Curse

LagginTimes · Oct 29, 2009, 03:16 AM // 03:16

Hello,

I'm experiencing some strange behavior from Guild Wars. It will run fine, but then it will freeze for some unknown reason. Freezes have *only* occurred when:

-I click "M" to bring up the map, and sometimes the game will go black instead of showing the map and the game freezes.
-I click on a town in the map. Once I click the outpost, instead of bringing up the town image and the menu to let you travel to the town, the menu doesn't show up and the game freezes. The mouse icon does change to the "walking man" cursor, however.
-I enter a new zone, and the game freezes at the splash image before completely entering the zone.
-I login to my account, select a character, and the game fades to black instead of loading a zone and then freezes.

When the game "freezes", only the image is frozen. The music in the background continues to play normally, and I can move my mouse normally. Clicking on buttons that should be there (i.e., moving the mouse to the top right corner where the close window button should be and then clicking) does nothing. I have to Ctrl+Alt+Del and kill the Gw.exe process. I can reload Gw.exe, but then after some random amount of time, the game will freeze up via one of the above reasons. It almost seems as if Guild Wars failed to load some menu interface and then gave up and died.

I'm not sure if this is a Guild Wars issue or a driver issue. My system specs are:

Intel i7-975 "Extreme Edition" 3.33GHz Quad Core OC'ed to 3.60GHz
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 OEM
12GB Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz
2x Crossfired ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5
Intel X25-m G2 80GB SSD (Boot Drive)
Intel X25-m G2 160GB SSD (Game Drive - GW is located on this drive)

I run Guild Wars on a 2048x1152 resolution with all settings maxed out.

All my drivers are up to date. Display driver is the Catalyst 9.10 suite that was released 10/22/09. CrossfireX is enabled. All hardware tests came back fine. Every other graphics-intensive game I've ran so far had absolutely zero issues, even after prolonged gameplay. I have no stability issues with the overclock whatsoever. The only problem I have ever encountered on this new system, gaming and otherwise, is this Guild Wars freeze issue, which seems to be occurring due to some software glitch somewhere.

If anybody has any information on how this can be remedied, please let me know. I've tried running Gw.exe in Windows XP SP3 compatability mode and the same issue occurs. As it stands, I am redownloading Gw.dat. I doubt it will fix this issue but I figured it was worth a shot.

Any help or information will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Wrath Of Dragons · Oct 29, 2009, 04:14 AM // 04:14

Try disabling one card. Maybe crossfire is the issue.

Pinkest One · Oct 29, 2009, 04:31 AM // 04:31

I've heard of crossfire and SLI bringing some strange stability issues with GW so yes try Dragons suggestion and also try setting Processor Affinity.

P.S- Monster system man....monster

Elder III · Oct 29, 2009, 04:26 PM // 16:26

hehe - GW on that rig is like an old woman driving a Porsche...... anyways, first thing I would try is to disable Crossfire..... as stated above - I don't think that GW supports that resolution natively, but I think that some others here have got it to work for them..... (Moriz maybe???)

LagginTimes · Oct 29, 2009, 05:05 PM // 17:05

I actually didn't do anything to get GW to run at 2048x1152. It was a readily available option when I went to the video settings. Once I get home from work in a few hours I'll see if the new Gw.dat did anything, and then disable CrossFireX to see if that works.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll update this post once I figure out more.

UPDATE: Running with the new Gw.dat, I have yet to encounter any issues. I've even had the Guild window up, swapping between entering and leaving my Guild Hall repeatedly and I still cannot get it to freeze up. When I first installed GW a few days ago, it didn't exhibit any problems initially either, so I'm going to run around for a bit before I'm comfortable. I have yet to disable Crossfire, but I will if it ever freezes again.

Not sure if it matters, but when I -imaged GW the first time, it wasn't one uninterrupted -image, since I had to restart a few times halfway through. I'm not sure if this may have possibly corrupted some files when it was streaming. The new Gw.dat was an uninterrupted download.

Lord Sojar · Oct 29, 2009, 11:16 PM // 23:16

Indeed, anytime you start and stop reading/writing to a large file, the risk of corruption goes up significantly each time you start/stop.

Glad a simple gw.dat corruption was to blame.

Also, nice system. Update the firmwares on your Intel G2's so you get TRIM. Otherwise, you are crippling yourself...