Guild Wars 2

I’m currently exploring the last bit of Cursed Shore and I can’t wait to get the hell out of here and never come back.

The reasons I hate Orr with such a fierce passion have already been give by others before me, but what it boils down to is that I find these zones to just be annoying and monotonous. I don’t feel challenged because I simply don’t care. And it’s not just the gameplay (in Orr) I have stopped caring about, it’s the story, the lore, this entire part of the world…

And that’s, I think, the worst failing of Orr for me… I have ended up at a point now where I don’t give a flying kitten about anything that goes on here, including my personal storyline, which I’ve abandoned a while back because I’ve just lost the motivation for it – the idea of seeing the ending isn’t strong enough to warrant playing through any more story instances in Orr (ironically I find the exploration element to be far more compelling than the personal story and world completion is the only reason I’ve stuck it out to the third zone, though I’m really at my limits of tolerance after 4 days in Orr).

Who says they copied it from anywhere?

Sometimes certain systems or values are used a lot in games simply because they work better than the alternatives. For all we know Anet started with the aesthetic design of the craftable armors first and only determined the crafting tiers and leveling increments later.

I agree with the OP.

It’s one thing to try and balance the loot/reward system to prevent situations where one specific activity is yielding far too much money compared to everything else, but right now it feels like Anet are simply intent on preventing players from having ANY way to make money at more than a snail’s pace.

I would be inclined to believe they’ve completely gone off their rocker, if only it weren’t for the presence of the gem store and the rather obvious gem -> gold trade staring us in the face. Combined with the raised cost of many of the “shinies” in one of the other patches, it feels like they’re just working on drawing out the time needed to obtain those shinies as much as they can possibly manage in the hopes more players will take the shortcut of buying gems.

I really hate such manipulative business practices and I guess I was a fool for ever believing that we wouldn’t see it in this game – not with NCsoft having their paws on this franchise (and through them some the biggest exploiters of F2P titles with cruddy cash shops). :/

Are you in Europe by any chance?

If so that’s normal – you are not supposed to get another box, because the EU standard edition prepurchase consists of just the sleeve and the key you got prior to launch – that key is all you’ll ever need to play.

Only the US prepurchase players had to go and pick up their retail copy (or receive it by mail) and enter a 2nd code to continue playing after launch.

This does mean that the EU prepurchase boxes were effectively digital copies with a physical wrapper, since we will never have any game discs.

It means they already have both your email and password and their attempts to log in and hijack your account and characters are only stopped short by the email verification process for logins from unauthorized IP addresses.

A lot of people used the same password for GW2 as their email, which led to email verification being totally useless since the account thieves would just log into the mail service and whitelist themselves.

I hope for your sake that you do have a different and more secure password for your email account. In meantime you should change your password to something long and complex not used anywhere else, and if you really want to tighten up security also change the email to a new one specifically created for GW2.

Until (if ever) we get two-factor authentication the best way to prevent hacking is to make is as difficult as possible for anyone to steal / figure out your login details and that means making sure they’re not used anywhere else online, since every place you use them at increases the chances account thieves will get hold of them.

edit: I also forgot to mention, you should run a full scan of your system in case of keyloggers.

Wow, lucky or unlucky you (depending on how you look at it).

I think your best bet is reporting this through the Support section on the website, though I would make it absolutely clear your account hasn’t been compromised and that the farmers sent the money to you by mistake.

What you could do in the meantime is detach the money from the mails and deposit it in the bank so you can’t accidentally spend it. That way at least there’s no chance of it returning to sender when the mails expire.

Yeah, I’ve never entirely understood why companies can be so inconsistent and why it’s so difficult to be transparent about the password restrictions.

I recently went through my lists of passwords and updated all of them to a length that the majority of sites seemed to be able to manage. I had however totally forgotten about the hidden password restriction issue in GW1, so when I updated my GW2 password to something far longer I could no longer log into the linked GW1 account… it took me a while to remember that, oh yeah, there was that “password cut-off at 15 characters thing”. I grudgingly had to change the password back.

I wasn’t aware that GW2 had decided to repeat this mistake – seems they just never learn. At least it’s upto 100 characters this time and not just 15.

Also, while we’re on the subject of passwords, what the hell is up with all of these companies lately that are blocking copy-paste in the password change / creation fields? I’m not just talking about flaky copy-paste support, but purposely preventing you from pasting anything into the password field, while all other fields work fine. I get the feeling like someone is trying to (futilely) protect idiots from their own stupidity here, while making life needlessly difficult for the rest of us.

Fracture.6985:

I have also a problem with this, as well as blue lines appearing and flashing as im moving around. I checked my drivers and they are all up to date, the game runs smoothly, i have no issues there.
I set it to virticle sync in the game menu but that didnt help at all, i dont know what to do
I have an Acer aspire 5750 laptop
Intel HD graphics 3000.
8gb DDR3 memory
1000gb hdd

il ad a pic below
i hope someone can help, im a newb at this

The blue bars/artifacts is a driver issue – it should be fixed with the latest Intel drivers, so if you are still experiencing it chances are likely the graphics driver you’re running isn’t completely up-to-date. In most cases when this happens it’s the result of the laptop-specific drivers being out of date compared to the general drivers from Intel.

What I would do is check Acer’s website and see what the latest Video Driver version is for your laptop and then check Intel’s website or use Google to find out what the latest version is according to Intel. If there’s a discrepancy and Acer hasn’t updated the drivers in a while then you may have a serious problem. You could try to install the drivers directly from Intel, but usually it will refuse to install and just refer you back to Acer.

Laptop-specific drivers are one of my biggest pet peeves – most of the time you’re completely dependant on the manufacturer, which means if there’s a problem and it turns out they’ve stopped updating drivers, you’re up kitten creek without a paddle. :/

Cytheria.2867:

Every bot is another paid for account, funding the dev’s, fuelling new features, financing the support team and paying for the site, forums and wiki resources.

Actually this is a common misconception – you assume botters acquire their accounts through legitimate means, when most of the time they don’t.

Most of the bots you see right now operate on accounts that were stolen from legitimate players – these bots are only costing Arenanet money, because not only do Anet have to spend time and resources on banning the bots, they also have to spend time restoring the stolen accounts to their rightful owners.

Even in the cases where the botters do operate on newly-purchased accounts, they are often purchased with stolen (or otherwise expendable) CC details, which means while Anet may initially receive payment for these accounts, they often lose the money again due to chargebacks. Even if the payment was legitimate, once an account is already banned for RMT-related activites there’s very little reason not to do a chargeback to recoup the money – what could Anet do? Ban the account again?

There isn’t a whole lot you can do, since your problem isn’t just the lack of dedicated memory on the graphics chip, it’s that the graphics chip is a really underpowered chip more tailored towards reading email and watching youtube videos.

If your laptop is the exact Inspiron 1750 that seems to be listed everywhere, then it should have a core2duo processor of around 2ghz and an Intel GMA 4500. In this case I would say the game will most likely run like a slideshow (5-10fps at most) even on minimum settings. The GMA 4500 is sufficiently old and weak as a chip that it would struggle really badly with a current game like GW2.

Even if you have the slightly newer version (which iirc is just called an Inspiron 17) with an i3/i5 series with an Intel HD graphics, you have the same problem to a slightly lesser degree, namely that the Intel HD graphics chip is underpowered and below minimum requirements in terms of graphical power. It would be less severe, but a lot depends on what resolution you run at (I would say 1024×768 max for this card) and what your expectations of performance are (I would say 5-15fps most likely and 20fps max).

Neither is really ideal, but I would say the core2duo + GMA 4500 is a real no-no, whereas the i3/i5 with intel HD graphics is a hesitant maybe. However if you want the game to run well (30fps or better), especially with something better than minimum settings, you really need a better system.

+1

I really like this feature in other MMO’s when it is an option for ingame gold (like LOTRO and WoW).

While I’m not a big fan of paying real money for this service myself, I can certainly understand if they make it available only through the gem store, given that that’s how it worked in GW1 and there being no subscription.

That doesn’t mean I don’t hope they break the mold and go for an ingame alternative though.
A Nouveau Hair Salon in Divinity’s Reach? Yes please!

Yeah, I don’t understand why they felt the need to make all tools soundbound on acquire instead of at least account bound – it seems needlessly restrictive.

It’s especially frustrating when you get them from random lootbags while exploring a low level area on a high level character – those tools would so much more useful if only I could pass them down to a low level alt, but since they’re soulbound and can’t be sold, I usually just end up deleting them, since my high level character can’t carry around 10 different types of tools all the time just in case I might be passing through a lower level area again. :/

Yeah I’d strongly recommend running some sort of GPU benchmark, preferably one that stresses VRAM as well, since that looks suspiciously like there’s just a fault with the card. GW2 is able to push GPU’s quite hard so that’s why I’d recommend a proper stresstest rather than just another game, since it may only happen at high GPU stress levels.

As for the 600 series cards in general, while there are certainly people having problems with them, there are plenty of people having those same problems (crashes and performance issues) with older series cards as well, and equally there are plenty of people with 600 cards who are not having those problems. It’s just that you don’t tend to hear much from the latter category of players because most of them have no reason to come to the forums.

The main thing 600 series cards have that might be affecting them specifically (on top of other potential problems) is the GPU boost feature, which seems like it can still be a bit temperamental sometimes and downclock the card in situations where it’s not supposed to (it also seems to be more likely to happen when a high end model like a 670/680 is paired with a more limiting CPU, like any AMD or Core 2 model).

I myself recently upgraded to a GTX 680 (from a GTX 470) and I’m very happy with the upgrade. GW2 has been running really well and is perfectly stable (306.23 drivers) and I haven’t noticed any problems with GPU downclocking in any of my games. I do have it paired with an i5 2500k @ 3.3ghz and am running EVGA Precision fulltime in the background – they might be reducing the likelihood of downclock problems.

Supersampling is an extremely intensive graphics setting, so it will have a major impact on your GPU useage and thus the heat production of the card. If you’re worried about your temps you can increase the fanspeed a bit through certain GPU monitoring / tweaking software like MSI Afterburner and EVGA Precision so that the card stays a bit cooler.

If you want to know exactly how hard GW2’s graphics (or the graphics settings of any game for that matter) are pushing your card I would recommend having a look at the OSD (onscreen display) function that both of those tools should also include. It’s a fraps-like overlay that you can turn on and tweak to display all sorts of info as you play the game, including your GPU useage.

This can be really useful to figure out how intensive games and graphics settings are compared to each other, and it should also show why your card is getting so much hotter with supersampling on, since the load should be much higher. The difference in load is usually the result of the fps being artificially limited (whether by Vsync or the CPU bottlenecking performance), which means in both situations you only get a max of X fps, but in the situation where Supersampling is enabled the GPU has to work much harder to render the same number of frames because each frame is more graphically intensive.

Mind you any GPU should be able to work perfectly fine under 100% GPU load for extended periods of time, there is nothing dangerous about it. The reason why some people end up having overheating problems at higher loads is not because the game is overworking their card – their cards are merely doing what they’re designed to do, which is to provide maximum performance – the problem is that their cards are receiving insufficient cooling to operate at higher loads.

You’re already a step ahead of most by keeping an eye on your GPU temperatures – as said, if you think it’s a bit too high, just crank up the fan and see what happens. The only situation where I would worry is if your fan was already running at a really high level and the card was still heating up quite badly – that usually indicates a more serious cooling issue like dust or airflow or a faulty fan.

Same thing here.

I remember this problem from beta – they fixed it at some point, but as of today’s patch it’s back.

Same thing here. The problem with random lines of dialogue being silent is an old problem from beta that got fixed, but as of today’s patch it’s happening again.

Also if you’re installing GW2 to Program Files or some other OS-created folder, try installing it somewhere else to folder of your own creation like C:/Games

Sometimes games have problems with write permissions due to Windows security, even if you run the program as admin and UAC is disabled – that’s why some games advise avoiding Program Files. I use C:/Games as the install folder for all my games + Steam these days.

A CPU upgrade to sandy / ivy bridge will give you the boost in the areas you need it most, while a GPU upgrade will only boost your max fps in areas where the game is less CPU limited and allow you to run higher settings in those areas without lowering fps, but it won’t fix your min fps. Ideally ofcourse you should upgrade both, as the 550ti isn’t bad, but it’s not quite a high end card, only bordering on high.

If you go for the CPU upgrade you can save some money by getting the i5 equivalent of whatever i7 you had in mind, since they’ve very close in performance when it comes to gaming – the main difference of the i7’s is that they have hyperthreading, but most games don’t make any use of it at all and the few that do derive only a very minor performance boost from it. So unless you use your PC a lot for other CPU-intensive programs that do greatly benefit from hyperthreading, you have to ask yourself if the price difference is worth it, since on average an i7 is about 100 dollars / euro’s more expensive than its i5 equivalent.

Also if you live in the US near a microcenter, I’ve heard they frequently do great in-store deals where you can pick up nice Motherboard + i5 combo’s even more cheaply.

dustman.1059:

orly?

If I use the same email address for all my games there is a greater chance it will be hacked???

Yes, because the more websites and accounts that you use the same email address for, the more likely it is that one of them will be hacked and that your email will fall into the hands of potential account thieves. Once they know your email they have half the login credentials for all of your game accounts already.

While passwords guessing may be a less popular way to steal game accounts these days than say phishing emails and keyloggers are, that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped using it. A lot of the initial GW2 accounts were compromised with details harvested from other sites and systematically tested for matches within the GW2 database – first they narrowed it down to email addresses with GW2 accounts and then they proceeded onto trying to match a password, probably from a long list of most-commonly-used and previously-harvested passwords from lord knows how many possible sources.

If they got into your account and it wasn’t a keylogger or phishing mail, chances are good your email address was already known from another source and your password wasn’t strong enough to withstand basic password guessing. The problem with any password that isn’t completely random gibberish is that you never know how many other chumps out there may be using it as well – given how many millions of people there are on the internet and the fact that most of them use passwords that consist of actual words and names, the chance of duplicates is pretty big.

killimandros.5087:

I agree with the Kepler user thing, to a certain degree. There are AMD users with the exact same issues. There are also users with 4 and 5 series, evem some with 2 series reporting about it. Might be different problem, but Im not sure.

I think there are definitely multiple causes at work here and the downclocking problem is only one of them, but it is the most likely cause where Kepler users are concerned.

If you have an EVGA GTX 680 then you can circumvent this issue by running EVGA Precision X, since its built-in “Framerate Target” option (set to Max FPS by default) will push the GPU to full clocks as long as the framerate target isn’t met, which with Max FPS is ofcourse never. You can also set it to something lower like 60 fps if you don’t want it to stay in uber-boost mode constantly.

I don’t know if this also works for players with other EVGA 600 cards or players with 600 cards from other brands, since I only saw this feature advertised on the Precision X page for the EVGA GTX 680 specifically and that’s the card I’ve tested it with.

Other users should, however, be able to run either Precision X or MSI Afterburner to at least monitor their GPU clocks and check if their GPU ever downclocks while playing GW2.

I’ve done a bit of googling on this error and I can’t nail down a specific cause, but I don’t think it’s directly caused by having a 32-bit OS.

Most likely the cause is the location where it’s trying to install the game being too stringently protected by the OS – one of the installation troubleshooting steps actually says to avoid installing to the Program Files, but I would recommend avoiding all OS-created folders just to be sure and instead create your own (for example C:/Games) and install GW2 to that.

Other suggestions I’ve seen are running the GW2.exe as administrator and in compatibility mode for your OS (r-click -> Properties). Also I’ve seen someone mention the page, which they had customized and had to set back to “system managed” to fix this issue – even if you haven’t touched the pagefile you might want to make sure windows is allocating sufficient space to it and if not, increase it by a few gig.

I’m getting really tired of MMO’s shoving excessive goldsinks like these down our throats and presenting them as a “convenience”. My ranger is now lvl 73 and the cost of waypoint travel is ridiculous compared to the average income at that level – I noticed that from around lvl 40-50 onwards waypoints already started to become more of a rip-off than a convenience.

As a longtime GW1 player the whole “it’s optional” excuse doesn’t cut it for me, not when we were promised better than this for GW2. Goldsinks aren’t a bad thing when done in moderation, but when they become excessive they tend to hurt the majority of the playerbase more than they help to balance the economy (because they widen the gap in wealth between regular players overburdened with goldsinks and the top few who dodge most of the goldsinks and play so excessively it doesn’t matter).

Everything I’ve seen so far of the earnings/spendings at higher level – from the high cost of waypoint travel and armour repairs to the increases in the cost of most of the stuff worth buying at high level (like lvl 80 weapons and armors) – seems to point towards the GW2 money treadmill having been adjusted to match the pace of fast-burning MMO players who tend to dodge most of the goldsinks anyway, while the rest of us get burdened down with them.

Have you tried adjusting the graphics settings manually? Not just Low/Medium/High presets, but turning off individual settings by hand.

The presets might not be very well tweaked, especially not for older GPU’s, it might think your graphics card more capable than it is.

It also depends a lot on which starter area you end up in – the Sylvari ‘dream’ is extremely heavy on certain effects that bring even newer high end cards to their knees if enabled.

On your card I would start with disabling / lowering everything to the barest minimum except textures and environment and then steadily raise things from there while looking what it does to your fps. Even with the age of your card I figure it should be able to handle those 2 settings on higher at your resolution.

If you still get very bad fps even at minimum settings you could try the latest 306.02 beta drivers, but there’s a possibility it’s just something screwed up between the latest GW2 patches and the drivers. I’ve seen several people complain about suddenly poor fps as of the last game patch.

LOBO LOBITO.1695:

well i downloaded 1.0 GB so far and it reads 20% progress, i wonder if i have to download 5.0 GB for real? : \

It may have started with the largest files first and be saving the smallest files for last, at least that’s what it seemed to do for me the 2 times I had to download a particularly big patch (of over 1gb) prior to launch – I’d be worried the patch was huge and then once it got over 40-50% it would speed up and be done much quicker and with less MB than I thought.

The only thing you can do is just leave it running and be patient, it’ll get there eventually. If you have to shut down your machine, don’t worry, you can close the launcher safely and it will pick up where it left off the next time you start it – it might seem like it restarts from scratch because the progress bar resets to 0%, but the number of files remaining should actually be roughly the same as when you closed it, hence you aren’t actually starting all over.

Also if you have a bandwidth cap or slow internet it might be worthwhile to make a backup of your GW2.dat file (once it’s finished patching ofcourse) every so often, and store it in a safe place, like a secondary or external harddrive, or another computer. That way if anything ever happens to either the GW2.dat file (corrupted beyond repair) or the harddrive GW2 is installed on breaks you can always restore from your backup copy and reduce the amount of time you’ll have to spend re-patching.

In my case it’s fairly easy since we have GW2 installed on 2 computers in the house so they automatically serve as each other’s backup – but if there are any big patches we often copy the GW2.dat file from the machine that has already patched to the other one to avoid having to download the patch twice.

rebalnz.3869:

IceBlizzard.1054:

I run a gtx 670 and in only certain places do I find that my performance isnt quite as high as it could be. In lions arch my frames drop way more than they should.

I try to play with vsync off but man o man i notice tears bad.

same video car and got the same problem. LA lags me out bad changing from ultra to low only makes a 5fps difference.
there’s also random as spots in gw2 that drops my fps insane. in human starting areas there’s a cave system(with bandits) nothing impressive in the visuals but i dip to 20fps lol. doesn’t make any sense.

Same thing here. I wouldn’t say LA lags me out really bad, but the framerate seems to be dipping lower than it should do (down to around 40fps in the worst places) and changing the settings makes close to no difference except to the GPU useage, which indicates there is something else bottlenecking the performance and it doesn’t seem to be the CPU, the memory or the harddrive. My bet would be it’s some sort of limitation in the engine.

I’ve actually just installed a new graphics card, so I’ve measured performance on 2 cards now with the rest of the system staying exactly the same (i5 2500k @ 3.3ghz / 8gb RAM / win7 64-bit) – before I was using a GTX 470 and now I have a GTX 680. The performance difference between the two cards is really noticeable everywhere else in the game (PvE that is, haven’t tried WvW yet), with the sole exception of those few places like LA square where the FPS just tanks no matter the settings or the power of the card. I’m rather hoping it’s something that will be improved in time.

As for game crashes, I was dreading that after the change of graphics cards I might join the club of people with crashing problems, but so far it seems the game runs flawlessly on both my cards. I’ll have to see if that luck holds, but so far both performance wise and stability-wise it looks promising.

Btw I’ve been using the 306.02 beta drivers on both cards, cleanly installed (by which I mean I cleaned out the old drivers in safemode and only installed the drivers + physx from the new drivers, nothing else).

Another option would be to run GW2setup.exe on the other computer first (if the launcher starts patching just close it) and then just copy your fully patched GW2.dat file across.

That’s how we sync the client across different computers here in the house, since we are under a bandwidth cap at certain times of the week.
If there has been a major patch and we don’t want to waste bandwidth we just copy the GW2.dat file across the network and use it to overwrite the old one that wasn’t patched yet.

Currently my GW2 folder is about 14.5gb, however keep in mind that it’ll likely be updating/replacing old files as well as adding new ones so there may be more to patch than simply the difference between 14.5gb and your current client size.

The disc installer seems to be quite outdated and there have been a lot of patches in the past few weeks / months, so it’s possible you may need to (re)download as much as 1/3rd of the client during the patching process. It’ll still be less than downloading the whole thing, but yeah unfortunately with MMO’s installing from disc usually still requires a lengthy patch download even shortly after launch.

If you haven’t yet, try installing the windows 7 patches for Bulldozer CPU’s: http://www.techpowerup.com/158534/New-Windows-7-Bulldozer-Patches-Available..html

They may improve the minimum performance of the game by improving the utilization of the bulldozer architecture.

WoW is a really old game with much more basic graphics technology and an engine with far less fancy features, so the performance will be a lot higher since you’re running it on hardware that is severely overpowered compared to the hardware the game was originally designed for – it’s the same reason most old games run really well on newer hardware.

However depending on what your minimum performance is in GW2 you might be able to improve it a bit. Your CPU isn’t fantastic (it’s a budget model and slower clock-for-clock than any of the newer intel processors), so it may throttle your 7850 somewhat, but it shouldn’t tank as bad as say, a core2duo CPU. You might also want to take a look at some of the other “high specs, low fps” threads out there, as some of them may contain workarounds to improve performance.

The Coolermaster Hyper 212+ is a CPU cooler, so that’s not really relevant to the temperature of your GPU, but make sure the other 2 fans (assuming both are case fans) are providing sufficient airflow to your case – with 2 fans it’s best to have 1 pulling air in and the other 1 pushing air out (if both are blowing air out or pulling air in you don’t get very good circulation, whic makes it harder for the CPU and GPU fans to do their jobs since the temp inside the case will be higher).

As for the card itself, I don’t think you can adjust the fanspeed with Realtemp, and don’t recall if it even shows you the fanspeed, but if it does and your fan isn’t running at 100% yet while you’re playing GW2 that could just be a sign that the automatic fan control is a bit ‘lazy’ and doesn’t cool the card very aggressively at high loads. There are programs out there (like MSI Afterburner) which you can use to increase the fanspeed while gaming so your card stays much cooler.

Mind you 88 degrees doesn’t sound like it’s directly overheating yet, since most modern chips can take much more than that before sustaining permanent damage (usually at least 95-100 degrees, though it varies a bit from chip to chip), however 88 does seem a bit on the high side for 2nd generation fermi, so that might be why Realtemp is warning you.

The only situation where I would say you’re really in trouble is if it’s breaking 88 degrees (and still heating up further) with the fan already running at 100% and thus unable to go faster. Usually situations like that point towards a problem with the airflow in either the case or within the shell of the card itself. It might be completely clogged with dust and in need of a good clean with a can of compressed air (available from most computer hardware stores).

Ukira.9510:

Same problem. Can someone please help? I really wish to play this game.

Creature.9476:

@Ukira.9510

I’m having some problems pinning down if your videocard does or does not support Shader Model 3.0 Some sites claim your chipset does, and others claim it does not. So I will not make that claim, I’ll elave that up to someone else.

I will however not that you have an amazing amount of running processes on your computer. Try running the following steps to clear that up a little and it might help (while I keep looking for the spec on your card):

1) Open your Start Menu and type in the box “msconfig” (no quotation marks) and press Enter.
2) In the program that opens, go to the tab called Services and check the box in the bottom called Hide all Microsoft services
3) Now disable all services and keep track of what you disable so you can later enable it again. If you don’t care, just hit Disable all
4) Restart your computer and all those background programs will no longer start

— Edit —

Hah! Found it! You should have support for Shader Model 3.0 You may have probles where video RAM is concerned though. You need 256 MB of RAm and technically your card has no dedicated RAM, only shared. So unfortunately it’s beyond my wisdom to tell you if you meet the minimum requirements ro not.

I would still suggest a videocard upgrade though. You are meeting the minimum requirements just barely, so if you get it to run it won’t run nice. It will run just barely. (Not trying to sound like a jerk, but I want to set realistic expectations.)

I just want to clear this up – his card definitely does not properly support Shader Model 3.0 and the game will NOT run on it, no matter what he does or what driver he installs.

The reason there is a lot of confusion is because people are mixing up the 3100 and the X3100, which are entirely different chips featured on very different chipsets. The X3100 supports Shader Model 3.0 at the hardware level, but the regular 3100 only supports SM 2.0 in the hardware because it’s directly based on the older 900 and 950 chips which were similarly limited to 2.0.
While there was some talk of software Shader Model 3.0 support for the 3100, in practice there simply seems to be no driver that will fully support SM3 in such a way that this card can run modern games, probably because Intel never bothered adding it.

Also another common mix-up is the GMA 3100 with the GMA 3150, because (confusingly) unlike the 3100, the 3150 IS based on the same tech as the X3100- so the 3150 does support SM 3.0 at the hardware level. The reason I stumbled into this whole quagmire in the first place is, because I tried figuring out SM3 support for my netbook (which has a GMA 3150) and I figured that the 3150 would be similar to the 3100.

Essentially what it boils down to is that the GMA (X)3000 series and later support SM3, with the exception of the GMA 3000 and the GMA 3100 chips, because those are based directly on older chips without SM3 support.

I just had the same problem with the “Account Issues” subforum. I was reading a thread in that subforum, then used the Back button of the browser to go back to the subforum overview and all of a sudden everything was in Spanish.

It still showed “EN” highlighted at the top of the page though, not “ES”. When I reloaded the page everything was in English again. So far I haven’t been able to reproduce this bug.

I should probably mention I’m from the UK, so it’s unlikely to be an IP-tracking problem (at least in my case).

Hmm, odd. My i5 2500k @ stock only goes upto about 70-80% in GW2, but that is with nothing else intensive running at the same time.

Perhaps Norton was running an automatically scheduled scan at the same time – that could easily push the total useage upto 100% and would also explain why Norton was complaining about the high useage since it probably wanted to use more CPU power but couldn’t because it was competing with GW2.

I personally have most scheduled / automatic updater stuff turned off and do things manually since I don’t like them interfering with my game performance. In general 100% useage isn’t anything to worry about as long as your CPU cooler and case airflow are sufficient enough to keep the CPU from overheating at max load. Very likely though with both GW2 and something else pushing in the background game performance will have suffered a bit.

Most MMO’s don’t allow this because it would open up too much abuse with character selling – obviously companies would rather have people playing the game the way it was meant to than buying fully geared up level 80’s on ebay.

It’s already problematic enough with account selling alone, but at least there they can just ban the account if they can prove it has changed hands – since any sort of account transfer, whether for money or not, is against the terms of service. With character transfers on the other hand it would become a lot harder to punish character selling for real $$$ (not to mention that the people who specialize in powerleveling characters to sell them would have a far easier time if they didn’t have to restart from scratch on a new account each time).

Sadly this means in cases like yours the only thing you can do is have one person start again from scratch with a new account. Because of this I always recommend keeping “try-outs” as short as possible, so there’s no as much progress lost if they continue on a new account.

I don’t know how far your girlfriend progressed, but unless she’s really attached to the race / class combination she played, she could for example try out a different race or class on the new account to avoid retracing the exact same path, at least initially. There are 8 different classes and 5 races, each with their own lower level areas and different personal stories, so there is plenty of new stuff still to be explored.

If you’re getting login attempt emails you should be really worried, because it means they’ve figured out your email / password combination and the only thing that’s stopping them from cleaning out your characters or changing your account details is the email authentication process.

The first thing you should do is immediately change your password to something long and preferably completely random with at least some numbers and capital letters mixed in and longer than 12 characters. Write it down temporarily if you have to, or use a password safe program. Optionally also change your email address to a new one never used before, since they would then have to guess 2 new pieces of information instead of 1.

Secondly you should be scanning your system from top to bottom with at least 1 Antivirus program and 1 Anti-Malware program (like Spybot or Malwarebytes), but more than 1 of each is best if you want to decrease the chances of missing stuff (since one of them might detect something the other doesn’t and vice versa).

If the scans find malware on your PC it’s possible your details were caught by a keylogger, which means after cleaning everything, you should immediately change your password again as above (making sure it bears no resemblance to the last one).

If multiple malware scans come up clean then your details were sourced through either phishing emails or as Gaile mentioned from lists obtained through compromised accounts on other websites and MMO’s. Even if you never used the same email / password combination elsewhere, heck even if you didn’t use that particular password before yourself doesn’t mean they weren’t on the list, because some other random person may have used it in the past.

Given that they abused both the password reset form and the account registration form to figure out which emails already had GW2 accounts attached suggests that they were desperate enough to get their hands on GW2 accounts that they were using plain old passwords guessing techniques, whereby they go through a long list of known passwords hoping one of them will work with the email they know has a GW2 account. If they can’t find a match they will move onto the next email. This means the people who are the most secure are those whose emails have never been caught, followed by those whose emails are known but have sufficiently long and complex (complete gibberish essentially) passwords that are extremely unlikely to feature on any list.

In the next few weeks it’s likely we’ll see a decrease in random password guessing and an upsurge instead of accounts compromised through phishing emails and keyloggers instead, since that means a lot less work for them. Especially keyloggers are dangerous since they can easily lead to both the game’s login and the email’s login being compromised, which means the email authentication process can be easily circumvented before the user even realises their account is in danger.

Talisauros.6718:

I’ve downloaded the recent update to the graphic card and disabled any single application that could have been blocking the client, and the same error occurs.

In your case updating the drivers doesn’t really matter since your intel GMA 3100 (not to be confused with the GMA X3100) doesn’t support Shader Model 3.0, so even if you could make it through the installation the game itself won’t run unless you get a better graphics card with SM3 support.

What I suspect is happening during the install is that the launcher is trying to use some sort of advanced display function your graphics card doesn’t support and when it doesn’t work the launcher freezes or crashes and tries to restore itself by restarting.

crow.8630:

My friend recently bought the GW2 CD off a retail store. (New Zealand store).
When he puts the CD in, the initial online update(?) comes up; as normal.
But before he gets through to the main game download (The launcher with the percentage bar etc.) The update launcher just shuts off.
He also tried a different CD to download, also tried to download off the net: no luck.
Same problem occurs every time, hasn’t been working for 2 weeks.
Funny thing is he hooked up an external hard drive from a friend with GW2 in it, and IT WORKED. but only when opening the game from the hard drive itself.
Another funny thing is that the same problem occurs on BOTH his laptop and his computer, which both seem to meet the standard requirement for GW2 (Not 100% sure)
Uploading a Test Report from Game Advisor of his laptop.

According tot he test report your friend doesn’t have the right graphics drivers installed on his laptop. I’ve google the laptop model and according to Sony that model should come with an Nvidia G210m graphics card, which does support Shader Model 3.0, but without the right drivers installed those advanced functions won’t work properly, which is likely the reason why your friend is having the same issues as the OP (only for slightly different reasons).

Atm the card only shows up as a Standard VGA adapter, which means only the basic “automatic hardware detection” drivers from windows are installed. What he needs to do is go to the Sony website, look up the drivers for his specific laptop model and download + install the latest video drivers – those should be Nvidia drivers for the G210m (modified to work with his Sony laptop). After that’s done test advisor should be able to recognize his card properly and the launcher should – hopefully – work.

Since you said he’s having the issue on his desktop as well it’s likely that the desktop has the same issue, so either the incorrect drivers or an insufficient graphics chip. If you could attach a test advisor log from the desktop as well we could take a look at it for you and tell you if the drivers need updating or if it’s the cards’ specs that are lacking.

Archangel.1603:

I agree with this. I refuse to buy any Dye packs from the gem store until this happens. The same goes for appearance items from the store. I’m not buying them on a per character basis.

Same here. I loved the fact that costumes in GW1 were accountwide along with most of the other stuff you could buy in their store – and conversely I hate that most of the stuff in the GW2 store is character specific and/or single-use.

The dye system is the worst of it for me – it still pains me that they promised us during development that the dyes would be accountwide and then they just up and changed it without any justification beyond “we feel it works better this way”, which to me just translates to “we want to sell more dye packs by milking players who play multiple characters”.

The irony is I’d love to give them money (and already have for some accountwide stuff like bank tabs), but I’m not going to pay them for stuff that’s specifically designed to exploit the fact that I like playing multiple characters.

I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but have you checked your temperatures to make sure nothing is overheating? Both CPU and GPU are pushed hard in this game and it’s taking a lot of players by surprise.

Also regarding the GTX 470 specifically, these cards overheat really easily, because the chip runs extremely hot and they seem to have lousy automatic fan control – that means its vitally important to keep an eye on these cards, especially while gaming.

Even if your card is not actually reaching the point of overheating try increasing the fanspeed with a tool like MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision and see if you still get crashes when you keep the temperature at a lower level. I say this because some other players were experiencing crashing issues (either the GPU driver or the entire system) when their card reached a certain temperature level, even though that temperature didn’t seem to be critically high, yet keeping the temperature lowered prevented any further crashes. It’s possible in such cases it’s the VRAM overheating instead of the chip itself, which would explain why increased cooling on the card prevents the problem.

I assume you’re running Windows 7 64-bit? If so, have you installed the windows fixes that are supposed to improve Bulldozer performance?

I don’t work with AMD myself, but a quick google search turned up this: http://www.techpowerup.com/158534/New-Windows-7-Bulldozer-Patches-Available..html

I don’t know how much if any difference those fixes will make, but you should be able to get more than 10 fps at the lowest. 20fps could be understandable if it’s really really busy (I get close to that sometimes on my i5 2500k), but 10 seems far too low.

As for graphics settings, you should be able to run most of the settings on High, but I would suggest lowering any of the more intensive settings, especially if you run at a resolution that’s 1600×1200 or higher. Render Sampling should be on Native, since Supersampling will kill your performance singlehandedly (it’s not meant to be used on anything but the most extreme high end cards) – other intensive settings are Reflections (use Terrain & Sky or None, since All sucks up performance for almost no graphical gain), Shadows (Medium-High I would suggest on your card), FXAA and Best Texture Filtering (in the case of Texture Filtering you might find forcing 4x Anisotropic Filtering through the Nvidia Control Panel does a better job and costs less performance).

Also with that graphics card try aiming for drivers other than the 301.42 WHQL, since that driver in particular is known to give exceptionally poor performance on GW2. You can either try the latest beta drivers or roll back to slightly older WHQL drivers, since practically any driver will perform better as long as its not 301.42. Regarding the latest beta drivers, in my case both 304.79 and 306.02 gave me a big performance increase, but they don’t boost performance for everyone equally.

Some players are simply getting crap performance far below what is normal for their systems and it’s not easy to figure out what is causing it sometimes. If changing the driver and installing the bulldozer fixes doesn’t do anything you might want to have a look at some of the other bigger FPS problem threads.

That’s an AMD-based mini-laptop, which are even worse for running games than regular laptops are. Whatever the graphics chip in that is, it won’t be anywhere near strong enough to handle GW2 and neither is the processor. He’s going to have a get a proper machine if he wants to play GW2 and the best choice is a desktop if he wants to play it well (yeah great laptops can run the game well too, but they’re more expensive and are more likely to overheat).

It’ll certainly “start” the game, but don’t expect to get very good settings or performance out of it, because that laptop only seems to have a basic intel HD 4000 integrated graphics chip, which is really low end and not that great for running more demanding games.

It’s hard to say how much performance you’ll actually get, but so far it seems low end performance is very touch and go (some people say it’s playable, others have fps as low as 5fps, which is basically a slideshow). You’d have to ask someone with firsthand experience running the game on an Intel HD 3000 or 4000 to be certain if it can be considered ‘playable’, but even if it is it’ll be on low settings.

It sounds to me like your card is most likely overheating, which is not uncommon with these high 400 series cards – they run exceptionally hot and the automatic fan control isn’t very good. I have a GTX 470 (SC edition from EVGA) myself and even in a well-cooled case the autofan just doesn’t do a great job.

What I would recommend doing is running either MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision (both are free and should work for other branded cards as well) to monitor your graphics card temperatures as you play GW2. If your card is getting very hot while playing (especially if it gets near or over 95 degrees celsius) try raising the fanspeed manually in Precision/Afterburner by turning off AUTO and increasing the % on the fanspeed slider. See if you can keep the temperatures under 90 degrees at all times while playing GW2.

If even at 100% fanspeed the temps still go over 90 degrees (or even higher) consistently then your card may be really clogged with dust and need a good cleaning or your case might be getting hot and in need of better airflow. As a comparison my card is a reference design (which are the worst type of 470 you can have when it comes to cooling) and at 100% GPU useage I can keep the temp at 83 degrees max with ~80-84% fanspeed. So in theory you should be able to get a similar or better result than me depending on the exact design of your card.

If you find you can stop the game from overheating the card with the manual fan control, then the next step you could take would be to set up a custom fan profile through Afterburner or Precision that regulates the fanspeed for you automatically but at a rate that you can customize to your own liking so it does a better job than the default autofan. You can find the fan curve in the settings menu on the “fan” tab. By adjusting the fan curve you tell the program how hard to spin the fan at each temperature value and by ticking the “enable” box you turn the custom profile on and off. As an example I’ve attached a screenshot of my own fan profile in EVGA Precision below.

PS: if you notice that you’re getting driver crashes even when the card isn’t directly overheating, try to see if it always happens around a specific temperature level. If it does, then you might be suffering from the same issue that I’ve seen some other players report, where the game and/or drivers simply crash out whenever the card reaches a specific temperature even if that temperature isn’t at critical overheating levels. It’s an odd problem, but seems to be fixeable by keeping the card under whichever temperature point it crashes at.

Ambient Occlusion adds a subtle shadowing effects to the game – I first used it in Dragon Age 2 and found it was most noticeable in the nooks and crannies on buildings / walls (for example in the corners where 2 walls meat at a sharp angle). It seems to be quite performance intensive and the effect is subtle but nice. I haven’t used it in GW2 yet because a lot of people have reported massive graphical glitching when AO was enabled in the Nvidia panel.

Anisotropic Filtering essentially sharpens up textures that get blurred by the game as a result of viewing angle or distance. I’m currently running 8x AF through the Nvidia Panel, because when I tried the ingame “Best Texture Filtering” option I found the results were very poor and forcing 8x AF does a much better job. The impact on performance isn’t that large, it’s small enough (aka max 2-3 fps) that I don’t really notice it and I really couldn’t live without this option.

If you really want to see the effects go to Lion’s Arch to the square just north of where all the portals to the other cities are and look at the cobblestones there – the more level your camera angle the blurrier those will look. Compare those textures with no texture filtering at all, only the ingame “best texture filtering” enabled and finally with 4x-16x AF forced through the Nvidia Panel and use whichever looks best to you.

As for the other 2 options I don’t really tweak AA-related settings manually, so I can’t really advise you there. I either leave AA upto the ingame settings or if it really bothers me I use Nvidia Inspector and google which game profile is most recommended to force AA and just use that.

With an Nvidia 6150 SE integrated chip you’re lucky the game even starts, because that card is way below the minimum requirements, so it’s no wonder it’s performing horridly.

To put things into perspective your card is an Nvidia 6000 series… after those cards came the 7000 series, followed by the 8000, 9000, 100, 200, 300, 400, 500 and finally the current 600 series. That’s 9 generations your card is out of date (or 7 if you only count desktop cards).

Not only that but your card is the lowest model in the 6000 line-up – it’s not even a discrete graphics card but only a chip built into the motherboard and it was pathetically weak even when the Nvidia 6000 series were the latest and greatest on the market. The card has just the bare minimum feature support to pass the Shader Model 3.0 barrier, but in terms of performance it’s well short of modern day triple A games requirements, including GW2.

I don’t know what games you’ve been running lately (older games? old MMO’s like WoW or City of Heroes? 2d / indie titles with lower requirements maybe?), but it’s technically impossible for such an old and weak chip to run any recent games with serious graphics at 60fps even on lowest settings and resolution. It just doesn’t have the horsepower.

jabez.6827:

could this be anything to do with my Hard Drive?

It very well could be, especially since you already had an error about it.

I’m not sure what the best way of testing it would be, since I’ve never needed to test for a failing HD myself.

However I do use Defraggler (a free util I normally use for defragging my harddrive) and it also includes a Harddrive Health monitoring feature which reveals a lot of statistics from the harddrive. You could give that tool a try – you don’t have to run a defrag, only start the program and make a screenshot of the “Health” tab. It might be able to reveal how bad the state of the harddrive is.

oldmaster.3547:

I’m frustrated.
Even with fans in automatic mode the CPU temperature takes off after a few minutes. It slowly keeps increasing so the only way I have to make it come down is to take a look at the map, which seems to let CPU rest for a while…

Btw this is a desktop sold in a pre-made configuration designed for gaming, so it should theoretically run GW2 very well. It works great with other games, this is the only game that is causing this problem so far, even with the lowest graphic settings

This game pushes the CPU a lot harder than most people realize, especially when compared with a lot of other games. I have an i5 2500k @ 3.3ghz (4 cores, no hyperthreading) and most games so far have trouble using more than 40-50% of my CPU in total, whereas GW2 easily pushes it up to 70-80% useage on every single core.

What this means is that GW2 will be running your CPU hotter than any game you’ve probably played on it so far and in your case this has brought to light that your CPU isn’t sufficiently well-cooled – whether it’s the thermal paste preventing solid contact between the CPU chip and the cooler, or whether it’s a deficiency in the cooler itself or the airflow in the case.

Either way it shouldn’t be happening, but it’s a problem that can always be fixed one way or another and I would recommend getting it sorted out properly since sustained high temperatures (even if they don’t quite reach the point of outright overheating) are very bad for your hardware and can cause all sorts of problems down the road. Fitting extra fans to improve airflow should be pretty straightforward if your case has additional spots to fit more fans. If the CPU cooler itself isn’t doing a good job it might need replacing or simply reseating (with the thermal paste cleaned off and reapplied) – if you’re hesitant to do this yourself, I would recommend getting help from someone with hands-on experience (friends/family or a local computer shop) since it’s not a complicated job, but it can be fiddly if you haven’t done it before.

PS: The fact that the system was advertised to you as built for gaming unfortunately doesn’t guarantee that it will perform flawlessly no matter what you run on it – a lot of prebuilt systems are sadly suboptimal in the cooling department because it’s not a feature that can easily be used as a major selling point to the mass market consumers that are buying prebuilt systems. As a result most manufacturers only put in the bare minimum of cooling that they think they can get away with when they factor in the “average useage” and the result is that when games like GW2 push the hardware a bit more than the games before it, a lot of people with prebuilt systems start having heat issues.

It’s far too easy to tunnel around an IP block unfortunately, so it would probably end up hurting the legitimate users more than any of the determined goldselling companies.

The problem right now is that the security of the website must have been very minimal.

The fact that the account thieves resorted to the password reset form to figure out which email addresses had GW2 accounts attached suggests that a lot of accounts (at least initially) must have been compromised through plain old password guessing. Why? Because if they already knew the email + password combo’s they would have just tried them on the login screen – that they tried to narrow it down to email addresses with GW2 accounts first suggests the next step they then used was guessing passwords (probably starting with stuff like top 500 most-used passwords, lists of compromised account passwords from other games, etc etc).

The fact that they managed to break into so many accounts seems to indicate the website didn’t throw up anything to halt repeated false login attacks. Most websites have some sort of brute-force protection in place, but so far I haven’t seen any indication that the GW2 website did (at least at the time around launch when most accounts were stolen this way). That’s a pretty serious short-coming.

The other serious short-coming of the GW2 account system is that it is (or was at least) too easy for account thieves to change the email address – it’s bafflingly stupid if you do not have to confirm a change of email address through the old email first before the new one works, since that allows thieves to easily lock the original account holders out of the account without even needing to have access to the person’s email address.

As for protecting yourself from this. The first way is obviously to prevent your email address from becoming known to account thieves (which generally translates to trying to keep it off spam and compromised account details lists), but that’s easier said than done. It’s not as easy as it used to be to use services like Yahoo and Gmail to create seperate email addresses for different game accounts either – they’ve clearly wisened up on people using their service to create throwaway accounts and are making it more difficult to do so. So having a seperate email account for every game is also easier said than done, but if I knew one of my existing game emails had been scouted I would go out of my way to change it immediately. Ofcourse the problem is that often you don’t find out that they know the exact email address for your game account until it’s too late, which is why it’s so important to have a really strong password.

As Arenanet has stated many times, the password should ofcourse be strong and unique to GW2. A lot of players have indicated they did use a unique password for GW2, but most made not mention of how strong it was and I get the feeling that that’s because the passwords may have been too easy to guess, either by a dictionary attack or because it featured on a long list of “passwords we have come across before”. There are a lot of people who got the password reset email whose accounts were never breached, probably because their passwords took too long to randomly guess. And that’s the underlying principle with a strong password – the longer it takes to guess the stronger it is. This means longer and more random passwords are best.

The problem with long and random is that it’s harder to remember, especially when you have to remember dozens of them. That’s why I started using a password safe, which reduces the number of long and complex passwords you have to remember to just the one needed to get into the password safe. Beyond that you can make any password you use as long and complex as the game or website will allow and use a unique password for each and every thing you ever sign up for.

Which leaves you with 2 main vulnerabilities:

• the actual account database itself being compromised (completely out of your hands)

• keyloggers (which is something you can’t protect yourself against completely, but you can do a lot to reduce the likelihood of becoming infected – I’m pretty sure the majority of infections these days happen while browsing the web and fewer as a result of downloads with infected files, so tightening up your browser security with things like Noscript and Adblock, as well as using AV/Firewall suites that preventatively block websites that have been reported to spread malware can nip infections in the butt before they even have a chance to happen)

jabez.6827:

Cpu no more than 60 degrees and Gpu 70 degrees and yes my fans are spinning and no dust since the computer is 1 month old

Those temps are fine – if they’re like that under load around when the issue occurs then it isn’t overheating.

However I didn’t see you mention anywhere before that the PC is practically brandnew – that introduces the possibility that you have a faulty part somewhere in your configuration that has never been performing quite right but hasn’t been a problem until you started stressing the machine with GW2 (and don’t underestimate how stressful GW2 is, it’s the first game I’ve seen stress the CPU + GPU combined to such a level).

The biggest problem with issues like these is always figuring out if it’s a specific part and if so, which one.

To that end, I would highly recommend running some stresstests on your machine to test both the CPU and GPU (think of things like Prime 95, Unigine Heaven, Furmark, anything that stresses your hardware) and if it passes those, then try running Memtest for at least several hours (best done overnight since you won’t be able to use your PC at the same time). If it doesn’t pass all of the tests flawlessly then that would certainly point to a hardware problem (in fact the odd noises point that way as well), but if it fails only on a specific test that might help pinpoint the cause of the problem.

Retzie.9018:

Im having the exact same problem as you Artur, you are not alone lol Whenever i tried to completely remove my drivers, my comp would always automatically install drivers when i rebooted (even in Safe Mode), is this normal?

I have an ASUS card can i still use EVGA Precision? or do i have a similar programme like it?

The drivers Windows installs after you reboot are some basic VGA drivers that Windows probably pulls from the hardware itself (similar to the way Windows will install basic plug-and-play drivers for a lot of USB hardware).

Officially I believe you’re supposed to deinstall those through the device manager before running the driver cleaner and then reinstalling your new ‘proper’ drivers, but I’ve never bothered with that step myself. I’m sure there are several other steps I probably shouldn’t be skipping if I were really doing things by the book, but my main concern has always been with the leftover files from Nvidia, since I know those have caused me conflicts in the past with my previous setup.

And I believe both EVGA Precision and MSI Afterburner should work for other branded cards as well – it’s possible there might be some settings which are exclusive to EVGA / MSI cards only, but for temperature monitoring (and probably fan control as well) it should work for any card.

Drintar.1246:

Just a quick question is the Precision Auto profile more aggressive than the normal? I ask this because without running precision it does ramp up but not over probably 45ish% (based on sound difference) I think

Not by default, no.

Essentially how it works is as follows:
By default your card’s fan is being regulated by the automatic fan controller on the graphics chip (hardware fan control). This “autofan” will ramp up the speed of the fan depending on the temperature, but it can be rather lazy and often doesn’t ramp up the fanspeed a lot until the graphics card gets really hot.

If you’re not running EVGA Precision then your fan is always being controlled by the hardware. If you do have EVGA Precision running then it depends on the settings within EVGA Precision whether your fan is controlled by the hardware or by the software (Precision).

When the “auto” function is turned OFF the software will be running your fan at a fixed speed determined by the fan speed slider.

While the “auto” function is turned ON your fan will be running on the hardware autofan by default – however you can change this in Precision’s settings panel on the “fan” tab. If you turn on “enable software automatic fan control” you are changing the autofan to be controlled by EVGA Precision instead of your hardware and you can customize the graph on that tab to tweak the fan profile to your preference. The software fan control only regulates your fan whilst the program is running and can be disabled at any time to switch back to the hardware-controlled autofan.

Yeah heat is also an option, though usually that just causes downclocking, freezing or spontaneous rebooting – I’ve not often seen it crash the driver, but it’s certainly a possibility. It’s definitely a good idea to monitor temps as GW2 pushes the hardware hard.

Drintar.1246:

For what it’s worth I have the same type of issue on my GTX 470 but it seems to be heat related for me because if I use EVGA Precision to ramp up my fan to 72% speed I don’t crash at all with driver stopped responding errors. If I don’t ramp it up I will between 10 and 20 minutes of play get artifacting on the screen then the display driver will reset(this doesn’t stop me playing but it’s one of those DOH forgot to run Precision before I started playing moments)

I have a GTX470 myself and what I’ve done is I used EVGA Precision to set up a custom fan profile which ramps the fan up automatically as the temperature increases – you can customize the curve exactly to your liking, which means you can have it ramping up aggressively during high loads and still have it be relatively quiet at lower loads. Once you then set Precision to start up automatically with Windows it basically means it’ll just get on with it and do everything for you automatically.

I’ve been running my card like this for about a year and 8 months now and it’s working really well. I can game with my card at full tilt for hours without any worries, since even if it were to run a little hotter all of a sudden (hot summers day or whatnot) the fan would just scale to adjust and it stays nice and quiet when idle (well as relatively quiet as these cards ever get when they don’t downclock fully because you’re running 2 monitors off it).