to get 60 FPS with full details and no entity culling. Even an extremely overclocked Core i7 4790 with quad-SLI’d GTX780 is not able to do this.

This issue is present in all DX9-based games because the DX9 render pipeline is single-thread only. DX11 is able to render multithreaded, with Civilization 5 being the first game utilizing it.

The game devs mainly used DX9 until recently due to WinXP support. With XP being a thing of the past, most devs are likely to move on towards DX11.

Mantulis.4153:

Yeah, forgot to mention that current virtual memory is set at 10736 (double size the recommended). I changed it about a month ago to recommended and then doubled, but didn’t made any difference. I been tweaking pc’s for years now and I can assure you there’s not a single program ever running in background whilst playing gw2, except avast anti-virus. I’ve disabled about the half services via services.msc for the best pc performance, knowing they are unnecessary.

It’s usually best to set unneeded services to manual, instead of disabled. Disabling some can actually hurt performance and may cause strange problems.

You should still install the 64 bit version of Windows though. The 32 bit kernel cannot use more than about 3.3 Gig of RAM (total) no matter how much you have.

Yep, I am aware about disabling versus manual and the strange problems that later might occur, thus certain ones I do set to manual. Thing is after fresh reinstall I played for over a month without touching anything and still was crashing. I have good performance in-game. Like I said before I can load two more games whilst being semi-afk in gw2 and play them by switching with zero problems. So performance isn’t the matter.

I get only slight fps lag with every single option being highest, which I use a lot for taking screens. If its LA town and theres 20-30 people around, i’ll crash in about two mins. If its WvW and a zerg nearby, it’s insta crash. So therefore its related to “Out of Memory”. Just don’t get why it overflows in matter of minuts or even seconds. I guess its time to try and set virtual memory to 100gb+. And yes, I am running 32bit, because I have “only” 4k rams. If nothing helps, I guess it will be time to get SSD with 64bit and 16k ram… just for gw2.

If you have over 3.3 Gig of RAM, you should be using a 64 bit OS.

I myself have 4 gig and run Windows 7 64 bit without any GW2 crashes. This is actually a fairly common fix for the OOM error with GW2. Please try it.

Abomally pretty much said it.

You should be running Windows 7 (64-bit) version with Service Pack 1 installed on it. Guild Wars 2 tech support have stated in other threads that running the 34-bit version of Windows 7 while playing Guild Wars 2 will result in an unstable game. Same thing with not having Service Pack 1 installed on Windows 7 (64).