Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone,

I am having some issues with a new ATI 7770 graphics card that I recently bought… currently im running 10.12 drivers (newest).. Issue is that my graphics completely freeze periodically when im in the game. My mouse can move, but the entire screen just freezes for roughly 10 seconds then starts to work again. Then it might work for 2 minutes without ever freezing. Usually when I first enter the game, I can go 10min without a freeze… then when the first one hits.. its roughtly every 30 seconds or so.

What iv’e done:

I decided to reformat the computer because I had nvidia graphics drivers on the machine.. and I installed the ATI ones without cleaning our the nvidia drivers… so I figured it may have caused the drivers to glitch. (I know this is drastic, but I wanted to clean the computer anywase)

I put the graphics card in a new slot
I re-intalled the drivers multiple times… I tried other versions as well.
I re-fit the graphics card to make sure it was snug in its place.
I added a new power supply 550w. (needed 450). I did this before I bought the graphics card so it was always running with a 550w power supply.

What’s causing this freezing? Please don’t tell me its the card its self I just bought it and my 14 days at best buy are up. I did some research and I heard that ATI has issues with this, and that newer drivers arnt the best to run 3d apps off. Can someone confirm this?

I will try to roll my drivers back to 10.9 and see what that does.. any info you can give would be greatly appreciated.

if you need more information about my system ill be glad to share.

Thanks!

Power supply may be a bit low you may want to go with 600 or even 700 watts depending on CPU and anything else installed in your PC. It could be boarder line on the PSU. Your PC runs OK till you play the game, game runs OK for a while then the PSU heats up causing a voltage drop PC freezes up.

I was also getting the occasional bluescreen.. and it pointed to the graphics driver. Why would I need a higher psu when it only needs 450 to run? keep in mind.. thats an upgrade from a 300w supply that came with the machine.

so its getting worse… feels like its deteriorating somehow.. its freezing non stop. I can run it when its at the lowest settings though… really seems like something isnt working correctly with a graphics setting in gw2…

Maybe the card is defective do you have access the a second PC to test it in see if it does the same thing.

unfortunately I dont… if the card is defective why can I still run the game at the lowest settings? once I hit 1gig of memory on gw2.. everything starts to freeze.. hmm

What brand is your power supply?

Have you tested your RAM to make sure it’s not defective? Run Memtest+
Or were you referring to 1GB of memory on GW2 being your video memory? If you meant video memory then that would be your issue, your vid card is a 1GB card, it can’t perform higher than that.

What CPU do you have?

sobe.4157:

…Or were you referring to 1GB of memory on GW2 being your video memory? If you meant video memory then that would be your issue, your vid card is a 1GB card, it can’t perform higher than that.

From my experience, it’s pretty impossible to hit anywhere near 1GB of video memory usage with GW2 unless you’re pushing extreme resolutions (Eyefinity with 3 1080p screens) with Supersampling and using an operating system without optimized video memory usage (Vista).

I think the highest I’ve seen was close to or slightly over 500MB, with 3-screen (5040×900) Eyefinity on Windows 8.

Are you sure you’re running the latest drivers? The latest Catalyst drivers for the HD 7xxx series is 13.9

Sabor.6935:

Are you sure you’re running the latest drivers? The latest Catalyst drivers for the HD 7xxx series is 13.9

Yikes, didn’t even notice the driver version in the first post lol.

For clarification purposes though, Graath probably has an AMD Radeon HD 7770 (no such thing as a “ATI 7770”). The newest WHQL-signed driver is 13.9, but the latest beta driver is 13.11 currently.

Not too sure if he really is using 10.12 drivers though, since they don’t seem to support any of the 7xxx series (those drivers are from 2010, and the 7xxx series arrived in 2011 I think). But in any case, make sure to grab updated drivers from AMD directly (don’t use the OEM’s drivers as they’re likely old).

Actually tested it last night, GW2 got to 900~ MB VRAM usage measured through MSI Afterburner(Win7 x64 btw) @ 1920×1080 (Haven’t tested the game on my 2560×1440 panels), that didn’t last too long, but the point is it showed up on the graph. Right now after running around a few minutes for example it’s sitting at a steady 593, which is where I tend to see it, but the spikes up to 1GB are certainly there. This has reacted the same @ 1920×1080 on both an MSI GTX 680 Lightning as well as Galaxy GTX780 HoF.

Graath, I am having the exact same problem and have a similar video card as you AMD Radeon HD 7700. I started playing Guild Wars 2 with the newest video drivers installed, 13.9. I would get the black screen, then blue screen of death, and I’d have to reboot. This was quite frequent. I then tried installing previous drivers:
13.5
13.11
12.10
It was the 12.10 that made is a little better. I wasn’t getting blue screens of death anymore and at least didn’t have to reboot. Blue screen by the way said that the video driver failed. What would happen now is black screen and GW2 locks up.. wait like 10-20 seconds, and it usually recovers..sometimes does it again right away. And sometimes it doesn’t recover but I can at least end-task it and restart GW2 without having to do a reboot.

I’ve combed the web for solutions and was astonished to see how many other people, with different hardware configurations, operating systems, etc. were having the same problem. It leads me to believe that there’s an issue with GW2 code and not individual hardware/software configurations.

So for me the most stable (if you can even call it that) drivers were the 12.10 for GW2. It sucks because I just got Battlefield 4, and to play it properly I need 13.9 drivers…. meaning I have to uninstall the 12.10 driver if I want to play BF4, reinstall them if I want to play GW2