Graphical Issue, Please Assist

Scenario:
I've been playing GW for 10+ months and 9 of those months have mostly been trouble-free (just the common internet-routing issues 'cos I'm on WiFi, etc). It's this last month or so that I've been getting graphical issues and unexpected shutdowns in the middle of a game.

My PC is about 2.5yrs old, AMD dual core proc, 2Gb RAM, 512mb Leadtek Winfast 7900 GTX-TDH video card. Cooling is not a problem with this PC, I have rather large intake and outlet fans, and one huge mother of a fan on the video card as well as heat pipes. The whole lot is in a large aluminium case. O/S is Win XP Pro, SP3

So, more about these faults... 1) sometimes, recently when I get into the game and start playing, the graphics start flaying out in different directions, as the attachment shows. This appears to happen very sporadically, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to it. It could happen from a cold PC startup or if the PC has been going for a week. Now solving this problem seems to be as simple as using Alt-Tab and switching between GW and the desktop or whatever else I have running, but it's only a matter of time, and not much time, before it starts happening again. This can be anything from flaring of characters on the screen to mad flickering and becoming an epileptic's worst nightmare. It's very random, and like I said, sometimes it happens consistantly, other times not.

2) When HM farming for Glacial Stones in Jaga Moraine today (just as an example), the PC starts to lag a bit, which I thought was WiFi issues, but then the game seems to stop, and the sound rapidly fades until there's nothing but background (environment) noise. Sometimes the game will kick up again and show signs of typical lag. Other times it will halt for about a minute and then unexpectedly just shut down the PC and restart it. Ok so I know that Spectral Vaettirs in this area are pretty hard on the graphics card, and taking on 20 of these guys at once isn't uncommon... sometimes the skills even seem laggy to recharge, most times varying in speeds of recharge.

This is only one typical instance - it could be farming ectos in Tombs or whatever, but that's more of a very sudden occurance and not as frequent as the example above.

Precautionary steps taken so far:
Re-installed DirectX 9.0c drivers
In the process of downloading 3DMark06 (580mb) to check on processor and video card temps.
Set GW.exe affinity to CPU1 only.
Going to re-install GW as well (sans the 3.6Gb GW.dat file) but only if I have no other option.

Any suggestions here would be most appreciated.

Ok I did some cleaning out of my system (literally) blew out all the dust from every crevice and put it all back together again, and got around to running a 3DMark06 test - my poor system is teh phail getting only 5305 3DMarks. What that all means I've no idea, but I do know that it's about half of what they have as a benchmark for a 'normal' system these days. During the CPU tests it was struggling to put out 1FPS while the GPU tests were a bit healthier, with no overclocking. Standard settings on WinFox Speed Runner (the program that came with this video card) for 2D are 275MHz (Graphics clock), 797MHz Memory clock, and for 3D it's 650MHz and 800MHz respectively. What's a safe level to overclock these settings at if I chose to? WinFox also measured the temps as being 49°C on chip and 40°C on board.

As for GW I completely re-installed the lot again after various crashes midway through updating the game files. I had to re-download about 78.5k files from ArenaNet, about 1.5Gb and took about 10 hours. Not sure how it goes as yet, as I've been busy enough trying to sort my hardware and any potential issues out before I get GW into the mix.

Another thing to note as far as troubleshooting goes, is that I have a new 22" monitor which runs a 1680x1050 resolution, and I have GW running in this resolution as well. So far attempts to decrease the resolution back down to say 1280x1024 just end up skewing the graphical overlay (energy, skills, chat, etc.) and I still got the occasional flicker. I'll try this again later on. But could it be that my GPU has been trying too hard to maintain the higher resolution and as a result just failing in the end? Because it had no problem keeping 1280x1024 on my older 17" monitor (VGA-plug, not DVI).

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies.

Edit: I also updated the nVidia drivers to ForceWare v83.91

If nothing is happening when you run 3dmark, go ahead and try guild wars. You may have fixed/prevented the problem by cleaning out your machine.

Dont do any overclocking or mess with any stock settings until you figure out whats wrong.

What os?

If >vista
then control panel > administrative tools > event viewer > Check all three categories.

If <vista
To get started, click on the Vista Start button, then in the 'Start Search' box type just three letters: eve. Observe how the larger dialog box displays: 'Programs' and underneath: 'Event Viewer'. Click on 'Event Viewer'.

No glitches so far even while in Rata Sum which is usually where it starts getting buggy. I think the cleanout has helped even if a bit, and I run GW on 1 core now so that may help too. I've never run GW in a windowed mode, it's always been the max resolution for my LCD monitor because any lower resolution makes the game look like shyte. If it stays stable enough, I might kick up the graphic detail a notch and see how it goes.

Thanks for the reply.

Edit: thanks to the mod's for creating a new thread for my specific issue, even though I wasn't keen on doing it myself.

GW should run just fine on a dual core - I suspect that the gw.dat file was corrupted, although if you haven't cleaned the dust out of your sytem in a while that could be causing it to overheat and GW is very sensitive to overheating. Glad to hear it's working better now.

I ran the game over the last week and for the most part it ran ok, but I still get video card alarms from the software that came with it (I have a hardware monitor-thing active on the desktop). If it gets up to ~50°C if starts going off it's nuts and some graphics start glitching. This seems to be apparent in ANY of the campaigns. Again, it only takes an Alt-Tab switching between screens to correct it and thus briefly cool the temps of the GPU down a bit. Is there any reason why my video card is all of a sudden so sensitive at comparatively low operating temperatures to other cards? Bearing in mind it's still a 512mb PCIE 7900-series card, and approaching 3 years old.

Rahja's the expert on such things, but I suspect it may be that the card has been damaged by high temperatures and now falls down at lower temperatures.

Ok so I was playing GW earlier on in the day, Alt-Tabbing between screens as I was looking stuff up on Wiki at the same time, no problems occurred there. I shut down GW this evening and leave the PC running. I return later on and start up GW again, Alt-Tab between screens and for ~45secs it freezes on the desktop then releases and seems to have functionality. I try to get back into GW by clicking on the task bar, the GW mouse cursor is there but it's frozen on the desktop again. ~1min goes by, I hear an error tone in the background, GW screen presents itself in 640x480 resolution, which, if you can imagine, on a 22" monitor with 1680x1050 resolution max would look damn ugly. I close down GW and see a message on the desktop about nv4 drivers failing, save work, shutdown and reboot, yada yada and report this incident to Microsoft... yeh right. The icons for shortcuts on the desktop are all ok but the wifi bar in the system tray is full of black bars. I come on here wanting to type up this message and see all the icons black. So I rebooted it and here I am. Should I roll back the drivers (v83.91 I believe is what i have installed)? This isn't the first time it's done this, but it's the first time I let the system follow through on it's driver routine after seeming like locking up and subsequent errors.

Advice appreciated.

When you did the cleaning, did you also check that all the various fans were running normally? It sounds like typical overheating video card, but....

It could simply be that your video card is dieing.

You could try running GW without the hardware monitor thing (or any other app) running, but you've probably done that.

P.s. - about the running GW in one core thing. I don't think that would help in this case, but it won't hurt. But I wanted to ask if you only set the affinity the one time, or do you use an app such as ForceCore to do it every time? (If you set it by right-clicking the app in Task Manager, you need to do it every time you run GW, it doesn't "stick")

As of late, all that has been happening to 7900 cards are terrible things. Graphical crashing, warped textures, artifacting, etc etc. My dual 7900s are doing some similar stuff. I have tried many fixes, but to no avail. I think you just might want to drop 90-120 bucks, and pick up a new card. The 9800GT is amazing for the price, well worth the investment. I plan on slapping 2 GTX260 (rv B) into my system as soon as humanly possible.

newegg has an Asus ATI Radeon HD4850 for $150 after mail in rebate right now... a really good card at that price for any AMD system (oh yeah it will give you performance that you never dreamed of with the 7900 too).

Quaker - all fans running normally, slightly dusty but fine. No apparent buzzing or whirring or signs of dying fans. I usually have GW running just by itself. I might have Firefox running in the background so I can wiki stuff on-call but that's it. I downloaded ForceCore yesterday (huge download, 5.5kb zipped) and I ran GW with ForceCore on last night, nothing unusual thus far, but I still see flickers on the screen... similar to someone changing channels on a TV.

Rahja - I'm spewing. The 7900 card I have now cost me AU$900+ when I first got it, and it was the second-best card on the market in early 2006. I think only the aluminium case I got weighs more than this card, it's a monster. I planned on running dual cards (I have an SLi motherboard and never made best use of it), but at AU$1800 for two graphics cards, back in 2006 I didn't take my gaming that seriously. And from what you're telling me about yours, I'm glad I didn't. I'll check out new graphics cards after I'm finished here. Thanks.

Elder III - sounds like that card you mentioned has the rebate for the US only - I'm in Australia. I'm guessing that would cost significantly more from here.

Anyway I'll suss-out some options and see what's within the budget. THanks for the helpful replies.

Well after sussing out some options I've found the HD4850 and the HD4870 to be quite tasty for the price, but I hadn't expected to be upgrading video cards so soon. Usually mine last ~4 years before I think about upgrading (I tend to plan ahead when building a full system), and while the 4850's and the like might be worth chickenfeed to many American's, over here they're anything between ~AU$250 for a HD4850 (best price) and ~AU$320 for a HD4870 (best price). Those are the options for the 512mb cards. I had a brief think about the 1Gb and 2Gb cards but then saw the power requirements and quickly disposed of any delusional ideas I had.

Personally I'm leaning towards a HD4870 but I want to hear an opinion or two about these two cards first before I saved up some hard-earned and upgrade video cards.


Rahja I see what you're saying about the GTX260 cards, they are quite a tasty option but far out of my price range.

Those prices for the 4850/4870 are about right when converted to CDN dollars. The 4850 is a tad high, but the 4870 is less than I paid for one.

With the 4870 I can play GW at 1680x1050 with everything maxed and the fps pegs at 60 continuously (vsynced). They say though that a 4850 can do that too, but of course, the 4870 has more to offer for newer titles.

Rahja has a vested interest in nVidia cards, so he always mentions them over ATI. Me, I'm Canadian; ATI was Canadian, so I have a soft spot for them - however I was about to buy a GTX260 when the 4870 suddenly popped onto the market (in the nick of time. ) (They`re all made in China or someplace now anyway.)

Ok then, from now on they shall be known as Eh?TI.

I think your 7900 failed. Same thing happened to me with a 6800GT and more recently with a 7900GT with a aftermarket cooler on it. I'll be sending it back to EVGA as soon as I reattach the stock cooler. Lifetime warranty ftw.

As far as what card to get... Hard to say since you are not in the states. We have been having all kinds of good deals on last generations NVIDIA cards. Partly because the 4850 is that much better, and partly because there is a known problem with many nvidia cards. They took some shortcuts in production and there has been a fair number of them failing lately. EVGA offers 1 year on a lot of these cards instead of the lifetime since there is a good chance that they will fail. Still $60 9600GT OC are hard to resist.
If you can find a smoking deal on an NVIDIA 8800GT or something, you might want to risk grabbing one of them. If not, I would grab a 4850 with one of the aftermarket coolers or grab one and add an aftermarket cooler to it. The 4850 is one of the best bang for the buck cards ever. It cots a lot more to get a little more performance or more than double to get big increase in performance.

Here's a list for reference.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/g...otals,795.html