Guild Wars 2

I like ATI cards. I’ve used them for years and never had problems with them. Or no “unknown problems.” I had a 4870 card that was prone to overheating (which that series was notorious for) so I put on a good, after-market cooling solution and all was well. That said, I know people who swear by nVidia.

I’d suggest that you go with the brand you like. Then choose a manufacturer that has a good reputation, because that’s where the problems are going to come in. Some manufacturers might buy cheap VRAM and other components to keep the prices down, but that leads to cards that fail often or are very sensitive to power/heat issues. Some cards might have enhanced cooling, while some skimp on cooling.

So, more than just the obvious ATI/nVidia debate, look at the specific board manufacturer and see what their reputation is. Both major brands of graphics chipsets are great, but how those cards are sent to market isn’t always so good.

With lowered settings, the graphics card doesn’t do as much work and therefore doesn’t use as much power. It’s conceivable that your power supply might be right on the edge of being able to provide all the power that your graphics card needs when it has to do all the extra work.

What PSU do you have? Does it have multiple rails and/or a dedicated set of graphics card connectors? If it doesn’t have connectors dedicated to the graphics card, have you tried re-connecting the components in your system so that nothing else is plugged into the power cable that’s feeding the graphics card?

Are you sure nothing is running in the background? One “gotcha” that I’ve seen several times is that people “don’t run anything when gaming” but they have a web browser open so they can stream music or videos off the net. If the browser’s media player (Flash, usually) is configured to use hardware accelleration, that setting can override the GPU clockspeed and force it to run at a much lower speed. On my system, “hardware accelleration” for Flash forces the GPU to run at 400 MHz, as opposed to the gaming clockspeed of 950 MHz.

That might be something to check, since it definitely sounds like something is affecting the framerate beyond just the normal game and driver settings.

Any chance that you’re running on a laptop, sometimes plugged into the wall, sometimes running on batteries? Or that your Windows Power Management settings might be changing from “HIgh Performance” to something else, in between gaming sessions?

That’s a pretty odd picture and it’s kind of hard to guess at what’s going on. It could be some sort of corruption with the video memory/frame buffer, or it could be that the VRAM (or some other part of the graphics card) got fried. Have you tried turning off your computer, letting it set for 5-ish minutes, and then turning it back on to see if anything has changed? It might also be worth trying to uninstall/re-install the video driver just in case something got corrupted there. Probably not, but better to try everything before just going out to buy an entirely new video card. Unless you really want a new video card…

Depending on your budget, I’d suggest getting a good, solid mid-range graphics card. HIgh-end cards are great if you absolutely, positively need to have the highest possible framerates – and you have a monitor capable of refreshing the screen at that framerate. Otherwise, getting a card that can keep the framerate in the 50-60 range is going to be fine. So cards like the nVidia 560, 570, 660, 670 should work, or ATI 5700, 6600, 6700 series cards.

Some things to look for in any graphics card:
1) Enhanced cooling system, capable of keeping the entire board cool, not just a super-duper GPU cooler that lets the VRAM, VRMs, and other components get hot. You definitely want a full-board cooling solution.

2) Get a graphics card that requires LESS power than your power supply can provide, so that times of intense graphics don’t over tax the PSU and essentially cause a little blackout (brown-out) inside the computer.

3) Alternatively to #2, plan on upgrading your power supply to one that can provide MORE power than your computer (and new graphics card) will need at full draw. Pay attention to how much power the PSU can supply to what rails and if the PSU has a didicated rail for the graphics card or if it’s sharing rails with something else.

We definitely need more info about your computer setup before we can do any real diagnosis on that problem. It could be faulty hardware, outdated drivers, old DirectX, or something else.

That said, try updating to the latest graphics driver for your card. Also use Microsoft’s DirectX Web Installer to make sure that you have all the latest patches for DirectX.

If those don’t help, then you need to post again and attach a dxdiag report for your system.

With your setup, I wouldn’t think getting stable FPS would be easy to do. The 620 graphics card isn’t designed for high performance, so it’s going to rely on your CPU to do more work, and GW2 doesn’t really like AMD CPU’s.

The best suggestion is to look through the various graphics settings and make sure that you turn down all the ones that are GPU and CPU intensive. That will give you the best shot at somewhat stable framerate, but no guarantees.

It’s a matter of personal preference. Eventually, you will earn enough skill points to buy all the skills in the tree, so you don’t need to worry about “getting the right ones.” Just get the ones you think will be useful to you first, then you can fill in the other skills later on.

They work, but I don’t think they work the way you think they do. They are intended to be used to automatically log you in, not to fill in data on the launcher dialog.

If you want to automatically log in, then you need to use other command line switches with them. I think you also have to use -nopatchui to get it to work. You might need to use -autologin, but I think that one is optional.

Another driver that needs updating is your audio driver. It’s from 2010, so it’s way out of date. The part of Windows that you’ll want to make sure is up to date is DirectX. Go to Microsoft’s website and find the DirectX Web Installer. It will check the versions of DirectX on your system and make sure the are fully updated with the latest patches and bug fixes.

I’ll be optimistic and say it’s a software problem and hopefully just old drivers or DirectX. Can you post a dxdiag report of your system?

There might also be some windows settings that are conflicting with the game settings and causing some issues. For this, you should check your Windows graphics settings and make sure that any options are set to “Application Controlled.”

Other than that, you definitely need to list your hardware so that people can start making more educated guesses at the problem.

There’s not much that can be done about the “running around the maps at random” feeling. That’s just how the game is designed, without a structured quest system. It’s not bad when you get used to it, though. If you want to be less random, though, you can look for the scouts on each map and let them reveal the hearts they know about. This will let you get an idea of where the hearts are and what levels they are, so you can make somewhat less random choices about where to go next.

Also, if you’re a few levels behind in questing, are you doing the Dynamic Events? Those are a great way to level up quickly, as well as completing hearts. I’ve spent quite a few enjoyable evenings doing nothing but getting caught up in a group of adventurers that run from place to place starting up and/or participating in the events. It’s amazing how fast you can level through events. They’re also a good way to earn Karma to buy gear, weapons, and items for your character.

The first thing to try is getting updated drivers. Your vidio and audio drivers are from 2010, so they are several generations old, and may lack some features that the game needs. Depending on how yourcomputer likes to work with drivers, you may be able to download and use drivers directly from the manufacturer’s websites. If not, then you’ll have to check the HP website and see if they’ve published any newer drivers for that system.

Next would be to make sure that DirectX is fully updated. Even though you have Windows 7, and DirectX 11, that doesn’t mean that you have the latest updates and fixes to the DirectX 9 libraries. All versions of DirectX are independant from each other, so updating one version doesn’t mean that all versions have been updated. Check the Microsoft website for the DirectX Web Installer. It will check your system and update all versions of DirectX if they need to be updated.

My first guess is that the hardware is crashing because it can’t get enough power when GW2 starts making it do a lot of work. Although another possibility would be that something on the graphics card is getting too hot under load, and that’s causing the crash.

What power supply do you have? Are you sure it’s strong enough to power your OC CPU and your GPU when they’re both being overworked by the GW2 engine? Also, did you do all the research when you OC’d the CPU to make sure that you adjusted the various voltage settings to compensate for the increased power draw?

Have you tried running with the case open to see if that helps anything or allows you to play longer between crashes? Have you made sure that the system has had all the dust cleaned out? Have you run any utilities that can monitor temps to see if heat is a possible cause?

Of course, most obviously, have you tried setting the clock speed back to normal and seeing if that eliminates the crash?

The two most likely causes of PC shutdowns are: thermal issues (overheating) and low power.

Check your PC for dust bunnies, blow out all the dust in the fans, make sure there is plenty of airflow through the case, etc. Also, make sure that you’re power supply is able to provide enough power to the PC when things get busy in the game. No doubt your graphics card is going to be drawing nearly its full power requirement at times, and if it’s sharing a rail with other components or if the PSU is too weak, it can lead to shutdowns.

AFKAIK, you can’t slot more than one rune at a time. If you want to have more than one bonus stat, you need to buy runes with multiple bonuses.

If the rune has a “0/4” indicator, it doesn’t mean that you can apply up to 4 runes to a single item, it means that you need to have 4 runes applied to 4 pieces of gear in order to get all the bonuses.

The only file that could be getting fragmented and causing this (if it’s a file fragmentation issue), would be the GW2.DAT file – and it would most likely be internal fragmentation.

GW2.DAT is one huge file that contains all of GW2’s many data files, and it is updated and rewritten every time the game is patched. Depending on how the updating works, the file could be getting internally fragmented every time some the files data is changed, especially if the size of the new data won’t fit where the old data was and has to be added at the end of the file. Of course, this is all just hypothetical guessing.

If the problem is that GW2.DAT is getting fragmented, then the solution would be to rewrite it in order to get all the data back into contiguous form. I haven’t tried to do that, but there are some commandline arguments that might help out. They’re explained on the WIKI page. Some of the arguments that look promising to me are -copydat and maybe -image (though it may not rewrite the file, which wouldn’t fix any fragmentation).

If you’re concerned about your post teaching people how to exploit something in the game, most companies have an email address that you can send the information to. That way they get the info without it spreading to the gaming community. I took a quick look for any sticky posts that might give such information, but I didn’t see anything, but the info may be here someplace.

Yep, I’ve noticed the load screens taking significantly longer as well.

Swordbreaker.2581:

“2 – This is actually in the game, but broken”

control+shift+H is broken? :/

No, that works fine. But when you’re in combat, it’s VERY hard to do the whole “CTRL+SHFT+H PRTSCN CTLR_SHFT+H” sequence without being killed or losing some of the dynamic feel of an “in combat screenshot.”

I think what they’re asking for (and what’s broken?) is a single keypress function that will hide the UI, grab a screenshot, and enable the UI again. That way you can get all the action, with none of the “Ok everyone, DON’T MOVE! I wanna take a picture of this!” hassle.

Freeze-frames didn’t work on Police Squad, and the sure don’t work in PvP.

Unfortunately, you may be stuck. GW2 keeps all of it’s data files in one huge library file, GW2.DAT. If that file got corrupted (or the game thinks the file got corrupted) when your computer shut down unexpectedly, the game is going to have to either verify that the contents of the file are not corrupted and/or download new versions of the data files to replace the corrupted ones – or the entire corrupted library file, if the contents can no longer be read.

If you have a copy of the GW2.DAT file, you can try replacing the “corrupted one” with the backup copy and see what happens. It may only require you to download all the files/updates that have changed since you made the backup copy.

For ATI folks, I’m using the 12.6 drivers for my 6870 card, and it’s working just fine. So if you feel like reverting to something that “works well for someone else” I can recommend that version.

As AuroraFlare said, make sure you do a CLEAN installation. Especially if you’re reverting from a newer driver to an older version. But it’s good advice almost all the time, anyway.

It’s also available from one of the Karma vendors in Fields of Ruin, which is a level 30-40 zone.

Actually, that sounds about right, for your system. The slow processor clock speed coupled with a graphics chipset that isn’t designed for high performance gaming is going to mean lower framerates. Especially since your CPU is going to be doing double duty because it will have to run software emulation for any DirectX functions that are not implemented in the HD 3000 hardware.

So, you should be able to run on full/high settings, but you won’t be seeing great framerates.

PS: Lag refers to network latency, a delay between when you make an action in the game and when the server updates your client to display the action you took. Lag has nothing to do with framerates.

They don’t need to talk to be reported, you just need to be able to see them.

To report them in game, target them and right-click on their portrait. You can choose “Report” from the menu and select “Botting” as the reason.

Yes, your framerate will suffer. If you double the resolution, you quadruple the number of pixels that the graphics card will have to render. That means more work to paint on textures, apply shaders, apply mapping, etc.

And just in case… The physical size of the monitor does not affect performance at all, only the pixel resolution does. So a 24" monitor at 1920×1200 is just the same as a 27", 32", or 60" monitor/TV at 1920×1200 (Ok, a TV will stick to an HD resolution of 1920×1080, but still…) Just don’t let anyone tell you that moving from a 20" monitor to a 27" monitor will lower your framerate because it’s a bigger size.

So there will be an impact and you will most likely have to make some trade-offs to keep the performance in an acceptable range. Of course, it’s really hard to say how big of an impact it will have until after you get the new screen and give it a try.

You can view you collection from the various crafting stations that you run across. They also serve as bank access.

Since this issue involves sound, maybe you should include your sound card info and what driver versions you’re using. And if it’s not a discrete sound card, you definitely need to say what motherboard and what built-in audio chipset it’s using.

There was a post by someone from ANet saying that it was fine to let the gold seller pay you for reporting them. So you will not get in trouble for accepting their money.

I don’t have the link, but it shouldn’t be hard to find if you search the forum for similar threads.

I’m not absolutely positive, but I believe I’ve read people saying that they’ve fixed this problem by deleting the “Local.dat” file. So you might want to give that a try. Or just rename it first, in case it doesn’t work or makes things worse.

The file should be in your “My Documents\Guild Wars 2” folder.

I agree with Wendigo. I’m using a Nostromo n52. It took me a couple of hours to get used to it, but now it’s hard to play without it. Once you get the configuration the way you like it, it makes thing so much better.

What you’re seeing in that screenshot isn’t screen tearing. Tearing would be one or more horizontal lines where the image above the line is different from the image below the line. It’s caused when the monitor refreshes and displays images from multiple animation frames at the same time. If you want a better definition, I suggest looking on more technical websites for the full details.

Anyway, that’s more of an issue with some textures not being applied properly or some of the world geometry not appearing. It could be a driver issue or it could be a game issue. There are a few places in the GW2 world where you can get the camera into a certain location where the rendering engine gets confused over what parts of the world to display and what parts are hidden. If you swing the camera back and forth you can see these objects appear and disappear.

I wouldn’t expect a driver issue to have objects not appear for a split second and then appear. I can make up a few reasons in my head, but I’m not sure how valid they are. When was the last time you updated DirectX? If it’s been a while, there might be some optimizations and bug fixes that you’re missing that might help.

You might want to add that bots love to teleport around the area they are farming, instead of running. I’ve noticed several bots that instantly jump from spawn point to spawn point along their farming path.

If you haven’t done so already, you can go to the other race’s starting zones and complete the hearts there to get more karma. They’re usually easy to complete and karma seems to pile up pretty fast, at least for me.

I haven’t had any experience with that particular PSU, but it looks like it should do just fine. As a sanity check, are you plugging the graphics card into the PCI-E (6-pin) ports or are you powering it through one of the SATA cables?

Looking at my map doesn’t ring any bells. Is that the one in the spider cave, where you have to fight some veteran spiders to get to it? If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I just hugged the righthand wall on my way to the back of the cave, killing spiders as I went. Then you jump up to the highest pool and commune with the object to get the skill point.

In my case, I started several characters, deleted some, restarted some, deleted more of them and started again. I couldn’t find one that really clicked. I was basing my “I like this character” decission on how it played with the default weapon, though.

On my later alts, I decided that I would do enough playing on each character to learn all the weapon skills (main hand and off hand) so that I could see how each weapon played. On the elementalist, I did every weapon combination with every elemental focus. Gaining experience with all the weapons helped me find out what meshed well with my play style, and I’m much happier with my characters, now.

My main is an elementalist using a staff. I typically use fire spells, but I’ve put a lot of points into water and earth so I have good defense and I can do a decent job of healing myself, since the elementalist takes a beating if anything gets close. My second favorite character is a mesmer using a greatsword. I’m kind of at a disadvantage in multi-mob fights, but I feel extrememly powerful in 1v1 fights. Besides, it’s just cool to throw a giant 2-hand sword at someone and see it bounce around 2 or 3 times. It makes me smile.

For fun, if you can call it that, you might try downgrading to the 12.6 driver from ATI. That’s what I’m using on my 6870 card, and it’s running very well and very stable.

Can you post a dxdiag report of your system? We really need to know a lot of information about your system, its hardware, its drivers, and what version of Windows, before we can even start guessing as to what might be the problem.

Initially, I’d suggest the basic troubleshooting methods.

1) Update your drivers from the manufacturer’s websites.
2) Update DirectX using the web installer from the Microsoft Website.
3) Try enabling and disabling options on the GW2 graphics options page to see if one of them is causing this.
4) Since there is a Mac beta client, try running it and see if you have the same problem. You should be able to use the same GW2.DAT file for the Mac and the Windows version, so you don’t need to download the entire game again.

Usually, a driver crash is caused by some sort of hardware failure and the two primary causes of that are too much heat or too little power.

Are you sure that the airflow in the case is sufficient to keep the entire graphics card cool? Are there any other components in the computer (DVD drive, HDD, SSD, etc) that could be causing extra heating on the graphics card?

What Power Supply do you have? Are you sure it’s powerful enough to handle your PC’s needs when the GPU starts doing a lot of work? It doesn’t take much of a dip in power to cause the graphics card to crash. If your power supply has multiple rails, you might want to look at how the components in your computer are getting power from the power supply and try to rearrange the connections so that the graphics card isn’t sharing its power with anything else. (this is most important if the PSU doesn’t have dedicated power connectors for the graphics card. if it does have dedicated connectors/cables, then it should be separating the power distribution internally.)

porting to a waypoint has worked for me, but sometimes it’s not a good solution. For instance, I was doing a story mission, in a personal instance, when died. While I was down, one of my spells is a teleport, and I used it to try to get away from the boss. Unfortunately, it teleported me INTO a rock – as in “inside the rock.” So when I rallied, I was trapped in a rock with no way out. I was forced to teleport to the nearest waypoint, which was outside of the instance. Since I left the personal instance, it got reset and all the progress I had made (which was everything but turning in the item I looted from the boss), I had to redo the entire mission.

So even though teleporting to a waypoint is a solution, it’s far from an optimal solution.

I would like to see one or more of the following:
1) a command like /stuck to move a short distance if you get stuck.
2) a waypoint at the start of every personal instance (inside the instance) for these emergencies.
3) better collision testing for the various teleport spells so that they don’t put you inside of things.

One place to start would be getting updated drivers for your sound card. The ones you have now are more than 3 years old. They might be lacking some features that GW2 needs, which could cause problems.

A somewhat riskier move would be to also update your motherboard’s BIOS, which is also over 3 years old. I’d do some research on the BIOS issue before actually doing an update, though. Unlike drivers, a motherboard’s BIOS does not need to be updated unless there are some bugs that need to be fixed or some compatibility issues to be resolved. But that leads to another suggestion, which would be to download and install any new motherboard drivers from the manufacturer’s website. There might be new INF files that fix compatibility issues, improve performance, or increase stability.

When a driver SYS fails, that’s usually something to do with hardware failing and the driver is just the last thing the OS knew it was talking to. There are relatively few things that will cause a hardware failure, but the most common are: bad connection, heat, power, faulty components.

Easy stuff first: is the graphics card properly seated in the slot? If it’s sitting at an angle and not making solid connections, it can cause issues. So you might want to remove and reseat the card. If you have a motherboard that supports SLI configurations, you might want to put the graphics card in “the other” video slot and see if the problem persists.

Heat: Everyone loves to say “my card can’t be overheating because the GPU temp is normal.” That’s not true at all. Any component that has electricity running through it can get too hot to function properly, especially if the case has bad airflow, the card is right next to something that puts out a lot of heat (PSU, HDD, blowtorch, etc) and many times overheating ISN’T on the GPU because the GPU is where all the cooling is focused. Things that get forgotten about are VRAM, voltage regulators, capacitors, stuff on the video card that’s far away from the GPU – by the power connections. So take a few moments and do some due diligence and make sure that airflow and cooling are up to par. Maybe even try a little overkill and have a box fan blow into the open case just to make sure there’s plenty of airflow.

Power: Since it’s a new card, and it seems like you haven’t had the problem before, it could be that your old PSU isn’t powerful enough to handle the new graphics card. What size and brand of PSU do you have? Does it have more than one power rail? Does it have dedicated GPU power connectors or do you have to use adapters to get power from one of the standard power cables? If you’re taking power from cables that are also connected to HDDs, SSDs, DVDs, case fans, or other components, you might try reconnecting the power cables so that nothing else is getting power from whatever cable the video card is getting power from.

Faulty components: It’s usually pretty rare to get bad products, but it does happen. And usually, the parts that fail are the parts that are only really stressed when playing games or using other applications that really stress the hardware. So you might never see problems if you only run desktop apps, but running a game would cause the crash. If it’s convenient and you can’t find any satisfactory solutions to the crash, you might want to return/RMA the video card and try a new one.

Something else to try, since you said the card is overclocked from the factory, is underclocking it. That will reduce the boards power consumption and heat generation, and put less stress on the card and system as a whole. It wouldn’t be a permanent solution, but it might help you figure out what the real problem is.

Is the drop only in one, or a few, places? Today’s patch seemed to fix the horrific framerate drop in the Bandithaunt caves. So if it only happened in certain locations, it might be fixed now.

Does your framerate get worse as you get closer to the Bandithaunt cave and better as you move further away? If so, you may be seeing the effects of the “continually spawning bombs” bug.

Of course that issue is specific to one area of Queensdale, though I’ve heard people saying there are other areas with similar issues, just not as bad.

There should be a checkbox on the authentication page that will save your address to a list of “verified” addresses. If you don’t see that checkbox, you might need to try adjusting your browser settings (compatibility mode, etc) or using a different browser.

Of course, if you’re IP address changes significantly enough that even saving the address to the verified list doesn’t help, well, not sure what to suggest.

You need to make sure that you have 2 things: the latest (working/stable) driver for you video card/chipset, and the most up to date version of DirectX.

You can get the latest and greatest DirectX updates from Microsoft’s website if you do a search for their DirectX web installer. That will check your system and update all the necessary DirectX files.

For your video card/chipset, you’ll need to get that from the manufacturer, whether that means the laptop’s manufacturer or the chipset manufacturer is hard to say. Sometimes the mobile chipsets require that the drivers be “sighned” by the makers of the laptop, other times you can use the driver directly from ATI, nVidia, or Intel. You’ll have to check on yours and see where you need to go to get the latest driver. And you’ll want to completely uninstall the current video driver before installing the new one.

Something like that could be the hardware on the board failing. It could be a mild overheating on a non-critical part or a power dip that prevents the board from completing its task but doesn’t outright crash the board.

If your power supply has multiple rails to distribute power to the computer components, you can try powering the graphics card from a rail that isn’t used by other devices, just in case the PSU isn’t quite strong enough to give the video card all the power it needs. I’ve heard of other people solving similar issues (or what sound like similar issues) by increasing the main bus voltage, but you should only do this if you know what you’re doing because if you do it wrong, you could fry your motherboard and anything connected to it.

You might also want to try adding a little extra cooling to the back end of the video card, where the power connectors are. If a voltage regulator is getting too hot, it can mess up the power flow to the card and cause similar issues.

If you can, try running with the case open, so you can see the video card. If the video card crashes (and your board is based off of the reference design) there should be some diagnostic LEDs that will light up to indicate why the board crashed. If you can find those lights, it will give you an idea of what went wrong to cause the crash.

The two primary causes for computer shutdowns are overheating and loss of power. And if you’re really lucky, you can have a chip overheat and stop providing power to something, which causes a shutdown. It’s also worth noting that there are lots of chips in the computer that are much more sensitive to heat and power than the GPU and CPU, so just because those two chips seem fine doesn’t mean that the computer is fine.

The PSU can be very important in this issue. There could be an issue where the PSU is only putting out enough power on a given rail to feed the computer during normal usage, but when GW2 starts to put a lot of special effects on the screen and the graphics card needs to draw more power the PSU can’t meet the demand. If that happens, the graphics card will crash. If you’re lucky, it will only be an instantaneous crash and the video driver will be able to recover, otherwise the computer is going to crash.

Likewise, if the videocards cooling is focused solely on keeping the GPU cool, it may not be providing enough cooling to the VRAM chips or the voltage regulators or other small things that tend to get hot when the GPU works hard. If they overheat, the graphics card is going to crash just as it would if the GPU overheated. Same with several smaller components on the motherboard.

But if you want to disregard heat and power as issues, your next option is to go for “bad RAM.” You can either get a good memory tester and let it check the RAM for weaknesses or you can start swapping around sticks of RAM to see if the crash goes away or changes in any meaningful way that would tell you which stick is faulty.

Guild Wars 2 keeps all of it’s data files in a giant library file called GW2.DAT. If that’s the file you keep deleting/renaming, that’s going to force the game to redownload all of it’s data every time you launch it. There’s about 16GB of data in that file.

You should read some of the other “Low FPS” threads. LOTS of people are having issues with unstable framerates. It’s not just you.

That said, the first thing to check is your computer’s Power Management settings. If its not set on “High Performance” then Windows could be throttling your CPU and GPU in order to save power, and that will kill your computer’s gaming performance.

Next, what drivers are you using? What settings do you have in the game?