A strange predicament with GW and my video card drivers

Hi guys,

I've been having problems with GW on my laptop lately. I'll start up the game and play for a few hours, and after a while the game will suddenly freeze for a few seconds and then slow down considerably (all graphics/movement become laggy and texture quality decreases dramatically) and sometimes i'll have artifacts on the screen or it will flash in strange patterns. At first, I thought my laptop was overheating, but GW is the ONLY game that does that, and I played much more intensive games on the laptop just fine, such as TF2 or CoD4.

Well, my laptop is a Asus G1S with an 8600M GT card running Windows Vista 64 bit with 4 gigs of ram, and I had been using the 174 series of drivers from laptopvideo2go for the graphics card. This crash happened on nearly every version I used (from 174.31 and up), and even on the 175.12 beta. After it did this crash in the middle of my first UW run and I had to restart and couldn't reconnect in time, I got really frustrated. Anyway, I uninstalled the drivers, downloaded the original drivers from ASUS, and now Guild Wars doesn't seem to be having the issue anymore, though I haven't been able to thoroughly test it.

The flip side is, the drivers are ancient. They're the 101.38 drivers, nearly a year old. Because of this, every other game I like to play takes a huge performance hit. I tried emailing NCSoft about the problem, but of course their advice was to "update my video drivers" which caused the problem in the first place! Has anyone else experienced this problem with the new drivers, or is there any way I can fix this? Since GW is the only game this happens on, i'd really like to be able to keep the updated and vastly improved performance-wise drivers. Any ideas? Thanks!

problem with laptop graphics cards is that the drivers that work well for desktops don't work well for the laptop. Similarly a driver that works well for a dell laptop with the same graphics card as an asus laptop for example may not work the same.

Have you tried looking at the GPU temps when you run guildwars? It's possible that the fan isn't running at optimal speeds with the new drivers when playing GW.

Also you can try to run the computer into safe mode and run "driver cleaner pro". It can sometimes fix some strange driver issues.

Well, according to NVMonitor, my GPU idles at around 70 and goes to the high 80s under load. Although, it doesn't make a difference which drivers I use, it's always around the same temps. Plus, the fan always goes crazy when I play any intensive games.

I guess what i'm hoping for is someone who has my GFX card (or better yet, my laptop model) that can suggest the optimal driver set to use with GW that's at least a little newer than a year old.

I'll try the driver cleaner thing though. Thanks for the help!

Are you cooking steak? while the graphics card says it can handle that it really can not. you need to up you fans on those cards. 65c is the HOTTEST I suggest you let it get.

Ouch.

That's a LAPtop, dude. Were you thinking of having any children in the future?

I had a feeling people would be saying that. However, that's how the laptop is. It really runs that hot, and it's supposed to. I've already researched this, and everyone who has G1S has the same approximate temperatures, and it doesn't affect the laptop stability. I've had this laptop for nearly a year, and that's just how hot it is, regardless of drivers. And no, I never use it on my lap. Nevertheless, heat's not my problem. Everything else i've ever used on this laptop has run stable, except Guild Wars, so it's definitely not a heat problem.

Those temps are perfectly normal for that GPU. You should be worried when you break 95... but as long as you stay under 90 you shouldn't be having any stability issues.

Tho it might be possible that ASUS doesn't have newer drivers on their website due to stability issues? Maybe there are some issues with that particular series of laptops released by asus.