Guild Wars 2

I have a HP pavilion dv7 laptop with an up-to-date ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6370 graphics card (1gb dedicated memory). As you can see in my attached image my UI is fully visible, and if I position my camera just right I can see my character perfectly clear, but everything else is how you see in the images: wildly changing shapes and colors. I’m just wondering if anyone else has this problem or if there is a known solution. All of my drivers and catalyst control center are updated. Any help would be appreciated.

I guess if no-one knows what my problem is, or how to fix it, I can always sell my screenshots as contemporary art and try to make my money back on this game :P If anyone could narrow it down to what is causing the problem I.e. graphics card or gpu or anything else I can try to figure it out from there.

Strange… don’t think is your graphics card since all the rest is ok… I sometimes have lines on my screen and alt-tabbing fixes that issue, worth the try i guess. Let me know if you sell the screenshots as art tho

It’s called artifacting and it’s usually a result of an overheating video card or malfunctioning drivers (vendor-side).

Try updating your drivers to the latest catalysts from http://www.amd.com/us. Make sure you uninstall your current ones before installing the new set.

FurMark or 3DMark should be able to verify if its being caused by overheating (if you can run either of those for 5-10 mins without it freaking out, it’s not heat).

Zwerg I tried alt+tabbing with no success, thanks for the suggestion though. Maxie I ran the Furmark burn-in test for 10 minutes and though my framerates were low (6-10 fps) it ran fine, my gpu never went over 69 degrees Celsius. When I try updating my graphics/catalyst driver through AMD they tell me it is not compatible and that I should try the manufacturer’s website, and according to them I am sporting the most updated drivers. When I updated my drivers a few days ago I did not remove the existing ones first, so tonight after work I will uninstall and redownload them and see if that works. Thanks for the help so far

Akuma, you have a laptop graphic card thats why the driver package of recent releases says its not compatible as AMD dont officially support these cards.

However, they do have a “test” program taht will check if you device can actually use new drivers.

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonmob_win7-32.aspx

Go to that page and run the AMD tool. If it says your system is compatible, then you can try using official AMD drivers.

Good that it’s not a heat issue

Try the process of elimination; in your driver control panel’s 3D settings menu, set everything to application controlled. Then, in-game, in your options > graphics menu, lower/raise individual settings. If you still see no change, try forcing settings one at a time through your driver cpl then testing in-game.

For example, start with anisotropic filtering as application controlled, check in-game, set anisotropy to 4x, check in-game, set to 8x, check again etc.

Lexandro, I ran the driver verification tool that you suggested and it gave me this message,

“AMD Catalyst Mobility cannot be downloaded due to incompatible hardware/software on your computer. The version of your graphics adapter is not supported. Please contact your notebook manufacturer for a graphics driver update.”

I know the graphics card has to be the issue here, because my laptop has switchable graphics and when I switch to my power saving Intel HD graphics card it can run the game (terrible framerate and every quality option set to low or off) but it runs without the artifacting shown in my two images above. I’m about to try out Maxie’s suggestion of messing with every option one by one. Hehe gonna be a long night.

Here’s the HP driver for your graphics card:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&softwareitem=ob-89582-1

You can also get it from HP’s ftp server (sp50599.exe):

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp50501-51000/

If you open the file below it (sp50599.html) it shows:

PURPOSE:
Routine
SoftPaq NUMBER:
sp50599
SUPERSEDES:
sp49517
EFFECTIVE DATE:
December 03, 2010
CATEGORY:
Driver – Graphics
SSM SUPPORTED:
YES
PRODUCT TYPE:
Notebooks
HARDWARE PRODUCT MODEL:
HP Pavilion dv6 Notebook PC Series
HP Pavilion dv7 Notebook PC Series
DEVICES SUPPORTED:
AMD M880G with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250
AMD Radeon HD 6550M
AMD Radeon HD 6370M

OPERATING SYSTEM:
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Basic 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Basic 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Starter 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Edition

Unfortunately, it looks like the card is defective to me. You may be able to replace it, but you’ll have to completely disassemble the laptop.

Bah…HP link won’t work from here. If you do a search for “HP sp50599.exe” it should be first on the list.

Thanks very much Abomally, I’m installing that driver now so we’ll see if that fixes it. It might be a defective card, but I can run world of warcraft, Arma2 with DayZ mod, and Skyrim without any problems, so I would think a faulty card would mess up on those too.

Alright so I ran that file you told me abomally, I first had it uninstall everything first, then I did a system reboot, and then I did a clean install. The game now works without the artifacting but I no longer have catalyst control center or the ability to switch between high performance and power saving graphics cards lol.
EDIT: I just reinstalled catalyst control center and made sure I was using my ATI radeon card, and not my intel HD one, and when I ran the game the wild artifacting was back. I’m guessing after I deleted CCC my computer reverted automatically to the power saving GPU, which is why I could run the game without screen tearing.

Have you tried reinstalling DirectX?

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35

Problem solved. If anyone using an AMD ati radeon graphics card has a problem similar to mine, it can be solved by reverting back to an older catalyst driver. What worked for me was the 13.1 catalyst driver, found here http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_vista64.aspx
Thanks to everyone who contributed