Guild Wars 2

Ok so this should really be on their to-do list more than anything, technical issues above content in my opinion.

I normally run GW2 with about 50-60 FPS, I know most will think that’s good numbers but I don’t fully think so. This computer was specifically built for GW2, my first one, and is compound by the following parts:

- Gigabyte G1.Sniper 3, Socket-1155
- Gainward GeForce GTX 670 2GB PhysX CUDA
- Corsair HX 1050W PSU
- Corsair H100 Hydro Series CPU cooler
- Intel® Core i7-3770K Processor
- Corsair Dominator DHX DDR3 1600MHz 12GB
- OCZ SSD Agility 4 Series 2.5" 128GB (the location of the game)

I do experience some slight adjustment problems, which happens every hour. This has to do with simply moving my direction in a quick way, which tends to “lag” the movement for a short period of time. Not quite sure if this is some optimalization problems or so, but well that’s not too big of a deal for the time being,

My main problem is that the game drops about every 2nd hour, from 40-50+ FPS, to about 10, and very often below 10, my screen turns black right before this FPS-drop engages, and then back on. This puts me in an unplayable situation, as I simply cannot do anything, everything moves just too slow. The only solution to this which I’ve found is to minimize the game and start browsing the net or something, then come back some minutes later.

A 2nd “main” problem which occurs slightly on more rare occasions, has to do with a CPU increasement which tends to go from about 10%-25% working capacity to about 80%. Nothing will respond when that situation is up and going, and I have to ctrl+alt+delete the whole operation and just restart.

ALL of these parts are 2 months old, and this NEVER happens with anything else I do. Crysis 2 etc. – perfectly smooth not a drop in the ocean that can be realated to technical issues. No other game, no MMO, just Guild Wars 2. So it cannot be hardware related, imho.

I’am using the Nvidia 310.54 drivers atm, all are up-to-date.

As the topic states, this has been an ongoing problem which has followed me from the very first BWE, so I’m starting to get a bit worried. I know for a fact that I’am not alone, and it is kinda a bit more disturbing considering that I stand greatly above the computer requirements :-/

I hope my post haven’t been too negative, I’m a truly dedicated GW fan and this is after all the only MMO I considering myself active within so. I just wish it could run smoother, as that’s what I personally notice the most when I play =)

EDIT:

Ok so here is something new which I’ve discovered…
The game on maximum settings is what actually makes this whole crash appear, and tbh now I’m really worried becasue it has limited itself to my 2nd problem:

- Screen turns black
- A weird sound appears out of nowhere, really worrying sound tbh..
- The PC never shuts down, keeps running
- My screen then goes tries then to locate my input settings, like digital, HDMI, analog etc. and looping while doing that.
- I cannot use my keyboard, as in caps/num, nothing will respond.
- The only way to resolve this is sadly to crash-restart the whole thing.

I also want to inform that the whole CPU increase cannot really be verified as of now, the crash appears out of nowhere and it is really impossible to state if that has to do with the CPU. So one can say that this is a 3rd form of technical problem…

What is interesting though is that this appear on maximum settings (keep in mind my specs…). I checked it out earlier tonight, while exploring the new content, and I seriously had 100 FPS with a lot of people around me, and then ofc, it all shut itself black.

EDIT:

It now appears that no matter what setting it’s turned onto, it will crash in the very end. The difference is that I can play with low settings for a longer period of time before everything goes black and as stated above happens.

However, when lowering them to the minimum requirement, this never occurs, at all. So yeh, I’m lost really. My first rig dedicated to this game, and a whole new internet, all for GW2. Please, don’t tell me that I have technical and hardware related issues, please :c

Sincerely,

Fume.

Unfortunately at this time GW2 is a CPU centric game. The general concensus is to OC your CPU. This should help increase FPS as well as help mitigate high CPU usage issue.

As far as the FPS drops, you can create a second GW2 shortcut and add -diag to the end of the command line. When you start having the sudden FPS drop, minimize the game and run that and see if the results tell you anything.

Seeing how it mostly runs, I would check to see if something is overheating with some monitoring tool. That could force throttling of CPU and/or GPU.

Maybe some process is starting up and killing performance, such as an anti-virus program.

Ok so really, OC my CPU is the solution? That’s beyond acceptable, it lowers your CPU’s lifespan for Grenths sake. I doubt it is my cooling system, 8 fans and everything, everything on max. As I’ve stated earlier, this is GW2, not some super-high-end game running Dx11 etc. It’s not showing up elsewhere.
I guess I’ll have to manually sort this out, if they can’t even approach us with some positive movement, we’ll have to do it ourselves…

I don’t think OC is the solution. It’s a knee jerk reaction by many in this forum. Your problem is an intermittent drop right? So look for intermittent causes if possible.

In my experience, when it comes with gaming, we are the first line of defense, so to speak. If google does not offer up advice, than the next step is self diagnosis. Customer support is limited in my experience.

One thought is to try disabling everything you can think of on startup, and try running like that. If that does not solve the problem, keep everything disabled you can, and start looking for uneeded processes. Using google and taskmgr, and trial and error, you can often determine if a process is really needed, and if not kill it. This is assuming the problem is caused by a running process interfering with the game. If it’s not that, then hardware is the next potential cause I can think of.

michaeljhuman.3940:

I don’t think OC is the solution. It’s a knee jerk reaction by many in this forum. Your problem is an intermittent drop right? So look for intermittent causes if possible.

In my experience, when it comes with gaming, we are the first line of defense, so to speak. If google does not offer up advice, than the next step is self diagnosis. Customer support is limited in my experience.

One thought is to try disabling everything you can think of on startup, and try running like that. If that does not solve the problem, keep everything disabled you can, and start looking for uneeded processes. Using google and taskmgr, and trial and error, you can often determine if a process is really needed, and if not kill it. This is assuming the problem is caused by a running process interfering with the game. If it’s not that, then hardware is the next potential cause I can think of.

This is quite a widespread problem and issue that a pretty large portion of GW2’s players are currently struggling with, and a lot have been doing so for a long long time.
I would eliminate hardware tbh, as it should have shown up in other games too, am I right or? There is not a single other active task running on my computer when playing GW2, which can run if you know what I mean =)
But yeh, I’ll go ahead and investigate this with the whole editing and everything that follows. Thank you for your time…

well…i thought that it’s not possible…but now i even can’t past the 40FPS mark anymore (it was 40-60+FPS yesterday…have my very own places where i always check my average framerate)

OC’ing your GPU can help you
look up some OC tutorials especially made for your GTX to see what’s the optimal clock/fan/voltage
for my GTX580, the most stable setup i could aquire is a clock between 888 and 902MHz and a voltage of 1,1v – fan speed settings are customized-auto depends on it’s temps
was able to get 10FPS more…which still is not even quite satisfying for me

btw…the best tool for monitoring/OC’ing your GFX-card is “MSI Afterburner”
but personally, i do not recommend OC’ing a GFX card…not until they are actually made for OC’ing like any current-gen CPU
and some newer GFX-cards dynamically OC’ing themselves (similiar to intel’s speed-step thingy)

OC’ing the CPU is also not the solution if you got at least a quad core @3GHz…OC’ed my i7 950 to 4Gz without any performance boost

OC’ing RAM and installing GW2 on a SSD just reduced stuttering and increased the loading times (better than nothing, i guess…)

but the only fix i found so far: lower the graphics (i prefer to disable reflections and set render sampling to native – anything else gives either none or just a slight boost of framerate)
everytime when i’m about to launch GW2, i say to myself “please no patch please no patch”

btw…running 20-40FPS now -_- (sys-specs @sig)
guess i only start playing this game again, when i’ve got a HAL9000 in my possession…

With the black screen and fps drop it sounds like it’s the nvidia drivers crashing and then recover. I’ve had that happen before but not in this game.
If it isn’t a known problem with the driver/card then it is the clockspeeds set too high or gpu voltage too low.

if other games work or not is irrelevant, they all put different load on gpu so may not trigger it. I’ve seen cards pass Furmark stresstest only to fail to complete 3dmarks Vantage.

if my driver crashes, it recovers automatically and it resets to it’s normal voltage/clock speed after a screenfreeze followed by a short blackscreen
happened to me a few times while testing different OC settings - in-game and at the desktop screen

so blackscreen issues might be a driver crash, but not the FPS drops...other users must have noticed and also reported the short freeze/blackscreen before a FPS drop

alot people say it’s might be GPU throttling, cause it’s temps and usage became too high...
well, my CPU usage never goes above 50% in-game and my GPU never goes above 60% usage in-game
both components’ temps are quite cool in-game - around 50°C (around 122°F)
TC’s compenents are way better than mine...so his GPU/CPU usage will probably be even lower as well as his temps *looks at his cooling system*

just can’t be the driver only if those FPS-drops always get worse after every 2 patches they release for this game

wauwi.9162:

if my driver crashes, it recovers automatically and it resets to it’s normal voltage/clock speed after a screenfreeze followed by a short blackscreen
happened to me a few times while testing different OC settings – in-game and at the desktop screen

so blackscreen issues might be a driver crash, but not the FPS drops…other users must have noticed and also reported the short freeze/blackscreen before a FPS drop

Keep in mind though, your gpu is fermi, TC’s is Kepler and it’s different architecture with gpu boost clocks, dynamic voltage etc. So it might very well be fps drop due to driver crash if card remains in low power state afterwards or it could also be safty measure. These cards needs to be kept below 72c as thats the first thermal threshold for determining power state.

ecidemon.6408:

wauwi.9162:

if my driver crashes, it recovers automatically and it resets to it’s normal voltage/clock speed after a screenfreeze followed by a short blackscreen
happened to me a few times while testing different OC settings – in-game and at the desktop screen

so blackscreen issues might be a driver crash, but not the FPS drops…other users must have noticed and also reported the short freeze/blackscreen before a FPS drop

Keep in mind though, your gpu is fermi, TC’s is Kepler and it’s different architecture with gpu boost clocks, dynamic voltage etc. So it might very well be fps drop due to driver crash if card remains in low power state afterwards or it could also be safty measure. These cards needs to be kept below 72c as thats the first thermal threshold for determining power state.

Glad to see more people that are trying to help out here
My card doesn’t go above 40 degrees, the cooling is very fluent here and my card has an in-built cooler as well so. It can go to 50 but we’re talking about massive LA situations..

OK this needs a bump, I’m getting tired of this endless technical trainwrecks of issues.
It doesn’t matter anymore, if I lower the settings or not. IT WILL IN THE VERY END CRASH AND LIKE “PROBLEM 3” FOLLOW ITS FINE LINE. What’s different is that the time before the crash turns out to be longer, so I can actually play looking at terrible quality, for a longer period of time before everything goes down the drain.

Things are just getting worse by each day. Though it varies, everything tend to crash faster. I can log-in and play 5 minutes, then suddenly my screen turns black and I have to force-restart my pc. I CAN’T DO THIS TOO MANY TIMES, IT’S HONESTLY A HORRIBLE THING TO DO, CONSIDERING YOUR MESSING YOUR HARDWARE. So to put it short, I’ll have to GIVE UP GW2 as of now, as I don’t want to kitten up my computer because of these horrible technical issues which are obviously on Anet’s dirty hands now. We are not responsible for this, get a grip and give out some feedback guys, really. I heard that it was being investigated for about a month ago, that’s pretty weak considering its serious impact it strikes the ones that are affected.

Anyone found a solution yet? I just bought the game and have been having this same issue! Not yet found a solution.