Curse

Chev of Hardass · Aug 16, 2010, 10:32 AM // 10:32

I guess I spoke too soon.

I am having the same problem again. There is no way that enough dust got inside to clog up the cooling already.

I think there is some mix of Vista, 8600, and Driver Version 197.45 that creates poison with Guild Wars.

Can I get a Driver Version Check from those that are having problems and those that are not?

Quaker · Aug 16, 2010, 03:24 PM // 15:24

Have you tried reducing the graphics settings in GW?

But, it may be too late now. It often seems that, once a chip has been overheated a few times, it just gets worse.

Vinceant · Sep 09, 2010, 08:46 PM // 20:46

I'm going to bump this at the risk of getting flamed.

I have had this issue on my laptop for about a year now. I am running a Geforce 8600m GT. I can tell you with great confidence that it is not heat related, nor a hardware failure, nor a fault of Vistas. So far I have been unable to confidently determine what causes it, but I have eliminated those three possibilities. I cannot manage to reproduce the problem with any consistency; it seems completely random as to when it happens.

When I first had it happen, I definitely thought it was heat. As I said I use a laptop, and heat is not an uncommon issue for them. However after dismantling and cleaning my machine, it still occurred. I thought it might be a malfunction with the cooling fans, but to no avail. The moment I realized it was not a heat issue was when I monitored the game for 5+ hours with GPU-Z with no oddities showing up (card only heated up very little from it's idle state), and the game did not malfunction. About a day later I managed to get it to crash during a GPU logging session; no temperature or voltage changes on the gpu occurred when the crash did. Then later, after a cold boot, first thing I opened was Guild Wars and bam, happened on login. So, the odds of it being a temperature related issue is really unlikely.

Then I thought my hardware was possibly at fault. Luckily I have a great warranty. However, after replacing every piece in my laptop twice (I'm talking EVERYTHING, including about 90% of the chassis), I still have the issue (it doesn't even occur less often, though I haven't been able to keep track of its stats). So, hardware malfunction is also unlikely.

Then I thought maybe it was just Vista and/or some driver issue between Vista and Nvidia... No go. First of all, I tried every major release of graphics drivers compatible with my card, with no luck. Then I tried Windows 7, and it still occurred. So Vista being the culprit is unlikely. Unfortunately I don't have an XP license (or care enough) to install that and try it, but even if it worked, it would be a pointless gesture.

My current theory as to the cause of this issue is an incompatibility between Guild Wars itself, and the 8x and 9x series Nvidia chips. This problem didn't affect my older 7x series card, and didn't always affect the 8x series either (my roommate used one about 2 years ago with no issues) so it may have been an update to GW within the past two years that caused this. I've poked around on here and other forums to see that others with these cards have had this issue.

Any other thoughts on this issue? The game is still playable, for the most part, but it crashes the display driver a lot, sometimes it recovers, sometimes it doesn't; but damn if it isn't annoying.

P.S. I've tried everything dealing with Guild Wars settings that you can possibly imagine, including, but not limited to, forcing DX8, no sound, diagnostic mode, and varying the detail level. Though I recently came across the -mce command line argument, and realised I hadn't tried that (though I doubt it could fix it, but you never know).

P.S.S. I've contacted Anet support over this, and they blamed my hardware, despite the facts I've listed above. Also despite the fact that I can't get any other game, or benchmark, or test to produce these kinds symptoms on my computer.

Chev of Hardass · Sep 09, 2010, 08:50 PM // 20:50

Well,

I seemed to fix my issue by getting a new Video card, and ditching Vista for 7.

I did find that my old video card had more dust in it after I cleaned it out that was not visible until after I removed it for replacement.

I upgraded anyway, so I have the old card as a backup.

Vinceant · Sep 09, 2010, 09:06 PM // 21:06

What card did you get to replace the old one?

Chev of Hardass · Sep 09, 2010, 10:09 PM // 22:09

9800 gtx+

Quaker · Sep 10, 2010, 09:48 PM // 21:48

I keep forgetting to mention that these problems can sometimes simply be caused by the video card not setting in it's socket correctly - not fully seated, dirty contact, etc.
You could try simply removing the card and re-installing it.

Snograt · Sep 10, 2010, 10:01 PM // 22:01

One thing struck me whilst reviewing this thread - how could it be a gw.dat problem if the screen corruption was occurring in Windows too?

(Refers to the OP's screenshots, not necessarily the same problem as Vinceant.)

Vinceant · Sep 11, 2010, 08:16 AM // 08:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snograt

One thing struck me whilst reviewing this thread - how could it be a gw.dat problem if the screen corruption was occurring in Windows too?

(Refers to the OP's screenshots, not necessarily the same problem as Vinceant.)

Well, I could post screenshots of my game behaving exactly like the OPs. It happens rarely for me now like that, but it still happens (like I said it was always random as to when it would totally crash like that).

It came to my attention that my brother is having his graphics drivers crash as well while playing this game. He's using an 8600. That further supports my theory of some kind of imcompatability with that series of cards, though it's far from proving it, or even giving those of us affected by the bug any proper info on how to deal with it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quaker

I keep forgetting to mention that these problems can sometimes simply be caused by the video card not setting in it's socket correctly - not fully seated, dirty contact, etc.
You could try simply removing the card and re-installing it.

I would agree that this could be an issue if this were happening in anything video related, but it isn't. I can't speak for the OP, but my brother and I play a variety of different games with no issues even remotely similar to this. Even so, I have dismantled/reassembled my laptop personally several times since my discovery of this annoying bug, so I doubt it's a seating issue. Nice thought though.

I should probably mention that I'm a field technician by trade, so I've tried a lot of this stuff already just out of habit. I have a pretty good computer "sense", if that makes any sense (some call me the computer whisperer! Not really, but it'd be funny if they did); this problem continues to elude me though, and that's almost as annoying as the bug itself.

Quaker · Sep 11, 2010, 01:57 PM // 13:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vinceant

I can't speak for the OP.............. I have dismantled/reassembled my laptop personally several times

I was referring to the OP's computer, not your's.

In your case it's probably just overheating. Try reducing the graphics settings in GW.

Btw, measuring the temperatures of the card doesn't necessarily indicate anything. A "field technician" should be aware that a thermal fault can show up in any device, well within normal operating temperature. A thermal fault is a problem with a device that mostly shows up when the device warms up. In the case of electronic devices, it's often a bad solder joint or a microscopic crack in a component.

Vinceant · Sep 14, 2010, 05:14 AM // 05:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quaker

I was referring to the OP's computer, not your's.

In your case it's probably just overheating. Try reducing the graphics settings in GW.

Btw, measuring the temperatures of the card doesn't necessarily indicate anything. A "field technician" should be aware that a thermal fault can show up in any device, well within normal operating temperature. A thermal fault is a problem with a device that mostly shows up when the device warms up. In the case of electronic devices, it's often a bad solder joint or a microscopic crack in a component.

If that were the case then several things would be much more apparent.

A. Most games would cause this issue. Currently Guild Wars is the only game I've had do anything remotely like this. I've ran games that heated up my card far more than Guild Wars and had no crashing issues at all, nor have they completely scrambled my graphics.

B. The issue would be easily replicated. Currently it's not. It's sometimes very hard to get the game to break, and sometimes it happens when I open the game. In other words, it would happen a lot more consistently. It's pretty hard to test it if it doesn't happen consistently.

C. Replacing the hardware would fix this issue. Again I say I've replaced all my hardware twice. lol The odds of three motherboards and video cards having this specific issue is unlikely. It's not impossible, but chances are that if the "new" hardware had problems, they would be either more or less evident, or completely different. The problem didn't occur less often with the newer hardware.

Lord Sojar · Sep 14, 2010, 05:33 AM // 05:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vinceant

If that were the case then several things would be much more apparent.

A. Most games would cause this issue. Currently Guild Wars is the only game I've had do anything remotely like this. I've ran games that heated up my card far more than Guild Wars and had no crashing issues at all, nor have they completely scrambled my graphics.

B. The issue would be easily replicated. Currently it's not. It's sometimes very hard to get the game to break, and sometimes it happens when I open the game. In other words, it would happen a lot more consistently. It's pretty hard to test it if it doesn't happen consistently.

C. Replacing the hardware would fix this issue. Again I say I've replaced all my hardware twice. lol The odds of three motherboards and video cards having this specific issue is unlikely. It's not impossible, but chances are that if the "new" hardware had problems, they would be either more or less evident, or completely different. The problem didn't occur less often with the newer hardware.

It's likely a hardware to software configuration specific issue. Driver interaction with Guild Wars and your particular set of hardware.

Unfortunately, that's only fixed by changing a piece of hardware to something completely different.

Operative 14 · Sep 14, 2010, 06:11 AM // 06:11

Goodness, I didn't realize this rated top billing!

As a response to the earlier questions, GPU-Z showed the temperatures as being a relatively nominal 77 degrees C after playing for about 10 minutes, and looking back at the notes I took here on my stickies after GW had been running for 'a few minutes' ( don't remember what that means :/ ) the error happened when it was running at 75 degrees to 72 degrees.

Since then however, since about mid August, did a fresh install from windows Vista 32 bit to windows 7 64 bit. I havn't had the problem in the OP since then, though there have been a few little graphical hicups here and there. Nothing that crashes out the game like it did before the format and reinstall though.

However I think I have to agree with Vinceant and Sojar, it seems like this is some kind of issue related to GW and the GPU. I havn't done the research to see if it's the 8600 specifically or the 8000 series in general, though it seems suspicious to me that we have, what, 4 people here with 8600 GPUs and they are all reporting similar, if not exactly the same, problems?

jcegt87 · Sep 14, 2010, 06:55 AM // 06:55

ive had a similar problem lately i been running my computer the same way for about 2 years and no prob until 4 days ago my system crashes when i play GW only

so far i have
cleaned my fans on the CPU and GPU
unmounted and mounted my graphics card,
reinstalled all drivers pertaining my computer especially my graphics card downloaded speedfan to check my temperatues all temps seem fine even when the system crashes temps dont go up
and also reinstalled the game using both the client ,once it froze on me again i installed using the CD

when my pc crashes i cant do anything at all and the sound loops

these probs started Thursday/Friday

im running

windows 7
ATI radeon HD 4650 1G
4G of ram
and the CPU is a AMD athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ (2CPU ~2.2GHz)

Direct X 11

ive even done a stress test using different programs including FurMark And BurnInTest and it shows everything well

and ive also done a clean install of windows seven just in case something was wrong with the OS itself

ive played oblivion and DMC4 just to check the GPU temp but all is fine and system doesnt crash with those games

(yes old games but their still more demanding than GW im sure of that lol