I’ve stopped playing GW2 back around the end of february, mostly because back then my PC kept getting real hot and I was getting nasty fps drops and such. Then I dismantled it (it’s a laptop), cleaned it up, but didn’t pick up the game again until recently – sunday to be precise. Since then, the only software changes I did were upgrading from win8 to win8.1, and updating my sound drivers.
However, I’m now experiencing the infamous black screen/no signal issue, where the screen just cuts off, ambient sound and/or music is still playing, but the PC does not react to any input whatsoever except for a hard reset. (F11/F12 does NOT bring up the logoff screen, so I’m ruling the router issue out)
This is baffling me to no end. I didn’t change anything relevant to the issue since before the cleanup, the PC is running at WAY lower temperatures than before the cleanup, yet I’m getting this odd random blackscreens, mostly inside instances (dungeons or not. I even got it in the ‘Dead End’ instance, where there are a grand total of like 6 other character models and no fancy effects.), in open world content whenever there are many character models around (the current Priory camp, or even just a small crowd of less than 20 people in the grove) or at zerg events – the only thing I could possibly understand. And I’ve tried google, even! Attempted pretty much any solution I’ve found so far:
-setting AA to application controlled, forced on or forced off – not the solution
-setting multi-screen mode to single screen performance – a nifty feature, didn’t know that existed until now. Didn’t help though.
-forcing VSync on or off, setting it to application controlled – nuh-uh
-rerolling my sound driver (it was the one thing I changed after all, worth a shot) – not helping
-completely removing the second screen – nope
-updating my video drivers to the most recent version – though the game ran perfectly fine on the old ones since release…and it didn’t help
-playing around with the sound quality settings – nothing
-deleting that folder with the black lion trading data – that only resulted in the game freezing for about 1 second whenever I open up the trade post, now
-praying to Tzeentch and Slaanesh
And so far nothing has helped. Game didn’t crash in open world content of low population yet, but that might just be coincidence thus far. Sometimes I can run two or three dungeon pathes all the way through, complete with fps drop sections when two engineers decide to throw those annoying nades – so I severely doubt workload has anything to do with it – and sometimes I can’t even approach a dozen Sylvari standing close to each other. And the most mind-blowing part is that I didn’t change anything major on my software, and that (while running kittentier back then) my laptop could play the game continuously before the cleaning. Also: Guild Wars 2 is the only game to cause this issue. Several other, more demanding games (through higher fidelity or kittentier coding) have been running on the machine, and nothing ever caused anything similar.
I’m all out of ideas. Please help me, interweb!
Though I doubt it’ll help much, I’ll list my specs too:
Dell Precision M6500
Quadro FX 3800M – Driver Version 332.76
i7 Quad @1.87GHz
16GB RAM
Win8.1 64bit
(I’m well aware that it’s not a “gaming laptop” and all that jazz, the argument is irrelevant because it was able to run GW2 for long enough until now.)