Curse

beckermanex · Jun 03, 2005, 03:09 PM // 15:09

Following up on one of my previous posts. I was running rock solid for three hours last night without changing a thing, besides lowering my graphical settings to the minimum. I did exit and come back a few hours later to experience one crash last night.

My next order of business is dig out the original OEM CD-ROM and try those drivers as that will be my final port of call before I start to try different video cards. Everything else in the system is less than 5 months old, and, as reiterated many times over, runs perfect with everything else.

Numa Pompilius · Jun 03, 2005, 03:26 PM // 15:26

When games (e.g. Knights of the Old Republic II) have problems with ATI cards but not nVidia cards it's typically because the game uses OpenGL, and, no offence ATI owners, the OpenGL API of the ATI drivers sucks.

However, Guild Wars uses DirectX 9, so I doubt that GW will run worse on ATI cards than nVidia cards.

To get gfx glitches followed by gfx lockups is typical of heat or overclocking. One thing to watch out for is the automatic overclocking done by some ATI driver versions - check if there is an 'disable overdrive' checkbox in the settings, and if there is, check it. "Overdrive" is a feature which automatically overclocks the card based on temperature and load, which may cause problems if the ambient temperature around the card is too high.

Mercurial · Jun 03, 2005, 08:47 PM // 20:47

I already posted my problem without eyeing this one, but I thought I'd contribute my own problem and pseudo-remedy:

I can manage through the problem, it's just a real pain to deal with when it comes up.

Specs first:
Athlon64 3400+
MSI Neo Platinum motherboard (NVidia chipset)
1GB DDR400 GeIL memory
BFG 6800GT OC (!!! Down-clocked from 370MHz to NVidia-native 350MHz... will get into that below)
Dual-monitor setup
SB Audigy 2
x2 80GB Western Digital HDDs in RAID 0 array
520Watt PSU
Cable internet at (I think) 4Mb/s

The game will run fine for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more, then all of a sudden my entire system freezes up for a good 5 to 10 seconds, followed by a second or so of life, then freezing again. It'll do this repeatedly until I minimize my screen (Win-key + D) and then bring it back up. Then it'll run fine for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours and it'll do it again. This is Guild Wars specific. There have been, on very rare occasions, instances where when I minimize the screen, one monitor will black out like it's not getting any video feed, and the other will revert to 800x600 @ 4-bit resolution. Restarting takes care of that... but it's a *very* rare occurance.

I'm presuming it to be my video card for reasons I'll get into in a moment, but it's not memory as I just purchased brand new DDR400.

I'm thinking it's my video card since somewhat similar events happen while playing Halo or Doom 3... "newer" games, you might say. My fix for that? Downclocked the video card.

I'm curious if it's a temperature problem or not, and have a plan in mind for looking into that (involves re-clocking my video card at higher and lower core frequencies and playing GW and Halo... hopefully I'll get around to it this weekend), but it averages high 70's/low 80's celsius while playing... the highest I see it reach is 86C. I've looked on other boards regarding temps... I've seen such varied temps, from 70C underload to (unbelievably enough) 110C! My CPU temp gets upto 65C... sometimes 70C.

boots559 · Jun 06, 2005, 07:07 PM // 19:07

Boy, this has been an adventure.
I threw the arctic silver 5 on the video card, pluged it back in blah blah, go look at my idle temp, and it's higher than it was with the crap they threw on at the factory, i'm like wtf. so i pull the card back out thinking i might of put too much arctic silver 5 on it, being that it's the first time i've applyed this silver goo, when i pull the heatsink off on of the pins look kinda funny, and when i look at it the spring that holds the heatsink to the board is like competely missing, and due to the cage XFX throw around the heatsink i can't put it back on *sigh*

so i left the card out and ordered the vf700-cu heatsink(this was thurs.) and put my friends old geforce 4 mx 440 with the passive cooling *ugh* those 4 days were hell.
got the heatsink about 45 minutes ago and installed it, running about 47C idle only played about 10 minutes of gw so far but i was watching the temp as i was playing, it only went to 48. at stock it was running 64 idle and was in the 70's in about 5 minutes.

So heres hoping it stops the crashing...

beckermanex · Jun 10, 2005, 06:31 PM // 18:31

Not sure if it matters at all, but I upgraded to the newly released CAT5.6 drivers last night and was solid for about 4 hours, no crashes, no glitches. I'm going to give it a few days before I really start to get happy, but I think I read somewhere else on the board that ATI recommended someone with an ATI card upgrade their drivers to CAT5.6 as an issue was resolved. We'll see...

beckermanex · Jun 10, 2005, 08:15 PM // 20:15

Spoke a bit too soon on that last driver update, although, if you keep the VPU recovery option on (at least for me) the game will momentarily glitch out, but restore itself, although it resizes your desktop and messes up your screen resolution, but atleast you can keep playing.

Youki Souma · Jun 10, 2005, 09:02 PM // 21:02

m7viq Motherboard
1 gig of ram
480 watt power supply
Nvidia GeForce Fx 5500 agp slot 256 mb
Amd Athlon Xp 1600+ 1.40 Ghz
Windows Xp Professional 2002 Service pack 2
Latest XP 200 drivers for card

Ive had the problem of the screen blacking out and the comp becoming totally non responsive. I used a 128 Mb Ati Radeon 9200 series card before, no change at all. The Arena Net guys havent been able to help me with this yet.

Dirkiess · Jun 10, 2005, 09:08 PM // 21:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youki Souma

m7viq Motherboard
1 gig of ram
480 watt power supply
Nvidia GeForce Fx 5500 agp slot 256 mb
Amd Athlon Xp 1600+ 1.40 Ghz
Windows Xp Professional 2002 Service pack 2
Latest XP 200 drivers for card

Ive had the problem of the screen blacking out and the comp becoming totally non responsive. I used a 128 Mb Ati Radeon 9200 series card before, no change at all. The Arena Net guys havent been able to help me with this yet.

Don't know if this will help, but someone mentioned that SP 2 on XP Pro isn;t very stable. Don't know if this is true or not, I was just going by what that guy said.
Try and find out a little more on that, and maybe uninstall XP SP2 to see if that resolves any issues.

Another option is to play with the BIOS settings. Turn everything back to default and even switch off some of the Graphics Settings. See if this improves performance at all.

Youki Souma · Jun 10, 2005, 09:16 PM // 21:16

The only thing Ive ever messed with in bios is pushing my agp slot aperture up to 256 mb to match the card. Im still waiting for response form Arena net guys, theyve tried helping a few times, but failure each time. Also, my prob is kinda different from everyone elses it seems, so Ill explain in more detail.

When mine blanks out, the screen goes black right away, no glitchy graphics. It makes a 'Click' and its off, but the monitor light is still green. No sound, no movement. Stays totally non responsive till I restart from the tower. This will happen anywhere form 2 seconds to 3 hours or more. I bought A new card $90, and a new power supply $160. And Im thinkning I may have to replace motherboard. Also a note on overheating, I keep my case off with a 9 inch fan pointed inside the entire day. And the average temp of my room is 75 degrees.

Wavelength · Jun 11, 2005, 12:15 AM // 00:15

I have been having the same problem with random crashing. Usually having to hard boot the computer. Well, today I ran a freeware tool I have called "CleanUp!" and I noticed that one of the last files it erased was "GW.tmp". Next, I started up Guild Wars and entered the mission I have been trying to complete; listening carefully to the sound because it does start to skip before the game poops. Anyway, we didn't complete the mission, (Thursty River) but my game didn't crash. I even turned up some of the video options just to try to push a crash. We'll see with more testing, but I'm very excited that I was able to get through at least one 'session' without problems.

ps, You'll know you dl the right app if it plays toilet flushing sound while it runs.

akazukin cha cha · Jun 11, 2005, 02:39 AM // 02:39

ok, I posted everywhere else, might as well post it here:

I have this system:
-------
Asus p4s800d-e motherboard
pentium4 2.6 ghz
520 watt ps
3 gigs of ddr ram
Radeon all-in-wonder 9700 pro-(I have a secondary card 'NVIDIA vanta', which is ass and i use just for a dual screen desktop, already diabled it to all hell to test if it had anything to do with it)
360 gig of 3 HDs(maxtor, maxtor, seagate) on 6 partitions-(i have tried install on all of them)
Windows XP w/ win serv pack 2
---------

I have tried everything suggested. Roll backs, reinstalls, system cleaners, lowered my agp write to 4x, disablked fastdraw, used direct3d and open gl. .....

Heating I dont believe to be an issue but I havent really dabbled with it. Someone suggested I mess with monitor power and refresh options, but i have never messed with them so I dont know what to do beyond default settings.

MY GAME, at first always locked up consistantly at 2 or so mins. Then I turned off fast draw and agp write to 4x, this gave me a FALSE glimmer of hope as it now freezes like 10-15 mins in.

This is all very aggravating to me, I have never had an issue with the system on any game....ever... which I guess is just luck on my part, but still. I cant think of ANYTHING that it could be, but I know it has something to do with the card and how it communicates with windows, I just can find any settings to mess witht hat I know about

-_-, I'm open to any suggestion at this point..

cha cha

mechaman · Jun 11, 2005, 04:56 AM // 04:56

----------
Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
350 watt PSU
Corsair VS1GBKIT400 1GB Kit DDR400
Radeon 9800 pro
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS
120 gig HDD
Windows XP Pro SP1
----------
Recently built this comp; only salvaged a couple parts for the junker I used to use. (HDD, Sound card) Used to be able to play for hours on end with no problems, just recently started having hardlocks about a week ago. Usually happens when I'm trying to load of mission while in a group. Running on CAT 5.5 drivers and I'm pretty sure all my other drivers are up to date. All my other games work just fine except for Planetside, which also locks up everynow and then, but that isn't unusual.

EDIT: just updated my drivers to CAT5.6 and used driver cleaner and I haven't frozen yet. *Knocks on wood*

beckermanex · Jun 11, 2005, 05:37 AM // 05:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youki Souma

When mine blanks out, the screen goes black right away, no glitchy graphics. It makes a 'Click' and its off, but the monitor light is still green. No sound, no movement. Stays totally non responsive till I restart from the tower. This will happen anywhere form 2 seconds to 3 hours or more. I bought A new card $90, and a new power supply $160. And Im thinkning I may have to replace motherboard. Also a note on overheating, I keep my case off with a 9 inch fan pointed inside the entire day. And the average temp of my room is 75 degrees.

This is basically what mine does if I disable the VPU Recover option in the Catalyst Control Panel. If I leave the recover on, the game will come back after blanking out (as mentioned before). I'm still chugging away on finding a fix.

zeocen · Jun 11, 2005, 07:53 AM // 07:53

Okay, my apologies if this has already been said.. I kinda skim-read this thread.. But I'd just like to say that I can pretty much safetly say I'm 100% certain it's not nvidia's OR arenanets fault.

The key thing with this problem stems from the Unreal Engine.. I've been having the EXACT same problem with many other games using the Unreal Engine (most recently, brothers in arms and also Lineage2, It was REALLY bad in Lineage2, both unreal engine games)

Guild Wars is also an unreal engine game.

Now I've been having this trouble for quite a while since I was playing Lineage2.. and everything I've researched has come down to nvidia cards conflicting with Unreal Engine and/or Unreal Engine + ServicePack 2.

Lineage2 has been out for almost 2 years, and I haven't seen an OUNCE of support for this issue in that time.. and now it happens with GuildWars, literally hundreds of people have this problem and still nothing has been done. I think the only option in the end is to get an ATI card.

I should note, today I downloaded the bf2 demo.. before that GW was crashing left right and center.. then I played bf2 for maybe about 4 - 5 hours with a few intervals inbetween, it ran perfectly. Then I went back to GW and what do you know, crash crash crash.

So yeah, that's why I'm pretty much certain it's 100% an Unreal Engine and nvidia issue, though neither sides have shown any sign of support in this issue. :/

johnisme · Jun 11, 2005, 08:01 AM // 08:01

For the first week of having the game it crashed twice to the desktop with my radeon 9800pro,since installing a 6800gt there has been no crashes in 3 weeks of playing.

zeocen · Jun 11, 2005, 09:03 AM // 09:03

Like I said there could be other deciding factors (SP2, AMD 64 etc) .. but the majority of this problem stems from Unreal Engine and Nvidia cards. Other random crashes from different setups are just coincidences imo

Dirkiess · Jun 11, 2005, 10:50 AM // 10:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wavelength

I have been having the same problem with random crashing. Usually having to hard boot the computer. Well, today I ran a freeware tool I have called "CleanUp!" and I noticed that one of the last files it erased was "GW.tmp". Next, I started up Guild Wars and entered the mission I have been trying to complete; listening carefully to the sound because it does start to skip before the game poops. Anyway, we didn't complete the mission, (Thursty River) but my game didn't crash. I even turned up some of the video options just to try to push a crash. We'll see with more testing, but I'm very excited that I was able to get through at least one 'session' without problems.

ps, You'll know you dl the right app if it plays toilet flushing sound while it runs.

To those people who are having various crash problems, I would suggest to at least try this out first.

There are 2 places where there is a GW.TMP file.

The first is located in the Guild Wars game folder itself. I don't know what it does, so I would suggest cutting and pasting the GW.TMP file to another directory outside of the GuildWars directory. Then rerun the game and see how it performs. It's quite possible these files are recreated when GW starts.

For XP(I don't know if it exists in other OS's)
The 2nd place is located in the C:\Windows\Prefetch\ folder. There are two files located here. Called GW.exe######## and GW.TMP#######. The ######## is whatever appears after the file.
I think these are somehow created when GW.exe and GW.TMP is accessed. Again, cut and paste to another file location outside of this directory and the Windows directory.

If this is anything like other config files that can be created by other programs, it could well be they have been corrupted somehow and may be affecting the game.

Give it a go and any updates with regards to the game, please add them back here.

Lets hope we can get this cracked. A possible fix to these issues with so many different spec machines out there, may help Anet/NCsoft to locate a solution a lot faster.

To the poster regarding the Unreal Engine. Interesting thoughts there. I have no idea on that, as GW is the only Unreal engine game I know off that I run and I don't have any issues at the moment.
Anyone with ideas on that, greatly appreciated.

Dirkiess · Jun 11, 2005, 10:54 AM // 10:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by zeocen

Lineage2 has been out for almost 2 years, and I haven't seen an OUNCE of support for this issue in that time.. and now it happens with GuildWars, literally hundreds of people have this problem and still nothing has been done. I think the only option in the end is to get an ATI card.

:/

Interesting idea on the Unreal engine. No idea what impact it has on drivers and game so unsure of any ideas on that one at the moment.

As for using an ATI card over an NVidia, there are others here experiencing problems with ATI too. It seems to be various setups having these issues.

All in, some can be Hardware, Heat, and PSU related. Others have been found to just be a full reinstall and driver issues.

Doesn't appear to be much in the way of a definite overall solution for everyone, but various ideas are helping people to get up and running.

akazukin cha cha · Jun 11, 2005, 07:51 PM // 19:51

It finally worked...

Well the heat issues seemed to solve it. I lowered my CPU threshhold to 70c and MB threshhold to 70c, then opened up the side of my tower and let a giant fan blow into it.

Then the game worked....

o_0

Thanks for all the help!
I suggest all you ATI card users look into heat issues and lock-ups resulting from heavy loads. That is what seemed to fix mine, no one can be sure. Mine is running the game at a toasty 52 c/ 125 f, not good even with the fan on it.

cha cha

miteethor · Jun 12, 2005, 06:28 AM // 06:28

Mine hard locks - it can be 2 min or 5 hours, but at least once a night everything will freeze completely - the screen locks on the last image, and the sound will go for another 10 seconds and then stop. Totally dead, no keyboard, etc, have to manually power off. Tonight it happened 6 times, always deep into a mission. I'll never finish this game like this!!

My Specs:

AMD Althlon 2700+
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
ASUS NForce2 MB
Used to be running old drivers, then I updated everything because of this freezing issue, and now it's worse.

Oh, and there's no way it's heat - I have 13 fans in my case. Even after 5 hours tonight my CPU temp was only 110 degrees Farenheit