Guild Wars 2

I’m posting here because I’ve finally found a solution to an age old problem. Although I don’t require support, I’m hoping the forum staff leaves the thread (if nothing else, makes a new thread with the information & stickies it) so that the many others facing this issue can find it. For many months, the lack of a solution to this problem was what was keeping me from playing the game.

What the problem was

You have an AMD radeon graphics card. Randomly, while playing the game, your screen suddenly goes black and your monitor says no input. The computer is still running and you can still hear music / background noise – kind of like what you’d expect to happen if your monitor was suddenly disconnected from your PC. The only way to gain access to your monitor again is to manually restart the computer.

Things you’ve probably tried
Note: If you haven’t done these, try them first.

-Updated drivers
-Re-installed GW2
-Ran GW2 in windowed mode
-Ran GW2 as admin
-Ran GW2 -repair
-Disabled some startup programs
-Tried using a different router / directly connected to modem

What worked for me

I’m not 100% sure if this will work for everyone else, but it did for me. I have had this issue for well over a year and have contacted ArenaNet about it multiple times. Nothing suggested has ever worked, up until this. I ran across this fix on a forum for another game; the user was complaining about the same issues I was having.

Here’s what you have to do:

Open up your AMD Catalyst Control Center
Make sure you have advanced view enabled
Click on “Performance”
Choose “AMD Overdrive”
Bring your GPU clock settings down, to around 750 MHz

This is what it should look like: http://i.imgur.com/jUQt8sR.png

What was causing the issue

After some tinkering, I found out what it was exactly that was causing the crash. Basically, fire. Whenever I had fire on my screen (either from players, like a flamethrower, or from a torch on the map) I could hear my GPU humming more loudly. When I turned away, it would calm down. Lowering my clock settings stopped this, and I have yet to crash since I’ve made these changes.

Hopefully this solves your problems!

Sir. you may be a genius. I did what you suggested, hopped on my engineer and started blasting my flamethrower. I even popped the shaders back up to max and did it (which was usually an insta-crash) and so far nothing. I’ll play around on my engy for a while and see if this trend of not-crashing continues.

Shankes. I love you, you beautiful person.

This post needs to be stickied.

Lythari.6458:

Sir. you may be a genius. I did what you suggested, hopped on my engineer and started blasting my flamethrower. I even popped the shaders back up to max and did it (which was usually an insta-crash) and so far nothing. I’ll play around on my engy for a while and see if this trend of not-crashing continues.

Lythari.6458:

Shankes. I love you, you beautiful person.

This post needs to be stickied.

Glad it helped guys!

Bringing this back up.

Back to the top. Post if this helped you so it gets more views.

Bump for justice.

has black screen

has AMD card

didn’t have ccc open at the time of black screen crashes, opened it and had clock set to 775, lowered it

my ccc is different to what was pictured though, thanks for bumping this thread though.

Time to test!

I thought blackscreen was something to do with getting disconnected from Arenanets servers.

TEST FAILED Lowered to 750, was fine and dandy, got past the asura tutorial on my new ranger (a place I black screened on), but got blackscreen by the rata sum leatherwork station.

Gonna try now with overdrive disabled (not hopeful, seeing as ccc was closed during the previous blackscreens so I would assume it wouldn’t have been activated?)

And still got blackscreens with overdrive disabled my black screens aren’t cured.

Something to note though: my blackscreens of death, I can alt tab/alt f4/hit f11 and kill the program and then restart, I don’t need to reboot my computer.

lokikron.6705:

has black screen

has AMD card

didn’t have ccc open at the time of black screen crashes, opened it and had clock set to 775, lowered it

my ccc is different to what was pictured though, thanks for bumping this thread though.

Time to test!

I thought blackscreen was something to do with getting disconnected from Arenanets servers.

TEST FAILED Lowered to 750, was fine and dandy, got past the asura tutorial on my new ranger (a place I black screened on), but got blackscreen by the rata sum leatherwork station.

Gonna try now with overdrive disabled (not hopeful, seeing as ccc was closed during the previous blackscreens so I would assume it wouldn’t have been activated?)

And still got blackscreens with overdrive disabled my black screens aren’t cured.

Something to note though: my blackscreens of death, I can alt tab/alt f4/hit f11 and kill the program and then restart, I don’t need to reboot my computer.

Hmm, if you can close the program, you’re more than likely having a different issue. The problem this fixes crashes the whole system, not just the program.

lowering GPU Mhz to fix blackscreen ?? not a fix …lol worst advice ever .. it’s a symptom for a bigger problem.

Your GPU is crashing causing the black screen … The cause can be anything

1- Bad GPU , can’t sustain stock speed specified in the video card BIOS .. yeah it happen. bad yield on the wafer but the manufacturer decide to use it anyway .. for example Powercolor Video card will die / defective in the first or two years of use .. just bad components …cheap stuff. or Cheap Mobo … compatibility problem , Bad BIOS.

2- Bad or poor unreliable Power supply , Vid card ain’t getting enough juice or too much of it

3- Overheating causing the video card to crash , any components on a vid card can cause crashes , VRM , memory chip , electric leaks .. etc etc ..

lowering your video card speed is NOT a fix/Solution .. search elsewhere.

Farming Flats.5370:

lowering GPU Mhz to fix blackscreen ?? not a fix …lol worst advice ever .. it’s a symptom for a bigger problem.

Your GPU is crashing causing the black screen … The cause can be anything

1- Bad GPU , can’t sustain stock speed specified in the video card BIOS .. yeah it happen. bad yield on the wafer but the manufacturer decide to use it anyway .. for example Powercolor Video card will die / defective in the first or two years of use .. just bad components …cheap stuff. or Cheap Mobo … compatibility problem , Bad BIOS.

2- Bad or poor unreliable Power supply , Vid card ain’t getting enough juice or too much of it

3- Overheating causing the video card to crash , any components on a vid card can cause crashes , VRM , memory chip , electric leaks .. etc etc ..

lowering your video card speed is NOT a fix/Solution .. search elsewhere.

Spent over $1k building my own gaming desktop, it’s not a cheap card, thanks.

Power supply is fine for card.

Overheating isn’t an issue.

If you don’t have the problem, you wouldn’t understand. Literally nothing else works.

So, I have an Nvidia card and this problem is also plaguing me… Any suggestions where to find a similar program? I’m guessing this is a problem that the newer high end cards are having, they seem to have issues with older games sometimes.

specs: GTX 980, i5 4670k, Asus Z87-A, 32gb RAM, 700W PSU

As I understand, this has nothing to do with OOM Crashes, right?

Between now and when I posted this last year, I’ve stopped playing the game. On a whim, I decided to load it back up yesterday, and messed around in PvP for a while. Same computer, but I upgraded from Windows 7 to 10. During the upgrade, my graphics card settings must have reset. I experienced a black screen crash within 20 minutes. I looked this post up, re-did my changes, and have been 100% since. Unfortunate that this problem still exists, but for those out there who have the same issue (same graphics card, basically) – fear not, the fix still works.

I know this post is old but I want to add that I have the same exact issue yet with a GTX 970 SC but if I put gw2 in windowed or windowed fullscreen mode it never happens lol. weird. I think of it as if the computer isn’t sending signals to the monitor that there’s activity when it’s in fullscreen which led me to think that its the gw2 client at fault