Guild Wars 2

My wifes comp is going bonkers with GW2. Her screen totally locks up and turns grey/teal/tan or even just a freeze frame of the screen then has tons of green and pink lines all over (more often then not the screen goes grey). In the background you can just hear stuttering sound like “dddrrrddddrrrrrdddddrrrr”.

The only way to fix this is to hard restart. Some people have had freezes where they can ctrl+alt+delete or the game may go to desktop with an error, but she gets nothing. If you dont hard restart the screen will just sit there until the end of days.

I have been researching this for her for awhile now and I have heard of so many things ppl say fix freezes (a lot of times they post back saying nvm, it didnt work after all lol). I’m just totally at a loss here. I’ve tried:

-Rolled back drivers off of beta (306 i believe)
-Tried turning off vsync
-Set AA according to the sticky
- Dusted out PC (also checking for temps, they’re fine on max load)

This never happened to any other game before GW2. We were playing D3 like crazy before, never had a problem. I really want to hope it’s just something wonky with GW2 and it will get patched but I just don’t know what to do anymore

Anyone getting something like what I’m describing?

The fix for this is to downclock your graphics card by 10-20%. That will stop the crashing. (This crash has been around since closed beta and is believed to be an nVidia issue which may or may not be fixed in a future driver update. ANet has been almost completely silent on the issue.)

I will try this as my next fix. I’ve seen this mentioned here and there, so I’ll give it a shot (also heard that ppl tried this with no avail -_-).

Can you recommend a utility to easily downclock? (never OC’d or anything so I have no idea what would be best/easiest for this)

If you’re running an nVidia card, right click your desktop and open nVidia Control Panel (if you don’t have it, you might need to download it from nvidia.com).
Click Performance>Device Settings>Custom and downclock a bit.

So what exactly should I change?

There are two sliders, the core bus and mem bus. The core bus was already at the lowest slider option and the mem bus was at about 3/4 of the slider option (I just lowered it to the middle of the slider).

I swear I’m not a comp noob, just gpu/overclocking noob ^_

You should never have to underclock your video card to play a game. What you’re describing sounds exactly like defective hardware or driver issues. That freezing you’re getting is most likely a BSOD, but you’re unable to see it because your graphics card is getting messed up.

After you leave it frozen for a minute or so and reset your computer, does windows say it has recovered from an error when it starts up again? If it does, then you’re most definitely getting a BSOD. However, it’s important to note that you won’t get that message if you’re resetting your computer before a report is created from the BSOD.

To make absolutely sure the dump file is getting written, you will have to get the computer to freeze, then while it’s frozen check your hard drive activity light. Make sure you don’t reset your computer until the activity light stops going. At that point you can reset your computer and wait for your computer to boot back up and give you the error message. You can check the details in the window and it will give you a code or something so you can investigate further.

Frongo may have the right idea, but with the amount of people this has been happening to (there was 5 page thread full of people having the same/similar issues on GuildWarsGuru) I’m not completely sure it’s 100% hardware related. It may have something to do in part with the game as well.

With that said, mine MAY have been hardware related. I ran MemTest86+ and it failed on a pass before I left for work. I’ll have some troubleshooting to do when I get home, but I know for a fact that my RAM was just fine before installing/playing Guild Wars 2. The issue of my PC completely locking up and making the audio distortion came with Guild Wars 2.

- Correlation is not causation; memory failing has little to do with GW2

- GW2 puts a far greater demand on the video card than D3; my 580 yawns at D3 but GW2 can peg it at 100% utilisation regularly

- Joeltron: it is difficult to provide technical info when we don’t know which video card you are running

- Driver 306.02 and the beta before it ran fine on my and my wife’s machines, GTX580 833/2066

- I use MSI Afterburner (doesn’t require MSI hardware) to change clocks and monitor FPS, GPU util

- Run memtest 86+ overnight, run VMT (video memory test) as well as full video diags; ensure hardware (heatsinks, fans) is thoroughly clean, especially the video card’s boxed-in heatsink

- Ensure case has plenty of airflow; test with cover(s) off with a desk/floor fan blowing in it to eliminate airflow issues

- Run chkdsk /r, sfc /scannow, reinstall DirectX, run Windows update, clean install video drivers to check for software issues

Rolo.9248:

- Correlation is not causation; memory failing has little to do with GW2

- GW2 puts a far greater demand on the video card than D3; my 580 yawns at D3 but GW2 can peg it at 100% utilisation regularly

- Joeltron: it is difficult to provide technical info when we don’t know which video card you are running

- Driver 306.02 and the beta before it ran fine on my and my wife’s machines, GTX580 833/2066

- I use MSI Afterburner (doesn’t require MSI hardware) to change clocks and monitor FPS, GPU util

- Run memtest 86+ overnight, run VMT (video memory test) as well as full video diags; ensure hardware (heatsinks, fans) is thoroughly clean, especially the video card’s boxed-in heatsink

- Ensure case has plenty of airflow; test with cover(s) off with a desk/floor fan blowing in it to eliminate airflow issues

- Run chkdsk /r, sfc /scannow, reinstall DirectX, run Windows update, clean install video drivers to check for software issues

Second to this. I’ve seen D3 usage of only to 60% or below while GW2 used 100%.

@OP
I think posting your wife’s dxdiag should help

Ok, sounds like I have a little bit of work today when I get home tonight.

I will try to compile as much ‘evidence’ as I can and get it posted. Thanks a lot guys for the input, you make me think there is hope for her comp after all

*edit – posted dxdiag

Also she has a gtx 460. Like mentioned above, I rolled back drivers and made sure it was a clean install like suggested above, so already tried that.

It seems like GW2 has an issue with nVidia or vice versa.

I have an HD 6870 and it’s not seeing 100% load and running highest settings (only reflections are turned down to “terrain and sky only”) at a steady 60fps even in group fights. I’m sure I’ll see some drop on WvWvW, but haven’t tried there yet.

Several hundred people posted about this (and I assume thousands didn’t) during the beta. While ANet was largely silent on the issue, they did mention a problem with factory overclocked cards (the fact that downclocking fixes the issue completely seems to support this) and implied that there were serious issues with nVidia’s new series of drivers (which has been corroborated in numerous other forums unrelated to GW2).

Given the breadth of the problem, the similarities in cards with problems (GTX 560ti and GTX 570 HD being the most common culprits) and lack of heat issues, I’m convinced that it’s a driver issue. Seeing as beta drivers were released just last week and did not address the problem, I’d guess it’ll be a few months before we see a fix.

Thankfully, downclocking your card allows you to play without interruption and with surprisingly little impact on performance.

I neglected to mention power supplies: make sure you have a proven, quality brand PSU that exceeds requirements (600W minimum) and blow all the dust out of it and ensure your fans are working.

All PSUs are NOT the same.

Well it’s a antec 650w so I’m confident that’s ok. She does however have the super clocked edition 460. So like I posted above, what sliders should I be changing in nTune to try this solution out?

I had similar happening. I played some other games that have reccomended requirements higher than GW2, and never had problems. I have a Geforce gt 560.
I followed what someone said about downclocking, and it worked. Then someone in my guild said they got the beta driver and it fixed, and indeed once I was gonna lunch the game and I got a warning saying my driver should be updated, I couldn’t find any update because it was beta. So now, I isntanlled the 306.02 beta, and moved back to perfomance > quality, and my freezing stopped. Have you tried it?

Thanks to those who mentioned reducing GPU speed by 10-20% on NVIDIA cards. I wasn’t able to even play the game until I tried that. It would crash on me 30 seconds into character creation/play. After reducing the GPU Clock from 600 to 540 using EVGA’s Precision X software, I can play just fine even on the highest quality settings.

Underclocking is a great way to test and a potential workaround. If overclocking averts lockups/crashes, either:

- Components are breaking down and no longer perform at spec (GPU, CPU, Chipset, PSU)
- Cooling issues (really takes effort to keep video cards clean)
- Inadequate power (Antec 650 should be fine but I wouldn’t have confidence in it as much as an Enermax)

For the PSU, you have to check the current draw of the video card and compare it against the PSU’s current capacity for those PCIe connectors plus whatever else is on that rail. The label on the side of the PSU will have that information. If you have peripherals on the same rail, move them to a different one.

Sidebar: To fully eliminate software issues, build a fresh install (another disk or partition) and only install Windows & drivers, DirectX, GW2.

Have you tried adding the -dx9single to gw2 shortcut target line? Also try capping your FPS to 60 there’s an option ingame instead of putting it on Unlimited