Guild Wars 2

Firstly where I come from on this issue.

- Sapphire HD7850 2gb, 8gb corsair vengeance ram, i5 3570k, Crucial M4 256gb SSD, MSI GD55 mobo, Samsung LED via HDMI

Between 30th August till 3rd October, horrible client crashing, repair client nonsense, grey screen sound crash at completely random intervals.

None of my other games crashed – Dirt 3, Deus Ex, NFS, Crysis, not even spider solitaire!!

Have repaired, recopied, redownloaded GW2 to no avail.
Have tried AMD Catalyst 12.4 & 12.8 and only found that 12.4 was more stable.
Have overclocked GPU & CPU and then reset to normal for a brief interval of stability
Have downloaded latest Intel motherboard drivers – might have stabilised as well
Have done chkdsk /r and no errors have ever been reported.

Have found that turning off the ‘Enable Graphics Overdrive’, ticking Tesselation to ‘user application’ and unticking ‘enable surface format optimization’ in Catalyst center stabilised things a lot more.

Have found that setting Textures to medium in GW2 graphics options also helped a lot and didn’t deteriorate the visual quality too much.

Still though, crashing persisted.

Finally, decided my Crucial M4 256gb was the only point of contention between 2 otherwise identical machines, mine crashing the other not using a WD Black 1TB SATA HDD.

Went to Crucial’s website and found that new firmware has just been released. Had to work out how to flash the drive since their in-windows flash utility doesn’t detect any SSDs for some odd reason…

…and now 4 days straight with 4-8 hours of GW2 per day, not a single crash. Have not tried to overclock as I have not noticed a real gain from it in-game.

So if you have an SSD, see if there’s new firmware.
If you have an HDD, make sure the latest SATA controller software is installed and disable the overclocking function, be it NVIDIA or AMD/ATi.

Myth Shaia, I just want to prematurely thank you… my desktop, which is nearly identical to my wife’s desktop, has been randomly crashing in GW2.

A few minutes before reading this post, I started to wonder if it had something to do with my Crucial M4 SSD (wife is only using the WD Black 1TB SATA3 HDD).

I’ve installed the latest M4 firmware — only time will tell if it helped, but your extremely similar situation and positive results has given me a ray of hope!

Hi Chima.

Hope that your problems will be resolved as well, just make sure you put Textures on Medium. Whenever a new patch from GW2 lands, it resets my Textures to High and the intermittent crashing begins anew until I reset them to Medium.

Further to this, I don’t know if it’s because of HDMI but that may be the cause of the sound/grey screen crash.

Would suggest putting your sound settings in GW2 to medium or low and see if that helps as well if anyone else has this problem.

This is Day 2 of no crashes after updating the Crucial M4’s firmware; all other variables should have remained unchanged… so it’s really starting to look to be the root cause of my crashes!

A further note on settings, I had also moved my audio hardware bar to minimum latency as well, not sure if this combined with HDMI was may be causing graphics issues.

Ahh, also do check the ram clock in the bios. For some reason many mobo’s are setting 1600mhz to 1333mhz and this appears to be doing some nasty stuff to GW2.

At this time, I am able to play with very few, if any crashing at all.