Guild Wars 2

Hello all,

This is more of a service topic than anything else.
Maybe some of you have experienced problems with hard crashes of your PC when playing GW2, not have not been able to recreate the problem with anything else. There has been a lot of suggestions on why this is happening, but i have finally (after a year with this behaviour on/off), tried something really simple that might also work for you.
First, go download MSI Afterburner and GPU-Z,
Next, fire up GW2 and keep an eye on the sensor tap in GPU-Z, in the field: PerfCap Reason, look too see if you get Pwr as a reason. If this happens the solution might be to give your graphics card access to more power.
If this is true, fire up MSI Afterburner, and crank your power limit up, this will raise the amount of power your card can draw.
If you still get a PerfCap on power, try dialing down your core clock a bit, it can be because of the turbo features on modern cards it still try to do a bit too much with the power available.
This is a really cheap an easy fix you can try, instead of having to try borrowing PSU’s or Graphics from friends.
My theory behind this is: GW2 don’t cooperate well with the drivers, thereby forcing the card to draw more power than allowed, this results in the different colored screen crashes or restarts people get’s since it forces the card to do something it’s not able to.
As of writing i see a 100-110% TDP on my GTX 670 by just standing in WvW with no people around. This is after i gave my card a power limit of 122%, before that it was just on 100% and crashing after half an hour or so. I first raised the power limit, got a crash but it managed to recover the driver (first time that happen), then i could see in GPU-Z it had spiked to 105% TPD, which it was not allowed, therefore the crash. After dialing my clock speed back a little, my card now runs without getting capped out on power.
Hope it’s something you guys will try if you have this sort of problem, maybe we can find the reason so Anet know where to look to fix this in the future

Thanks. This is a very interesting observation. I have had one crash/black screen while playing GW2 on my new Alienware 18 with GeForce GTX 860M SLI. It was built to support the GPU power requirements. However, on my older desktop Alienware x51 R1, it constantly crashes at completely random moments and activity levels. An hour or 2 minutes. Didn’t matter. I replaced GPU (original crappy GeForce 545) with power efficient GTX 750 Ti and it runs beautifully. However, it still crashes – and perhaps even a little more frequently now. I’m going to see if I can lower clock speed a tad and get it to be more stable. This game certainly pushes boundaries, so it would be sad if this is the problem. Thanks for offering something to look at! I’ll report back if this provides positive results, just as feedback.

—update 20141002: unfortunately, I replaced my powersupply with a brand new one and the problem persists. New video card (with lower power requirements than older one) and new compatible PSU with almost 100W more available power. I’m afraid it still crashes. Mostly colored checkered/black patterns with audio in the background or black screens with audio and the occasional flat out black screen/hung. I have reached out to a former colleague at NCsoft to see if he can learn anything more.