Guild Wars 2

The pattern looks like an aliasing issue with the glow/light bloom effect.

Maybe it’s skipping too many pixels while sampling the rendered image in its blur shader? A decent filter can be made by sampling just 1/16 of the pixels, but it’s going to have issues like that if there’s a lot of sharp, high contrast detail. Especially if the samples aren’t weighted properly.

Vagrant.7206:

I have a 1000W Corsair power supply that I have made sure all the connections are good (I’ve checked the connections like 20 times). If it was power, I’d be fairly sure to notice.

I have some overclocking enabled for the CPU using a motherboard switch. However, GW2 isn’t as CPU intensive as some of the other things I play (like Kerbal Space Program), so that shouldn’t be the problem as it never shuts down during those games.

GW2 is extremely CPU intensive in many situations, and certainly more so than Kerbal Space Program.

KSP doesn’t do any real content streaming and can’t use more than 1 CPU core for most of its work due to its old Unity engine and badly integrated physics middleware, while GW2 can at least task 2-3 cores most of the time.

Overclocked CPUs are generally much more stable at light load — you may have noticed that in many top overclocks, only one core was active and it’s considered a bit of an achivement to reach comparable clock speeds with more cores usable.

15 FPS in heavy WvW isn’t that unusual tbh. Heavily overclocked i5s and i7s can sometimes maintain 30-ish FPS in heavy battles, but even then the framerate isn’t likely to stay decent all the time.

Looking at your graphics settings, turning down the reflections would probably give the biggest single improvement you can get. The “Full” setting basically means drawing almost everything twice, and guessing from the FPS hit, the game often does that even when there’s barely any water around.

Isn’t that a socket AM2 CPU? You didn’t name the motherboard, but it’s probably so old that no new CPU will work in it. Also, AM2 boards use DDR2 RAM, so what you have right now is incompatible with newer motherboards and CPUs, which use DDR3.

So if you want a smoother framerate, you may need to replace the motherboard, the RAM and the CPU.

Buying a new graphics card would be a smaller upgrade, but when GW2 seriously slows down, it’s usually limited by the CPU, so the performance increase would be limited. It’d still slow down in the same fights, but you could run at somewhat higher settings without it slowing down more.

Akerhage.5419:

No, havent tryed old drivers. Hmm, Im not that keen in having old drivers either. Strange that Nvidia has it that way? But you think its only a GPU driver issue this? Also with the freeze of the computer when trying to quit the game?

Windows restarts its graphics drivers if they doesn’t respond to a command in 2 seconds (by default). When this happens, the screen will lose signal for a moment as the driver gets back up and tries to get the GPU working again.

On some past “bad” drivers, I’ve seen the card’s power management stop working after this, leaving the card stuck at idle clocks (=terrible performance) until the whole system is restarted. Sometimes the power management was messed up enough that different software would report completely different values about its state.

And if the driver already was in a broken state while running the game, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it’d crash and take the OS down with it while trying to free resources, etc. as the game shuts down.

Have you tried installing older drivers? Some recent Nvidia drivers have been very unstable with older cards.

With most Nvidia drivers newer than 314.22, my GTX 560 Ti stutters, freezes and randomly crashes the driver on pretty much any activity involving hardware acceleration (including light web browsing with Firefox).

From the comments on the geforce.com driver releases page, there are problems across the whole “Fermi” card range (GTX 4xx and 5xx series).

The whole system’s rock solid if I just stay away from their newer drivers.

Crawford.4135:

Intel i5 processors are not high-end CPUs. They are budget / business CPUs for general use. You should honestly go for an i7 as they will lend you more CACHE than i5 processors. CACHE is critical for a gaming system.

It saddens me that to this day you still see players/people say i5’s are better or not that much different than i7 processors. They are in fact much better over an i5 due to the CACHE. CACHE is an essential part for a gaming system and help in the performance area greatly.

If going from 6 MB to 8 MBs of cache made a huge difference in the CPU’s ability to work with anything, it would show in some single thread benchmark or weakly threaded game out there. In practice, the i7-4770K is within about 5% of the i5 equivalent’s performance in them, while its price is far higher.

The original poster is building a gaming PC on a budget here; I have to disagree with paying 40% extra for a CPU with +0-5%-ish gaming performance. Even considered as a part of the overall budget it’s starting to hit some diminishing returns there.

Crawford.4135:

A 500W PSU is not a good idea if you are going to go with that GPU you linked. Between the processor and the GPU, 750W is perfectly fine and not overkill by any means. Plus this allows you to add hardware (i.e. HDs, etc.) in the future.

I don’t think that system will ever draw more than ~350 W or so. If the PSU is a good 500 W that doesn’t catch fire when reaching 50% of its rated load, it shouldn’t be a problem. A modern 7200 RPM drive draws about 10 W while working hard so 1-2 more will not matter.

Of course, if he’s thinking about going with multiple GPUs at some point, the 750 W PSU would be an excellent idea.

DaBleuberry.1780:

•How long will this build last?

The CPU market is so stagnant right now it could be a long time. You may have to replace the GPU at some point, especially if decent high res screens finally start showing up.

DaBleuberry.1780:

•Is there any way to reduce the price of this build without losing performance?

The 750 W PSU is overkill unless you’re planning heavy overclocks and/or multiple GPUs.

You don’t want the PSU getting near its stated max power — they do wear a little with time and are more efficient (and less noisy) at about 50-60% output — but with a single GPU and an Intel CPU… I’d say a 500 W model from a decent brand should be fine.

DaBleuberry.1780:

•Should I go for the i7 processor or the i5?

Games will not benefit much from the i7 — especially ones like GW2. Many others are heavily GPU limited in almost any situation and won’t show much difference in average framerate.

If you’re planning to encode lots of video, compile huge codebases or run some other task that parallelizes better than complicated game engines, the i7 might be worth it.

Also, I don’t see a CPU cooler in there. Get a 3rd party one; the Intel stock one is junk and can barely keep the i7 from overheating. The i5 sort of manages on it, but you don’t want to hear the stock cooler hit max speed. Even something like the cheap Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO should be fine if you’re not planning an epic overclock.

If you have any money to spare get a 120+ GB SSD and install your OS on that; the computer will feel a lot faster.

Is the screen really darkening in windowed fullscreen or just behaving the same as the rest of your desktop?

Because if you’ve made your desktop darker by somehow tweaking the OS’s color handling (external gamma tools, ICC color profiles, etc.) fullscreen mode will generally overrule these.

If that’s why the screen’s looking “normal” in fullscreen mode, you probably can’t do much else than fix whatever’s making the regular desktop mode so dark.

There’s already a thread on the topic.

tl;dr: Seems like nobody told the skill effect coders about soft particles and other tricks, so instead they ended up spamming particles like our GPUs had infinite fillrate to work with.

It’s normal, some places just look like that.

Based on what it looks like and how it’s done in some other engines, the GW2 world is built on a heightmapped terrain (with a water plane at some height). This would look very boring by itself, so they add detail to the terrain by placing premade 3D objects on it.

Sometimes the premade decorations don’t quite fit or they don’t have one in the right size, so they take a smaller piece and scale it up; when it’s stretched too far, its texturing ends up looking low res compared to its surroundings, just like in the screenshot.

Maybe they could improve on that look by having a detail texture layer that adjusted with object scale to keep the apparent level of detail consistent, or something.

Look around for a “disable touchpad when typing” option in the touchpad’s settings.

It’s probably on by default to keep users from accidentally brushing the pad and changing input focus when typing, but this shouldn’t be a problem in a fullscreen game.

The launcher’s always been like that.

It’s almost as if someone didn’t quite grasp the concept of window message handling (WM_PAINT, etc.), or intended the launcher to have so much animation going on that constantly running the launcher’s code in a loop would make sense.

It actually made installing/updating the game CPU limited on my previous computer.

Have you tried a different driver version? All the recent 320.xx drivers from Nvidia are very unstable with some cards. It’s much worse with 400 and 500 series GPUs, but some have been complaining of issues with newer GPUs too.

My otherwise perfectly stable system started having screen freezes and then locked up within 15 minutes of installing the first 320 WHQL driver, while browsing around with Firefox. The GTX 560 Ti’s fan started screaming like the card was about to burn out, and didn’t generate a signal for the screen again until I unplugged the computer for a moment.

Downgraded drivers to 314.22, not a single problem since then.

CirdyGu.1689:

I was playing this evening and noticed on GPU-Z that also core clock also fluctuates °_°

http://i44.tinypic.com/2vt4nc9.png

What does it mean? And what may cause that?

Both GPUs and CPUs have multiple power states and can switch between them fast enough to react to changes in workload like that.

The GPU doesn’t know much about the gameworld and has to be told to draw stuff in fairly small steps. When the CPU side is too busy the GPU may run out of stuff to do.

Note that the voltage (VDDC) spikes roughly match the clock speed graph’s pattern. The GPU and/or its driver is probably deciding it doesn’t need to run at full speed to keep up, so the clock speed and voltage are slightly lowered to reduce power demands and heat output.

This shouldn’t affect the performance much, and it reduces GPU fan noise, so it’s a good thing.

Some hardware may also do this when overheating, in which case it’s called (thermal) throttling, but your card is clearly not doing that.

abomally.2694:

I have never known Hardware Monitor to be buggy

Just to note: I’ve had two motherboards with which HWMonitor was way off with some of the voltages — it was probably interpreting the sensor values wrong (incorrect multipliers, etc.), as a multimeter didn’t read anything out of the ordinary.

Still, wrong multiplier constants can’t really explain what’s going on in the screenshot above. -12 V doesn’t matter as it’s only actually used by ancient junk and probably has about zero load on it, but the 5 V looks seriously wrong.

Have you tried running FurMark or some other GPU stress tester for a few minutes? If it glitches or crashes the system you either have a graphics driver problem or faulty hardware.

Oh, and if your GPU is already near dead, stress testing can kill it for good. But it sounds like you may need a new one anyways.

That CPU probably isn’t going to run the game well at any settings.

I used to play on a heavily overclocked Core 2 Duo that was already faster than most Phenom II X2s (same number of cores and better score in PassMark’s single threaded performance), and the game wasn’t exactly smooth a lot of the time — and barely interactive in some situations.

Also, the game generally has issues loading sound effects and other stuff in time when CPU limited on a dual core, no matter how fast it is.

That looks like an input method indicator.

Some languages with complex characters (like Chinese and Japanese) use multiple keyboard input modes. Windows usually displays the current keyboard layout and input mode next to the system tray, but in-game the player may be unable to see that, so the chat bar has its own indicator for the input method in use.

You could check the keyboard settings (under “Region and Language” in at least the Windows 7 Control Panel), maybe there’s some extra keyboard layout configured in there that’s causing the symbol to appear.

If you run the game windowed and keep Task Manager visible in the background, is any other process hogging a lot of CPU time when you move your mouse inside the game?

I’ve seen this happen with Windows’s Tablet PC support before.

Renholder.2481:

Well im planning to get 4670k and GA Z87 dh3 but if performance might be similar it will be another waste of money… So far i made few tickets becasue of that problem and no response so far form anyone from support/tech team…

I just built a new system with a 4670k, an Asus Z87-A board and some cheap DDR3-1600. Kept the GeForce GTX 560 Ti from my old build for now.

Getting framerates near 60 FPS (vsync) most of the time, dipping to around 30-40 in large group fights. The GPU’s cooler gets quite loud when there’s a lot of combat effects on the screen, so maybe it’s a bit of a bottleneck there. The lowest framerate I’ve seen was about 15-20 FPS, when two WvWvW zergs crashed into each other. The skill lag was pretty nasty at that point; not sure if more FPS would really help anyway.

Settings mostly high, except with reflections disabled and shadows turned down a bit since both tend to make the framerate unstable.

I’d say go for the upgrade.

DJRiful.3749:

There isn’t much they can do unless they rewrite the TP from ground up not base on Web interface fonts and graphics.

I don’t think it would be very hard to just inject “font-size:75%” or even a CSS3 transform into the web page sent by the trading post server(s). The current issue seems to be caused by hardcoding the BLTC window size for each UI size without considering how large the page render actually is. When the GPU scales the rendered page without mipmaps or specialized scaling shaders, the best it can do is ugly nearest neighbor scaling.

Seems like a <1 work hour fix tbh, but who knows how nasty the UI codebase is.

DJRiful.3749:

I don’t understand why they can’t integrate just feed data into the game UI and list them via game graphic and fonts instead of having a viewport of a web interface.

I think they were promising mobile GW2 apps at some point? Since the trading post’s UI performance isn’t really that critical, it makes some sense to deliver it as web content: the “apps” can just be specialized web browsers instead of a custom UIs for each mobile OS.

Faux Play.6104:

When I moved the camera around it looked like they were trying to make the surface of the jewel case reflect things. Refractions are bending of light & I don’t see how that would create a double image.

Games do not actually trace light rays; current graphics hardware is just not engineered to do that.

To fake a refraction effect, they first draw the environment normally and then sample from that image while drawing the refracting object, distorting coordinates fed to the sampler to get a cheap 2D fake refraction.

Unless the refraction shader also considers image depth or the game goes through the pain of sorting everything based on depth relative to the refracting surface (and abandoning early-Z optimizations in many cases), it’s going to have these double image issues when something’s in front of the refracting surface.

Isn’t the double image in your screenshot more like a bad postprocess refraction rather than a reflection effect?

There doesn’t seem to be a good way to control the refractions.

Wouldn’t mind getting a separate setting for them. I’m starting to suspect their overuse in some combat effects is a major part of why some fights slow down so badly even on hardware that can otherwise run smooth on high-ish settings.

Copy the folder first, then rename the original folder. Then see if the copy works.

Easy enough to undo the rename if something breaks

And yes, it should work.

I’ve never had any crashes related to system load, but the game’s poor performance with certain effects on the screen has been a problem for me since the betas.

Yesterday, I was doing the event chain that eventually unlocks CoF. Running fine at mostly high settings. At some point, a huge pile of Embers spawned on top of the group. No real FPS problem so far.

Then, every one of them popped their fire field on the ground at the same time. The FPS went from 40+ to about 10. Did the heat distortion effects above the fields cause that?

It seems to me like some of GW2’s skill effects are completely ignoring real scaling issues with the graphics engine tricks available to them.

I think it’s about time the developers took a serious look at the graphics settings and how they affect the game’s performance. Because right now those settings seem like they were just arbitrarily added in to toggle specific portions of the graphics code without considering how they affect performance on actual hardware, in actual gameplay situations.

Yes, maybe it was easy to toggle a particular feature on and off, or change some numeric threshold, or whatever, but the purpose of those settings is to tune the game’s behavior for a particular system, and right now most of them do nothing and there’s no way to deal with the real performance killers without making the rest of the game look like a bad PS2 port.

I’d recommend starting with setting Textures and Shaders as high as possible, and turning off Shadows and Reflections.

Sharp textures will make the game look much more “high definition” in general, while the normal mapping enabled by medium or high shaders will make the lighting look a lot less flat.

Shadows and Reflections are pretty, but relatively expensive compared to the other stuff, so you should probably leave both at a low setting. At high levels, both can kill the framerate even on high end hardware, or at least make the FPS so jumpy the game gets unpleasant. And the “terrain only” reflections just look inconsistent.

I’ve never seen the remaining settings affect the framerate that much. Still, the HD 4000 isn’t exactly a high end GPU, so turning off GPU-heavy things like postprocessing, depth blur and antialiasing might be a good idea. I don’t think leaving the rest at medium-low settings will hurt the framerate much.

Me and several guildmates had this happen a while ago when the logins were acting weird. Those that actually got in could see their own email addresses (or parts of them) in the guild interface.

I don’t think anyone’s privacy was compromised as everyone said they could only see their own address, but it was still creepy.

It’s almost like a part of the login process was being skipped completely; two players also said they never got a character select screen and immediately loaded onto a random character.

If it’s just affecting the BLTC the problem’s not the resolution, it’s the UI scaling — it’s been broken since the scaling was added. Try setting it to default size.

This has been a “feature” of the game since the betas.

I think the camera’s collision detection is sometimes incorrectly triggering from objects in front of the player character, not just behind it. The camera collision response tries to move the camera closer to get the offending object out of the way as usual, but in this case it’s impossible since the collision point’s in front of the character. So it just ends up shaking like crazy as the camera collision code tries to position the camera wrong, and something else keeps resetting it.

They did some tweaking to make the camera act more consistently with different races and I think it helped it a bit, but it didn’t seem to fix the underlying bad camera code. I guess they just have many other issues to work on, too.

Nordmannen.1470:

I just dont understand processor or the graphic cards values. Only in Ram does it seem logical, because of the higher it is – the better? But thank you.

More RAM (aka memory) is generally better, yes.

To make up some sort of physical analogy, think of the RAM as a work table the computer does stuff on. If the table is too small it’ll spend more time rearranging things, lifting them off the table and back on (in this case on and off the hard drive, which is much slower than the RAM) than actually doing work. Having a huge work table doesn’t hurt, but past a certain point it doesn’t help much either.

8 GB is more than enough for most things, so you don’t need to worry about that.

For CPUs and GPUs, comparing them with each other is probably more useful than trying to guess how they perform from the model numbers.

My own GeForce GTX 560 Ti used to get stuck on its lowest clock speed all the time (some tools wouldn’t report this correctly, but it was obvious enough from the low performance and lack of fan noise and/or heat). IIRC, it was some sort of power management issue that was somewhat likely to hit certain systems sooner or later if they were left on for a long time.

It mostly happened with driver releases between 290 to 304, and I’ve never had the problem with any 306.xx driver. Which driver version are you using?

I experienced very low FPS during this mission, too.

The framerate dropped to slideshow levels as I looked at the closest line of Risen mines, all of which had a complicated (and completely pointless) particle effect surrounding them. If those mines were not on my screen, the framerate was good. After some time the particle effects disappeared completely, bringing the framerate to decent levels again.

I don’t know what was the point of the particle effects, besides demonstrating the engine’s incomprehensibly low performance at rendering such things.

Phantolino.5083:

-Dual-Core E5800 @ 3.20GHz

I recently bought HD7850 to replace my old HD5700 but i didnt see much improvement. My framerate (even if i cap it) isnt stable and that causes annoying hiccups, even worse when i turn my character around – my FPS in big cities or PVP/big dungeons drops sometimes under 20. This happens everywhere even with low graphic settings.

That CPU is a huge bottleneck for this game. I have an E8400 overclocked to 3.6 GHz and my GeForce 560 Ti barely makes a noise at 1920×1200 unless I enable supersampling. In most areas I get 45-60 FPS, but the framerate is very unstable. In large events (and some other random locations), the framerate drops to unplayable levels.

The graphics settings only seem useful for scaling the game down to weak laptop GPUs; except for reflections/shadows they don’t really do anything about the real CPU performance killer — the engine’s abysmal performance with large numbers of characters doing stuff. The animation system or something like that must be really CPU heavy.

I get it, it’s an MMO and the devs can’t control what goes on all the time.

But, even in places where such control is possible (like dungeons), performance engineering seems to have been ignored. For example, most of the fractal dungeons run at 50+ FPS on this computer. The Urban Battlegrounds fractal runs at about 5-10 FPS. Which one’s the intended performance level? Some performance/complexity guidelines should really be introduced before they make more dungeons.

Fuzzy text that doesn’t show up in screenshots sounds like you still have some driver hack enabled. Does the Catalyst driver still have the option to force MLAA on games? You should probably confirm that it’s disabled if it’s there.

Also, if there’s some odd driver postprocessing going on, it’s probably happening after the game grabs the rendered image for saving as a screenshot. Is the screenshot in the Windows clipboard after pressing Print Screen any different?

Is the GPU usage staying consistently low after it drops for the first time, or does it hit (near-)100% again if you go back to the character select screen or something like that?

Because that screen is one of the few things in the game that probably isn’t choking on the engine’s poor handling of tons of stuff happening at once

If the GPU usage peaks again at the character select screen, the engine’s probably just choking during normal gameplay and can’t tell the GPU what to do fast enough.

To me, it looks more like the trading post is still being rendered at a resolution meant for the normal size UI, and then scaled down to fit the small UI window with no filtering; just plain nearest neighbor sampling.

Looks like the trading post is implemented as web content and then rendered inside the game by Awesomium. Maybe they just don’t have any code in place for rendering the web stuff at a lower res?

They should at least turn off the scaling for that window imo.

I’ve seen this a few times when trying to do something that limits movement, like helping downed players or interacting with objects.

The casting bar usually appears, but the character keeps moving (at least from my perspective). Almost like the server considers the character stopped and interacting with the object, but the client fails to fully handle the “key up” event and the character appears to keep moving.

Bashing the movement keys usually cancels the odd interaction quickly, but I’ve had a few close calls in the Cliffside fractal.

Are you using integrated audio or a dedicated sound card? If the ticking noise’s volume is independent of any game volume settings and is affected by what the computer is doing, it’s almost certainly digital noise from other system components messing with the audio chip.

On some motherboards, especially cheap laptop ones, the integrated sound chip can be poorly isolated from all the electrical noise around it, causing buzzing and ticking sounds as the rest of the computer “ticks” along, so to speak. When the system’s very busy the digital noise usually gets worse. I once had a laptop with so poorly isolated integrated audio I could hear buzzing whenever I moved the USB mouse.

External sound cards generally don’t have this problem.

Rhaven.8417:

Cable connection is hard wired. The reason I know it’s GW2 is that not only my computer goes down but my laptop sitting next to me and my mom’s computer on the other side…and it only happens when the game is open. I didn’t play for two days and never a disconnection. I’ve played for 6 hours today and every 30/60 mins it went down…as did everything else…for about 15-30 seconds.

This sounds like more of a reason for why it’s not GW2 but your cable router.

Did you get it from your ISP? They often bundle the cheapest possible trash that can barely reach half the technology’s theoretical maximum speed and randomly fail when you do something else than browse the web.

The game’s probably just killing the router with too many small packets or something.

The numbered list of strange characters you described sounds a lot like an input method tool for Chinese or Japanese.

In most Windows installs Left Alt+Shift switches between input languages if you have more than one configured. Does pressing that let you type in your own language when the problem occurs?

At least in Windows 7, the input languages can be configured via the “Change keyboards or other input methods” link in the control panel, under “Region and Language”. Maybe you should check if there’s anything unusual configured there.

wauwi.9162:

i was like “wtf” then i googled and they indeed use some sort of graphic hack to apply/force AO in games which creates weird bugs and glitches most of the time

i wonder why it is turned on by default in the first place and why it is even there if it’s applied to games by a “hacking technique”…i mean most of all common games nowadays are online-multiplayer…

In this case, the word “hack” mostly just implies a messy solution to a problem.

Many of the settings in the driver control panel can make the driver behave differently from what was requested by the game, and the Ambient Occlusion filter is probably the hackiest of them all.

If the graphics still look mostly normal these driver hacks are generally not considered “hacks” in the cheating sense. Sometimes driver settings are the only way to get improved graphical quality or performance in games.

If the AO’s still bugged for GW2 and gives you a wallhack, you should probably not use it though

Einlanzer.1627:

The music in GW2 is pretty solid, but it really isn’t diverse enough. You tend to hear the same themes everywhere you go.

Agreed. A certain other popular MMO did a really good job with music imo, often having around 30 minutes of unique music for each zone, then occasionally playing these small shorter “musical moment” pieces at special locations like camps, little towns, magical groves in the middle of the woods and so on. Sometimes smaller areas inside zones would have multiple unique tracks. Even if some of the pieces were less inspired than others and the style varied a lot due to lots of different composers, the music still added a lot of character to each zone.

GW2 mostly just seems to loop through a way-too-short list of tracks for each region and some themes get played more often than others. And then there’s the random reuse of GW1 tracks, some of which already got reused before (like the Kurzick theme first playing in Factions, then Eye of the North dungeons and now some Orr zones).

The new music is not bad. I really loved the stuff in the Charr zones. There just isn’t anywhere near enough of it for the whole game.

It’s not necessarily player skills causing it; I’ve seen them just swim through their pit’s walls to chase fleeing players. On one occasion they somehow glitched onto the rocks and got stuck, except one of them was missing so it was impossible to finish the skill point for a while.

Similar underwater mob pathing glitches can be seen in the Vigil mission where you end up swimming in the LA sewers.

Maybe the mob’s trying to reposition itself, somehow picks an impossible location to move to and can’t find a path to it, triggering the anti-tactics code? Would explain why they sometimes go invincible mid-fight when the player hasn’t even moved at all.

I’ve had close to a dozen mobs go invincible on me today while leveling and finishing those underwater hearts I’ve been avoiding.

What’s really annoying is that the player character sometimes does not leave combat while the invincible mob is nearby, even if the mob’s given up on attacking already and there’s no debuffs on either the mob or the player. Recovering health is very slow without the out-of-combat regen.

And, if the player was fighting other mobs and they start respawning before the long heal cooldown lets the player recover at all, this goes from annoying to frustrating fast.

Almost sounds like an artifact from subpixel font rendering, but that varies a lot between OS platforms and even the different web browsers on them. For example, on Windows 7 Firefox and IE use a different font renderer than Chrome. What are you using to view the forum?

Also, is your display calibrated correctly or at least hand tweaked for roughly correct gamma, etc.?

Many displays in factory condition are way off and insanely oversaturated to look brighter on store shelves, and this may make the font renderer’s assumptions wrong.

On at least Aurora Glade (EU), the other Consortium Guard near Noll died somehow and the remaining one is permanently stuck in a “downed” pose (I guess he’s already “intimidated”?)

The event doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I’ve seen (or rather, heard) this a few times. Seems to be more likely to happen when the game’s very busy with something.

I can even make the sound glitch by pressing F11 during a loading screen and clicking something in the UI. Normally, this should make a subtle UI sound effect, but usually, nothing can be heard — until the loading finishes or a few seconds pass, and then the sound plays at a random (usually insanely loud) volume, often with some kind of echo effect.

Given that the loud echoing sounds and the siren almost exclusively happen when the game’s busy, I’m pretty sure it’s some sort of race condition in the game’s sound code. That is to say, the game’s threaded sound code fails at concurrency and has a chance of breaking unless the game’s sound thread gets to execute fast enough, or in a certain order relative to whatever else interacts with it. When the game’s running smoothly, the probability of this happening is near zero.

Maybe it’s just passing pointers to data that won’t stay valid for long enough, or only setting up some sfx parameters after telling the sound to play.

I suppose all we can do is facepalm at a 2012 game failing at playing digital audio.

Googling “Toshiba A210 overheating” (w/o the quotes) gives a worrying number of results about the thing shutting down randomly. Many laptops are just not engineered to run at constant maximum load, and yours looks like it might be one of them.

Does hwmonitor give any meaningful-looking temperature numbers for your laptop? You could see how hot it really gets while running the game.

If you haven’t tried it already, you could use a laptop cooling pad or do something to lift the laptop off the table a bit. If it runs for 30 minutes before failing it might not need much extra cooling to be stable.

And to anyone comparing movies with games… note that the images you see in theatre are exposures of a practically infinite number of “frames” summed over 1/24 of a second (minus some % of time the camera might spend with its real or electronic shutter shut to get ready for the next frame).

The natural motion blur this generates helps the illusion of motion enough to push the low-framerate movie past most people’s motion perception threshold (even if it will have that characteristic “movie” look — that many actually like).

Games don’t have that. They instead draw one discrete moment in time for each frame, with no “motion” to be seen in individual images. It takes a lot more than 24 FPS to deliver smooth-looking fast movement like this.