Guild Wars 2

So, for the past few months I’ve been having a hell of a time with the game causing my graphics card tostop responding randomly, as well as artefact at random points of gameplay.

After months of dealing with this and trying everything I could think of I stumbled on the solution.

I’m going to guess you have an AMD card. And I have bad news for you. In their newer drivers amd managed to mess something up with directx9 which is what gw2 happens to run (along with a ton of other games) and there is currently 2 fixes I can say work for it.

1. If you have windows 10 you need to do a clean install of 7/8, whichever you had before upgrading. After that you need to install a legacy version of the amd driver, before it was called crimson. At that point the game should run again, however if you try to play any brand new games you’ll likely have to install a newer driver and switch back and forth depending on what game you want to play.

2. I know this is the most painful one, and it’s the one I opted to eventually do. You need to get a new gpu. I would avoid amd for the time being.

Alternatively, you could try and deal with it until they figure the issue out, but it seems this has been a problem for over a year so I wouldn’t hold your breath for a fix.

I’m not 100% sure if it’s every single amd gpu that has this problem but for reference I have a Radeon r9 280×. I’ve heard of this problem with every gpu in the 280/290 series as well as other seemingly random ones

Lol have you ever though your gpu might be the problem showing signs of dying, and has nothing to do with AMD or W10? Tahiti is well know to have a high failure ratio…

I have been using AMD and Gw2 for 2.5 years and never had any issue after trying preety much all drivers released in these years.
Well, only when I upgraded to Insider program last month to the latest 15002 build, but there is a workaround and the issue is already fixed in the latest version.

Which card do you have though?

Mine was less than a year old, and I’m not the only one who has specifically had problems with the combination I had. I know that it doesn’t affect every amd user.

That sounds very much like a hardware fault, rather than a general problem. It’s also … well, GW2 is not exactly the only DX9 game out there, and all, so it’s unlikely to be the only one that would experience this.

(Especially as, relatively speaking, it’s not the most GPU demanding game of the era either.)

Had a r9 285 and now RX 480, both overclocked and even bios modded.

And just because you have it for only a year doesn’t mean it can be broken and be the source of issues. Random crashes and artifacts are a clean sign of gpu not being stable or being faulty/dead.

Gw2 was not the only game it had problems with, but when looking into it I noticed the trend of every game it would stall on was a dx9 game. With ones using other versions running perfectly fine

I’ve always used a Radeon card with GW2, and I’ve yet to have any issues. I guess it’s not all AMD cards.

I would def not follow the suggestions made by OP. I’m running a R9 280X Toxic. About a year ago, I had problems with mainly GW2, and mostly there were issues with artifacts and corrupted graphics, all solved by updating the gpu bios.
My son runs the same type of card, had similar problems in other games. A gpu bios upgrade solved all of his issues as well.

Not saying you’re having issues with the gpu bios, but suggesting a downgrade to Win 7/8 from Win10, and make a clean install to make it work is not a good suggestion at all. So for anyone reading this – find another solution if you’re having issues.

Also, make sure it’s not overheating. You can even downclock your card for a while and see if things improve.

The only time I’ve had problems with AMD GPUs in GW2 (out of 5 GPUs- 4650M, 7850, 280x, 290, 390) was when I had an unstable overclock. I’m much more inclined to think that the OP’s card has an issue then any systemic problem with AMD cards, especially given the lack of complaints on this and other forums