Dual-Core crashing issue

Well, I don't think that the problem with the game freezing with looping sound is down to some c0ck-up with implementing dual-core at all. I've just had the exact same crash even though I was running Guild Wars under just one core. Something is definately screwed up within this game.

If it is not a problem with the game freezing or looping sound what is the problem? It plays fine on my dual core. As the game is not multi-threaded, it will use core 0 all the time. I wonder if I can force it to core 1?

Are you overclocking at all? Mine use to do some funky stuff when I was aggressive on the overclock. I've since gotten it much more stable and it hasn't happened since on my AMD dual core. Strange thing was, it would be stable on every benchmark and stress test I threw at it, but Guild Wars would kill it. Weird.

Yeah, my system is clocked but that's not the cause as it also occurs at standard settings too and only on Guild Wars. No other game is experiencing a problem at all. It's also not just me having this problem, there's quite a few people getting this problem and only since ANet added the EotN content to the game.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10191397

Something added during the EotN roll out as messed something up somewhere. It's pretty obvious as I, and others, haven't had a problem up until the new content.

I haven't had hard crashes (as in BSOD), but I have had the game freeze for up to 20 seconds and then resume. Sometimes the sound would loop for a bit and others the sound would disappear except for the background music. The last time it happened I had Process Explorer up from Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft) and noticed that I had a huge spike in DPCs (Deferred Procedure Calls). DPCs are code that is allowed to execute after a driver services an interrupt. They don't execute immediately which is why they are called "Deferred."

Last night while the Mad King was in Ascalon I experienced one of the worst lockups in GW I've ever had. There was no way for me to even go back to windows. The system just froze with the sound looping. Fortunately I had previously installed a tool from Microsoft called RATTV3 which monitors how long the processor spends in DPCs. I did this because I saw the previously mentioned DPC spike. As it turns out during the crash I was spending multiple seconds in DPCs for the VIDEOPORT.SYS driver. Typically time spent in a DPC should be under a millisecond and can be as small as a few microseconds.

At this moment I'm still figuring out what this all means. My gut feeling is that there is some sort of contention issue that is being cause by the way GW uses the video driver. This situation never occurs on any other game for me so GW is a prime suspect. My drivers are up to date with the exception of my nForce4 driver. I'm reluctant to upgrade that because it's a pain in the ass. I may still do that.

People have posted some possible solutions to DPC "storms" in many forums around the internet. Some suggestions for fixing this are as simple as re-seating your heatsink on your GPU or disabling your floppy drive device (if you have one). Others say it is totally hardware related.

I'll write when I have more info. To be honest, I wish I'd get a BSOD because that would give me a mini-dump to look at in WinDbg.

EDIT:
Forgot to state my system specs:
Dual Core Athlon X2 4400
Nvidia 6600GT
2 GB RAM
nForce4 mobo

I thought it was only GW that did it. But, last week, I had the same sort of crash - locked up video and repeating sound loop - while watching a streaming DivX video on the desktop. (Not even full screen and GW wasn't running.)

No Dual Core issues here. It depends on your IR numbers and DMA's. Make sure all are defaulted and try again.

A little more info...

I was able to avoid DPC storms by disabling my floppy drive controller in the Device Manager. (I don't even use floppies anymore so it's no loss.) I had about 45 minutes of storm free gaming... and then GW.exe crashed into the whole sound looping thing, but with no screen this time.

Fortunately XP stayed up and I was able to use Process Explorer to see that most of the GW.exe threads were stuck in:

ExAllocatePoolWithTag

This is a kernel driver function so it's likely that my crashing is due to a driver issue. I'm going to methodically go through all my drivers and update them. Maybe this will bring some relief.

Try installing the AMD Dual Core Optimizer. It helps resolve some issues with some games.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/...1_9706,00.html

Also: Try dropping your clock speeds down to stock. Simply put, some games have issues with certain chips being OC'd.

I have a E6550 and never had any issues with games. Plus I'm running 64bit Vista, even less compatibility

You may want to disable FMOD by forcing GW to use the DirectX sound system. The switch is -dsound.