Guild Wars 2

Lemme understand what you said, is that 86C under load or idle? If that is idle, as in, not playing games, then you should be concerned and whip out your compressed air and go to town on your computer.

Even if that is under load I would be slightly concerned because that is close to the max temp of 100C.

Well, normally if you set everything to their default values, that sets all the overclocking settings to automatic (off). Automatic usually takes care of everything to make sure the system is stable. You can set the voltage to a set value instead of automatic, but at that point there really isn’t any way to be sure what is overkill versus what is just enough. The more the voltage you drop on your processor, theoretically the shorter it lives, but I’ve never had a CPU die due to overclocking yet. Also, the more voltage you drop on your processor, the hotter it gets, when its too hot, then bad stuff happens. Basically you are starting to venture into overclocking territory when messing with voltages and some more important BIOS settings which is for the most part trial and error.

Hopefully someone chimes in who has AMD overclocking experience as I have none. I’ve only really toyed with Intel processors.

To stop it would be futile because of what happened. The gw2.dat file most likely got corrupted and needs to be re-downloaded because of the sudden crash during the modification of said file.

To speed it up, dish out more cash to your internet service provider to get a better speed.

In short, I think a lesson has been learned here:
keep a backup of the gw2.dat file somewhere on a media hard drive and update on occasion. This way if your main game gets corrupted, you already have most of the game downloaded to patch up.

Do you get this error before choosing a character, or after choosing a character? If it’s before I’m not sure what to say besides to submit a support ticket to ArenaNet and pray to the 6 that the issue gets resolved.

I’m not sure how similar the codes are for BSOD between processors (if they are tied in the equation at all) but a 124 usually meant that the vcore needed more voltage. This is a common code encountered among overclockers with the i7 9xx series.

Hmmmm, well if you have tried drivers, the next thing I would check are temperatures of the CPU and GPU. You can download monitoring software for these two components if you don’t already have software that does this here:
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.22-setup.exe

Perhaps it was a bug that allowed you to assign the keys in the first place and they finally got around to fixing it. As I recall, I was not able to bind my ‘mouse 4’ and ‘mouse 5’ keys on my MX-518 when playing the game. This further fueled my want for a Razer Naga (Logitech did not launch their ‘keypad on a mouse’ mouse yet).

Perhaps try deleting the local.dat file from the user documents folder area. The game will automatically recreate the file when the game boots up, sometimes it just needs to get purged.

Yes, you are right, your CPU is too old along with your graphics card. The ‘can I run this game’ sites only tell you if your computer can launch the game, not what FPS you will get or whether the game is actually playable. In their eyes, as long as you can launch the game, it’s up to you how you want to play the game, whether its at 60FPS or sub 10FPS. Normally companies toss up a second set of system specifications that are labeled ‘recommended specifications’ which is what you’ll want in order to be able to play the game at a decent frame rate. ArenaNet does not have these specifications because there are no systems that can play this game reliably (in all areas) at 30+FPS without overclocking.

Sure you can try overclocking and getting the little extra performance, but it’s not going to equate to breaking the 20FPS barrier. Your best bet is to get a new CPU/GPU/RAM/Motherboard and salvage CD ROM/Hard Drive/Power Supply (if it’s powerful enough)/fans/etc from your old computer. There are a ton of threads about what people recommend buying to play this game relatively well, but if you post a budget then I’m sure people will flock to give suggestions on what to buy.

Hmmm, I must have replied before I had my first cup of coffee because it seems like I totally missed that last paragraph of information from your first post. Anywhos, I would make sure that the CPU is actually running at least at 2.3Ghz, perhaps some power saving technology is preventing the CPU from going at higher speeds when its needed, like when playing Guild Wars 2.

Beyond that, I’m not sure really what to check besides making sure that the GTX 460’s are not running in x1 mode and running in x8 or x16.

What are the temperatures for the CPU and GPU? If you don’t have software that already polls this information, I recommend using HWMonitor which can be found here:
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.22-setup.exe

Burntnoodle.4603:

CptBadger.5918:

Sorry bro. You can’t run this game on your toaster.

In fact, most desktop high end rigs struggle with it, because the optimization is a joke.

Or to be more precise – there is absolutely no optimization whatsover.

so are you saying my computer in fact does suck?

I wouldn’t say that because its mean, but lets look at the facts. Those ‘can I play this game’ checkers out there are garbage because it won’t tell you how well the game will run on your system, all they do is say ‘yes this game will run on your system because you pass the MINIMUM specification’ but most likely it will run like kitten. I would say with that processor and that graphics card, be happy to get 30 FPS on low to medium-ish settings at 1080p.

It might look like its trying to re-download the game because that process looks very similar to the ‘checking files’ process. This is where the downloader figures out what files have been downloaded already by going through all the files downloaded thus far.

First off, lets check your graphics drivers. You should be able to download the latest and greatest here:
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/62483

If that doesn’t fix anything check your temperatures while the laptop is under load. For that you can use HWMonitor found here:
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/hwmonitor/1.22-setup.exe

Well, I agree you should be getting better frames than that. However, I think you’re expecting too much from the game. When you compare games it really proves very little, unless they are running on similar engines. Since Guild Wars 2 runs on a proprietary engine created in-house, no other games use it. The closest game you can compare is Guild Wars since that is where the engine came from. It would be awesome to see someone take the Guild Wars 2 engine and port a game to use it somehow and see how terrible it runs.

Anywhos, I wouldn’t expect the GT 540M to pull too much weight, low-medium sounds about right. I would check your temperatures when playing the game. Your CPU/GPU might be throttling itself down to preserve itself from a heat stroke.

If everything is hunky dory in temperature land, then I would make sure that the laptop is actually using the GT 540M. Your DxDiag report worries me since it’s screaming Intel HD 3000 and not Nvidia GT 540M. There might be an option in BIOS to set which one to use or in the Nvidia Control Panel or Intel’s Graphics Control Panel. I’m not sure since I don’t have a machine myself that has both a discrete and embedded graphics system in place.

Is that the only BSOD code you get (a0000001) or are there others that appear as well? Are you overclocking any part in your system/turn off any automatic overclocking BIOS options to ensure they are not causing any issue.

Have you tried deleting the local.dat file? This usually resides in the documents folder that Guild Wars 2 creates.

Some computer specifications could help us help you solve this problem. What is your computer, particularly, what is your GPU, CPU, and operating system?

If you haven’t tried running memtest for hours on end, then I would do that to check your RAM and make sure it’s all fine and dandy. I would also use check disk on the hard drive that houses the gw2.dat file and ensure the hard drive is not a problem either.

You can try and install the latest drivers and see what the result comes out to be.

TheMagickDoll.7594:

Having the same issue. Pass week or so my graphic device will suddenly stop working and recover randomly.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770
Driver 12.104.0.0

Maybe try updating to the latest graphics drivers. I believe people are on 13.x now.

muslumgurseks.4951:

why not dual channel?

Probably because it is a single stick of RAM instead of two sticks running in dual channel. He could be going for a energy efficient build using less sticks but getting generally the same result.

Just suggesting anything here, but have you looked at your CPU/GPU temperatures when this happens? Something might be overheating and temporarily shutting some stuff down to let the parts cool before resuming normal activity.

I would try deleting the local.dat file which is normally located in your ‘my documents’ folder if I recall correctly. If there is one, that is, the file might not be created until the game launches. However, if that doesn’t work, you can try deleting the gw2.dat file and download the entire game again and see if there is a problem the second time around.

If neither of those things work, then I would open a support ticket to ArenaNet asking them what is up.

Does this crash only happen while you are playing Guild Wars 2 or does it just crash when ever?

TinkTinkPOOF.9201:

Behellagh.1468:

But imagine the multi-boxing potential.

While it is made up of many nodes and many CPU/GPU’s, it’s a single unit and doesn’t have multi-boxing potential at all. you would need to change many things on it and install a mass of VM’s. Not only that but supercomputers like these use lower clocked CPU’s with many cores/threads, and games, such as GW2 do not scale well over many cores and you are better off with fewer but far faster cores/threads. then we get into the GPU, which are nothing at all like desktop GPU’s which are meant for games and the like, the Tesla cards are meant for calculations of a different sort and fall hard on their face trying to render games, newer Tesla cards ($2-4k each) are about 3-4gen behind as far as playing games go, as that is not their goal. Tesla cards are about being stable and accurate in their computations, where desktop cards do not require this.

muslumgurseks.4951:

Technology isn’t that advanced yet… in 200 years we will be able to play it @60 cpnstant fps

The tech is without a doubt here now, the games are not. You look the highend FPS’s we have today, coded very well and have some outstanding gfx and able to get 100fps+ on current HW. Like it or not, most MMO’s do not fall into the well polished area as far as performance goes.

Yeah, I have to say the Frostbite engine looks more and more promising each iteration and for the most part proves itself in the Battlefield series. The engine Bungie made for Halo seems pretty rock solid as well. The Guild Wars engine was good for Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2 might have needed a new engine to run on since the Guild Wars engine didn’t see any heavy revisions and was introduced into service back in 2005. The Halo engine saw pretty big updates every few years between games and Frostbite speaks for itself on its’ wiki page.

The release of the new Haswell architecture and the updated Kepler architecture all within one month of now, its like anticipating Christmas! =D

Man I wish I had a Titan to play Guild Wars 2 with D=

Anywhos, what version of graphics driver are you running? Assuming you’re running Windows 7, this is the link to the latest and greatest:
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/61261

iamisandisnt.2170:

Ever since the last Frost and Flame patch (it was like April 30th or something), I went from a buttery smooth 60fps right down to 10-15 on average.

I’ve deleted the .dat file, run the -repair mode, and lowered all my graphics so that I can get a somewhat half-decent 20 fps, but every input takes a half-second to register. Not skill lag, mind you. That also happens on top of the input lag sometimes. When I move my mouse, it takes a half second for the view to turn. When I move forward, it takes half a second before my character moves forward.

The game is simply unplayable. Altho, I did manage to do the new dungeon once which was pretty cool ’cause I just turned the graphics all the way up and mashed buttons.

Anyway… thanks for making such a wonderful game that I’ve been addicted to, can you please un-do whatever you did in the last patch so I can have my fix back? Thanks

PS I just did a -diag but I’m not sure what part of it is needed and it’s too long to paste all of it here.

If I were you, I would open a support ticket with ArenaNet and see if they can’t shed some light on your problem. Also, you can attach documents to your post so you don’t need to copy and paste the results.

mellondog.2973:

It should run reasonably well. Just remember that GW2 isn’t set to run on multiple cores so eight cores will do very little, if anything.

If there was an * at the end of your post with more detailed information about your statement, I probably would have been OK with what you said. Guild Wars 2 actually does use multiple cores, its just that a couple threads that the game relies on are extremely ‘heavy’ and are the ones that bog down the entire system. If one of these threads is held up because it is trying to do too much, it holds the rest of the threads up, thus holding the game up, this lowering your FPS/performance. Basically its the domino effect.

Thoughts on the second box:
-An overclocked processor helps a lot with Guild Wars 2. This processor would likely run the game better because of the higher clock rate even though there are half the available threads. The graphics card isn’t a bad option either.

-This is what I would consider a minimum for people to have in a true blue gaming machine (note the speed).

-A solid setup with an SSD and HDD, the SSD could be improved as SolarNova noticed, but its miles better than a normal HDD.

-A high end chipset produced by what I regard as a good manufacturer.

-A solid power supply, I have the TX version of this one.

-I hear CoolerMaster makes good cases.

-I have an H50 cooling my processor, I don’t mind noise, but I’m also not sure how much more/less noise the H60 makes than my H50.

As SolarNova said, wait for Haswell. It comes out in less than a month and opens up so much more than Ivy Bridge since Ivy Bridge is the end of the socket life known as 1155. Haswell will be running on 1150. On top of that it should be priced the same as the current Ivy Bridge processors but comes with a performance boost. If you are adamant on saving money, Ivy Bridge prices should fall a little after a while.

@Tinny
The problem with prebuilt computers is that there is seemingly never a perfect box, there is always some compromise being made that sometimes ‘destroys’ the true ability of the box.

Thoughts on the first box:
-A solid graphics card and processor for the most part. The non-K 3770 is good but not as easily overclockable as the 3770K. In my opinion everyone now-a-days should overclock just a couple hundred Mhz because its free performance with virtually no effort and no degradation done to your processor.

-8GB of RAM is solid and a minimum for what I would consider today’s standard for gaming. The speed though is a little slow, especially considering that Haswell is supporting 1600Mhz officially, and people with Ivy Bridge run 2400Mhz monster sticks. The few extra bucks it usually costs to go from 1333 to 1600 or even 1866 is worth it.

-Having a SSD installed was for the fancy rich kids a while ago and I never considered it necessary or even beneficial to a build. I caved last year and finally got one and I stand by having one in any system now. Over the years I have never had a hard drive go bad and always had my ancient PATA (yeah that’s right, before SATA) have my operating system on it because I never had a reason to get a new hard drive. All of my other hard drives were larger and mostly external which held all my media I have collected over the years. Moving from PATA HDD to SATA SSD was like going from a Neo Geo to a Ford Mustang. Ever since, booting into windows and having everything run much faster than it used to made it worth the extra dollars/GB over what a normal hard drive costs. Even if its a smaller 64GB drive, totally worth it. So basically you’d be buying that and installing that on your own which is a really easy task.

-So you’re running an older chipset on an Ivy Bridge processor. With that, its not even the higher end chipset for the 6 series motherboards. Sure it’ll work, but its something that might hold you back later when you want to expand or overclock.

-A solid power supply manufacturer, the limited wattage might hinder you if you overclock or add another graphics card later on in life.

-A case with blue led fans is always a plus (because I love blue), but really, there are better options out there.

-If you overclock that CPU cooler isn’t going to cut it, especially on an Ivy Bridge processor.

-Generic everything else, really isn’t much to say on this other than that its nice that you get a DVD drive even though, personally, you should move past external media like that. Last time I had to use a DVD drive was…well I can’t remember =D.

Did you try some older drivers from 12.X? I’m not sure where to find them because I never use AMD, but Googling around a bit should surface what you need.

You can try using the -repair switch to repair the gw2.dat file if it is damaged, which it might be. It might be a problem with reading the data from the hard drive, so make sure the hard drive is A-Ok.

I doubt it has something to do with RAM if its the same addresses coming up and same textures/animations/whatever.

If any of that doesn’t fix it, I’m not sure, try moving the game to another hard drive if possible. Other than that, I’d wait and see what ArenaNet says on the matter.

What were the BSOD codes that you received when the first scenario happened? They might point us in the right direction. Your two problems are likely related and are just happening at different times which produce different results.

Is your GPU temperature within its safe limit? You can use GPU-Z to make sure your GPU isn’t overheating which can be found here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2234/techpowerup-gpu-z-v0-7-0/

Have you tried updating your graphics drivers to their latest version? I can assist with this if needed, I just need to know your graphics card and operating system.

How many clicks/how long does it take for you to log in? Perhaps the button doesn’t function because the client is checking for updates. I can’t remember whether the game asks you to log in first or check for updates, then allows you to log in.

What is your CPU, maybe its being taxed by other programs running in the background or you are running close to the minimum. A terrible processor might be able to play the game at 60+ FPS but at a terrible resolution.

I have had some experience with this error in the past. For me it was a problem with one of my sticks of RAM being bad. At first it was really hard to detect which stick was bad or whether it was Guild Wars 2 that was causing the problem. Initially, outside of Guild Wars 2 I experienced no problem what so ever with my memory. I even memtested all the sticks and came back with findings claiming everything was hunky dory. This cause me to think that it was Guild Wars 2 and I should shrug it off, but eventually some RAM refused to show up when I booted to Windows and Firefox would randomly crash. I tested the memory again and had no bad sticks according to memtest. So after the process of elimination I was able to determine my semi-faulty stick and life went on. I’ve never had a problem with my RAM since then and I haven’t seen that error either.

I would make sure your RAM passes memtest a few times. If memtest passes, and you can’t think of anything else, its kind of a pain, but just play on one stick at a time to find the bad stick(s). If all your sticks still fail even if they are in one by one, then it might be a hard drive issue. Make sure your hard drive is not failing, you can use check disk to ensure of this. Just right click on your hard drive in ‘My Computer’ and go to ‘Properties’. Then, go to the ‘Tools’ tab and there should be an error checking section somewhere in that tab. Let the utility do its thing and hopefully the information comes back saying there is nothing wrong, because replacing a hard drive sucks, especially when its the one with your operating system.

Flyynt.5310:

So I built a new system back in late December.

Previously I had i7 920, AMD 5870,and 8GB RAM running in a 2560 X 1010 window on Windows 7 and performance was fine (I could not tell you any specific frame rates now, but I never had any noticeable issues).

My new machine is, in theory, far superior to the old machine. It is an i5 3570, AMD 7970, and 16GB RAM on Windows 8. I am also running off an SSD now.

Sadly, running GW2 in a 1600 X 900 window at the very lowest settings produces frame rates of 14-20 FPS outside of major towns.

It was so bad at first, that I assumed that there was something wrong with my hardware. After trying many other applications and games without issue, I determined that it was not in fact a hardware issue.

Not feeling like messing with it at the time, I thought I would just wait for new drivers and/or GW2 patches and see what happens. Over the last five months, whenever a new set of drivers (betas included) would be released I would grab them, fire up GW2 and see if the situation was rectified. No joy thus far, still sitting at 14-20 FPS at the lowest settings.

Things that I have tried thus far:

Installed new drivers (13.1, 13.2 Beta 6, 13.3 Beta 3, and I am currently on 13.4 – there have probably been others as well).
Made sure that the Intel 4000 HD Onboard was disabled in BIOS.
Made sure that all of my CPU cores are running with GW2.
Verified that the GPU clock speed is appropriate while running GW2 (950).
Tried running it in full screen mode (both at 1680 X 1050 and 5040 X 1050).
Other various smaller tweaks that elude me now.

When running, my CPU is doing fine and not taxed (at least in the areas that I have been in while trying to rectify this problem). My GPU sits pegged at 99%.

In the five months since I have built this rig I have used it without issue (I just gave up playing GW2). Everything else has worked fine. FC3, BF3, XCom, Football Manager, Neverwinter Beta, iRacing, etc. Most of those have been run at full or high detail in 5040 X 1050 Eyefinity.

Clearly something is going very, very wrong with GW2 and my machine. It is not a matter of a tweak or two to improve the frame rate, it is just flat out broken. At this point I am at a loss as to what to even try. Any advice or ideas would be welcome.

Thanks!

I have heard of some successes with using some 12.X graphics drivers instead of 13.X. Other than that, just double check your thermals when playing and make sure that the graphics card is utilizing a full x16 of the PCI-e port and not x1. GPU-Z should be able to verify this for you which can be found here:
http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/2234/techpowerup-gpu-z-v0-7-0/

BigTwinkee.1538:

SolarNova.1052:

Holy necro batman, this was back b4 i even entred WvW lol..how things have changed :P

Anyhoo, i wouldnt worry till u hit the 90c mark. Granted 80-90c is rather warm but its still within safety. As above, check those things 1st. Software will never cause this type of issue, it will only show up a already present hardware issue (gone of TIM, faulty cooler, poor airflow, faulty GPU etc).

Eh…better to necro the thread than start a new one for the same issue. At any rate I’ll double check everything. Thought there may have been a driver issue since the problem was sudden and I was getting blue screen of death, but only on GW2. Thanks for the replies.

Well, what codes were you getting for your BSOD, it might not even be the graphics card causing the problem.

Check your thermals for the GPU when it creates this error. Also, if you can disable the boost ability on the GTX 650Ti Boost, that would be good as well. Perhaps it’s boosting too hard when playing GW2 creating stability issues.

Mmmkay, check.

Graphics drivers, which ones have you tried? Personally I’m for the latest, but I hear other AMD users preaching differently and saying to use 12.×. In any case, here is the link you can find your driver downloads at:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
Step 1: Desktop Graphics
Step 2: Radeon HD Series
…you can figure out the rest I would hope :p

Well, seeing as that we’re probably going to rehash stuff you tried on the forum…lets make sure you meet the minimum requirements. What is your CPU and RAM?

Well, with that new light, are we sure you are running the latest Nvidia drivers? Perhaps doing a clean install will rid yourself of the issue. I’m not sure what your operating system is, but you can get the latest drivers to download here:
http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy

I start building my build not around the gear or class or anything that has to do with the class. I build a build for a certain aspect of the game. WvW has a totally different mindset than farming CoF. Therefore, a different build is required. You can even go as far to say that normal event farming has different requirements than dungeons (CoF in particular). Though the differences are smaller than my previous example, they are still present.

The launcher, I’m pretty sure, is only supposed to run at that frame rate because nothing is changing on screen. Your problem with not being able to click the ‘log in’ button probably does not have to do with the FPS you get during that part of the game’s process.

What happens when you click the ‘log in’ button and it does not register? Do you keep clicking until it does or do you relaunch the game?

Behellagh.1468:

Ilithis Mithilander.3265:

With that much on a budget you can probably get a card that will run the game on high. What I would buy with that budget from Nvidia is a GTX 660Ti or if you’re partial to AMD the 7950. Personally, I’m a fan of Nvidia and would grab a GTX 660Ti if I were looking to upgrade right now with that budget.

Did you miss the op’s suggested price range? 150-200 pounds mail order would make it only the GTX 660 or the AMD HD 7870, unless you ignore VAT.

I’m sure if you hunt enough you can find a GTX 660Ti for 200 pounds. Amazon.co.uk has them for 205 pounds shipped but they’re currently out of stock.

Go to where ever you installed the game. Most likely C:\Program Files (x86)\Guild Wars 2\ check to see what size the gw2.dat file is. To do this, right click on the file and hit properties. If it is anywhere near 15GB then you’re set to update the game from the internet.

BigTwinkee.1538:

Sorry to necro the thread but I’m having the same problems as the OP. Did anyone else with these issues find a solution?

I’m going to assume you have tried to cleaned out your PC, checked that the fans are spinning at max speed, and reapplied thermal paste to your GPU. The only other idea I can throw out is check your case fans, maybe one of those was feeding outside, cooler air to the GPU and perhaps that is no longer happening.

Personally, 80C isn’t too bad, 90C is when you get worried and take precautions.