Potential Problem?

I've been playing GW for about 3 weeks now and loving it. I have a quesion though. After the first week I started experiencing some distorted pictures on the loading screens between areas or towns. The distortion lasts a few seconds and returns to normal. This has also happened on my desktop while opening GW.

This has happened in the game only twice and has been solved by minimizing the screen and then maximizing again. For all practical purposes, the game runs really well. The distortion doesn't seem to effect gameplay at all other than the two ingame occurences.

I have also had my desktop looking really "strange" a few times after logging out and closing GW.

Could this be a potential problem with my vid card or ram? I have 768 mb ram and a Radeon 9550 vid card.

Thanx in advance. I'm sure you all know more about computers than I..haha.

My roommate experienced some graphics goofiness and fixed it by cleaning the dust out of the heatsink on his video card. This might not be what's ailing your computer, but it's worth giving a shot. The cover needs to be taken off of the heatsink and the dust completely removed - don't just force it further down the heatsink.

First thing's first - make sure all your drivers are up to date, and to a spyware/virus scan just to make sure.

Second, does this happen after the game/computer has been running for a while, or does it happen even if the PC's been off for a few hours?

Third, while your computer isn't bad, it is a bit under what most people would recommend on a gaming rig right now. You may be experiencing an overtaxed system. I know for me, at least, before I upgraded my power supply and added a better heatsink, I used to get graphical anomalies every so often...

Always a good idea to clean your computer once in a while. Just remember, not to use a vaccum, there are some pressure cans that are made for cleaning computers. While they aren't optimal to clean the inside of a computer, they do the job nicely (these cans contain some gas similar to refrigerant and not air). Never used compressed air to clean a computer since it produces condensation.

This looks like an driver issue or a slowly dieing graphiccard. But don't bother... For your specs this could be also 'normal'. Keep your drivers up-to-date and check if you have the latest directX version aswell. As long as GW works, I would not care too much. Btw, a Radeon 9550 does not exist, but I guess you mean a Radeon 9600 or something similar...

cu

http://castle.pricewatch.com/s/search.asp?s=radeon+9550

Ou... well, then this card is ultra-rare on the european market. Never heard of it before. My fault. (And yeah, it seems really to be a slim-edition of a Radeon 9600).

yeah...i know that the specs aren't exactly what you would expect for a gaming machine. This computer wasn't intended to be used for that. I actually upgraded the video card and the ram 2 years ago.

I installed the video card and 512 mb ram. It had an integrated vid card and 256 mb of ram. I'm not exactly on a budget to replace the computer, so i'll have to upgrade a little at a time.

and thanks for the suggestions everyone.

Well I had a revelation. I still don't know what would cause the distortion on the loading screens, but as I said it hasn't really affected the game. What I noticed was that the problem with the desktop when I close the GW program.

I checked the settings and I normally run on 1024x760(?) But occasionally after I close GW my settings have automatically been changed to 800x600 and I cannot change them back without restarting the computer.

Don't know if this sheds any light on the situation. And in reply to another question. The distortion on the loading screen occurs after the machine has been on for a while. Turning it off usually solves the problem temporarily.

As I said nothing to really disturb gameplay. The reason I keep posting about this is because I'm very interested in the game and would like to also buy/play the other 3. I just don't know if I have high enough specs for them. In another thread someone told me that I should be fine as all of the games have basically the same requirements. I have seen, however, that nf and eotn have a little higher specs. I am above the minimum requirements by quite a bit, but just under the recommended for nf and eotn. For Proph and Factions I am above recommended.

Thanks for your input and I would appreciate any other input or suggestions. As I have said, I am new to GW and not the most computer savvy. But some of you sound like experts.

(ignore the title of my reply) From what i read it happens even after you close guildwars. Did this problem originate or begin when u began palying guildwars or has it been there form time to time? If its the second, then you'll have to delve into the world of figuring out what's wrong with your GFX-card ><

No. It began a week after I started playing GW.

Considering it is a 9000 series Radeon, it probably is just experiencing silicon degradation. Up the voltage SLIGHTY to your GPU via BIOS settings. When I say slightly, up it by the smallest increment allowed by your motherboard. If your GPU has some faulty gates/sectors, this extra power should get enough electrons to pass through. It is a temporary fix though, and if you keep repeating this process, your card will eventually die from heating. But this should help.

Typically, issues like inventory, random changing of resolution, etc are a GPU bound error. Considering that the inventory is a static texture, if your FPS is dropping significantly, this is a clear sign that texture overlays are not being performed correctly, which is BAAAAD.

Also, make sure your video drivers are not just corrupted. Do this first before trying my solution above. Get back with us after trying both.

Well, I checked the drivers (fine) and attempted to update them. It said that there were no current updates for the drivers.

Since I noticed that this was happening after the computer had been running for long periods of time, I have been shutting it down after every use (I used to leave it running all of the time). Why did I do this? I don't know.....following bad advice I guess.

Anyway I played for 3 hours last night without the slightest glitch or shaky movement during large battles. No distortion of loading screens and no automatic resolution changes.

Hopefully it was as simple as this. If not, then I am going to need to find some money and someone smarter than me to help me fix the problem.

Thank you all for your input I really am amazed at the wealth of knowledge on this site.

ok...my last post was obviously wishful thinking. I had a couple of graphics incidents last night and finally (during an ascension mission) my computer decided to restart by itself.

Many of the replies to my original post have been about the graphics card and an overheated/overtaxed system. Do you believe that this problem would be fixed by replacing the graphics card? (currently Radeon 9550 purchased 2 years ago) Or by increasing ram? (currently 768 mb).

If you think that the vid card is the way to go, I would appreciate some suggestions that will get the job done for all of the guild wars titles but won't have my wife throwing me out of the house because of the price.

Graphics degradation and spontaneous hard reboots? Sounds like it could be overheating.

Heat is easy enough to rule out.
1. Your computer may include a whole bevy of thermometers that are supposed to report back to software you can use to monitor temperatures yourself. If they clearly report a problem, I'd take their word for it. If they don't report a problem (or your system doesn't have them), I'd double using the second method below. Often these thermometers are accurate, but sometimes they aren't -- the sensors may be poorly calibrated, or damaged by the heat that they are supposed to measure, or incorrectly mapped in the software, or any number of other things may be wrong with them. So, I prefer to preclude the possibility of inaccurate measurements by taking the barbaric step of manipulating the temperature directly:
2. Start the machine from cold, and then run GW nonstop until you get problems, keeping track of the time. Repeat a couple times (from cold each time) to get an average. Then run the machine (from cold) with the case open and an oscillating desk fan pushing air over it. If that significantly delays the onset of problems, heat is probably a factor. If not, you can probably rule out heat.

If heat is the problem, I'd suggest (1) cleaning the dust from your heatsink, (2) replacing your thermal goop, and (3) upgrading your fans. But let's save those topics until you're sure it's heat and not something else.

ok...i'm about to show my ignorance. Where exactly is the heatsink found? And are there any special do's or don'ts associated with cleaning the dust out of it? I'm assuming it is in or on the vid card.

nvm...I had someone show me...sounds easy enough. I sure appreciate the suggestions. I sure hope that these take care of the problem. I don't really feel like shelling out the $ for hardware.

I'll let you know how it turns out.

A while ago i bought new graphics( G-force 7600 GS) and i had same problems as you described.Lots of wise ppl tryed to fix it up but no results.
In desperation i plugged off power cable from the card and form that time i didnt have any probs, it only communicate on system start that my SLI wont work correct without power supply(wich i dont care since i dont use 2 graphic cards).

Now I don't want to jinx anything....but.....I cleaned out the heatsink on the graphics card and on the mother board. I noticed that everything had a layer of dust on it so I just tried to do as thorough of a job as I could to blow the dust off of everything. I made sure that the fans and vents were clear.

I mean there were actually COBWEBS inside the machine. Anyway, I ran GW for four hours last night and it ran better than it has since I bought it. I don't know if the cleaning had anything to do with this, but, the FPS was higher than normal. I was running around 23-27. Last night I was running anywhere from 31-50 depending on what was happening in the game. The only time it really slowed down was when I was when I went back to Lions Arch and there were a ton of people around.(again, don't know if that makes a difference)

I may get on tonight and have the same problems as before, I don't know, I hope not. I'm really glad that I found this site for 2 reasons:

1. GW seems to be working better.
2. I'm learning a lot about my computer in the process.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

1. Any time you are going to be touching the insides of your PC, you should first (a) ground yourself by touching a heavy metal doorknob or other grounded object, and (b) unplug it. These steps are to reduce the risks of accidentally frying a component with a static electricity discharge. (Pika Pika Pika Pi... oh crap!)

2. If you've got a heatsink/fan setup like the one pictured here, you can remove the fan to clean the heatsink, then reattach it just using a screwdriver.

3. I find that pledge grab-it's do an excellent job of picking up dust off PC components, and you can slip the corners/edges into hard-to-reach recesses without much fear of damaging things.

4. Do NOT remove the heatsink unless/until you know what you are doing. If you decide to replace you thermal goop, post here and folks will help you with step-by-step directions.

Cobwebs?! Yeah, sounds like it needed a cleaning. It's possible that your processor and/or GPU might have been downclocking itself in an effort to avoid overheating, and now, without the cobwebs, it's running at full speed for the first time in a while. You might check your BIOS/manual to see if your CPU and/or GPU has that feature.

Okay...I broke down and took my computer to best buy and they hooked it up and looked at it for free.

I was told to uninstall my vid card software and virus/spyware software...then reinstall both with vid card being first. Did that.

I was then able to download the newest drivers for my vid card (which it wasn't allowing me to do before because apparently it wasn't running properly). BUT...now whenever I reboot my computer I get an error message for MOM.exe. It says "application has failed to initialize properly." then parentheses and a bunch of numbers.

The thing is I know that my vid card is not working properly but the game worked fine all weekend. The only difference is that instead of being full screen I can see the blue borders from windows xp and the taskbar around the outside which makes everything seem just a little smaller. Is this bad?

I'm seriously considering buying a new vid card and being done with this one. Too many problems. If I do, I'm thinking nVidia. Which nVidia card would be powerful enough to run ALL GW chapters without costing an arm and a leg?

Okay...I spoke with an ATI technician this morning and he thinks we can fix the error message and get this card working properly. Something about the order in which software and updates were installed. IF it works I may be postponing the search for a new video card for a while.

Does my current card (Radeon 9550 XL with 256 mb) have enough juice to run nightfall and eye of the north. If it does, then I just need to worry about my system's ram. If it doesn't, then I may indeed be looking for that new card.

I know that this hasn't been responded to in a couple of days and I'm sorry to resurrect a dead thread.

I wanted to thank everyone who offered suggestions. I uninstalled all vid card software, the .NET Framework, and my anti-virus program. I re-installed everything in a certain order and got my updates for drivers. The funny thing was that I wasn't supposed to get the latest updates. ATI told me to get updates from a couple of months prior.

Anyway...I still get the blue border and taskbar around the screen. Is this due to settings being lowered? Anyway, in the grand scheme of things it has run very well since Friday.

thx again

This could be as simple as you just need to hit the maximize button on the game window. It's the middle button in the very upper right corner of the window. It could be in windowed mode but stretched to to look like full screen. One other thing you could look at is the monitors settings. They are the ones you set using the buttons on the edge of the monitor case, not the settings you see by right clicking on the desktop (those are adapter settings). Using the buttons on the monitor you can adjust screen position and size and a host of other settings.