Graphic glitches

I'm getting a serious graphic problem in guild wars, and only guild wars.

After playing for 10-20 minutes the game will freeze for about 5 seconds, then come back with random textures where they shouldn't be.
Then the game will freeze every 5 seconds and change the textures around, most of the time its a giant texture over the screen so i cant see at all.

here are some examples.

- A transparent texture over the screen



- This is more typical, what happens most of the time.



- Facial textures in the trees. (text was blacked out by me in photoshop)



If I minimize Guild wars and then open it again, it is fixed. But it takes a lot longer than it should to open and close, and so does quiting. Everything will then run slower, loading maps and such, and the problem just returns after a while anyway. The whole computer seems to run slower after one of these crashes, even out of guild wars, so i usually just restart the pc. Could it be a memory leak?

It acts like it is an overheating issue, except its not artifacts flickering, its just random textures being placed where they should not be. And i cant see why my computer would overheat for this game when i can run newer games flawlessly.
My computer is more than enough to play guild wars, its just some problem with incompatible hardware or drivers that only happens in guild wars.

PC specs:
EVGA nforce 680i SLI motherboard (which i wonder if it has memory issues.)
A PCIe 8600GT 512mb.
Intel Dual core E8400.
2gig ram.

I've searched and searched and cannot find a solution, I'd really appreciate any help.
Let me know if i wasn't clear and i will try to clarify
Thankyou for your time.

I'll bet you're using TexMod? If so, that's a normal occurrence, and you've found your fix.

If you're not, I've got nothing to tell you.

I've had this same problem on and off for months and am no closer to getting it fixed. I've replaced the graphics card twice, got a new power supply, added a fan, redownloaded the .dat, did a complete wipe and reinstall, updated drivers, removed driver updates, and generally most everything else. I'll be adding more RAM this weekend.

The odd thing about it is how random it is. I can go two week with no problem at all and then all the sudden it will happen every time I log in for several days in a row.

At any rate, I'm out of ideas. If you ever figure it out, please share!

Nope, not using textmod.

Rue - sounds like you've replaced everything but your ram and motherboard, maybe it IS a memory issue.

I'm certainly hoping it's the memory. That's a lot cheaper fix then replacing the whole blasted motherboard. I'll let you know if that takes care of it, though who knows if I'll know right away. Sometimes I can go a couple of weeks and never have a problem. Other times I get this....



That's my guild cape emblem plastered all over the walls. Apparently we now own arachni's *eyeroll*

I've talked to others with the same problem, but it never happens to them as often or as bad as what you posted and what I get. There will be days that no matter how many times I restart the computer, this sort of thing comes up as soon as I log in. Other times I can log in and play for a few hours before it happens. I'm really not sure if it's a guild wars only problem as I don't run anything else that's as graphic intensive as GW. I've heard a few others say they run lots of games and this ONLY happens with GW. I just don't know.

Some possibilities:

- Bad video card
- Bad (old) drivers - which includes all drivers, not just the video drivers.
- un-updated windows
- bad or underpowered Power Supply
- bad RAM (mostly only if "shared" memory is involved)

I think I may have fixed it.

I reinstalled my motherboard chipset drivers to the latest, as well as installed the latest third party 'Omega' drivers.
uninstalled and used Driver Cleaner Pro to completely remove old drivers, whlist in safe mode. (restart your computer and hit F8 during boot up)
Haven't had a problem since.

I hope this helps someone else.

i would personally stay away from the "omega" drivers. it claims to improve rendering speed, and it does.... by disabling trilinear filtering. other than that, it is simply a hodgepodge of different files from different driver versions pasted together. not to mention, the guy making them haven't been keeping up with updates.

maybe a heat issue? check the temps of the GPU and CPU.

moriz: so far so good, i havent had any problems yet.

papryk: Although i agree it does seem like an overheating issue, I just cant see how guild wars would cause my system to overheat, its a pretty old game now. Anyway since cleaning and updating my drivers I've been running flawlessly.

just an update, a week later its still running perfect. I'm also running new games (prince of persia 2008) without hastle too.

Hope this helps someone else. But Ill stop watching this thread now.

Sorry to dig up an old topic, Rue, did you ever find a solution?

I'm having the exact same issue. Have the latest drivers for all my bits and I even sent my GFX card away thinking it was broken, only to have it returned at my expense (as it turned out to be fine).

5 posts up Bovril

I'm having this problem with my system too. I have an 8600GT here as well, I've switched out two of the same cards and had the same problems as the OP. I'll try some of your solutions since none of mine have seemed to work yet.

I basically so far have just come to the realization that every single person who has an 8600GT in their system just so happens to have this exact problem with Guild Wars. I hate 8600GTs.

My apologies for this necropost, but I have the same glitches. I am also using a XFX 8600GT (512MB dedicated RAM). Has anyone found a permanent solution? I've updated my nVidia drivers to the latest version, and it doesn't seem to help. It really is random, too. Some times, I get it in every zone and other times, I don't get it for days/weeks.

Strange. Any ideas, suggestions, et cetera?

Thanks in advance!

unfortunately I believe there's no solution possible on 'our' side. I also got this problem with 8600GT for quite a while and tried pretty much everything - new drivers, -repair, deleting gw.dat and installing again or even new pair of 8600GW and nothing helped for more than 1 day [which might be coincidence anyway]
maybe ANet crew could do something about it, but I guess they are too busy for that
maybe I get different graphic card soon...

Use NVidia 169.xx video drivers. I have the same card and every driver since that release has given the same results as the screenshots. When I switch back to 169, everything is normal (that is for both Vista and XP). I don't think the drivers before 169 were giving the same problem, but the Vista drivers prior to 169 were very unstable.

I know this isn't supposed to happen, but these pics are amazing! Thanks for posting them. That face of trees, could anybody even think that up!? I always love to see what happens when things go wrong in video games without total meltdown. Reminds me of glitch city from Pokemon.

hehe, apparently if you were around during the early days of 3D accelerated gaming, you'll sometimes find S3 ViRGE cards that gave that kind of results in some games. S3 used to be the industry leader in graphic cards, but incorrectly assumed that 3D acceleration was going to be a passing trend, so they made the transition from 2D to 3D very late. as such, they had to rush to catch up. unfortunately, that lead to bugs in the chip design, which lead to some of those funky texturing issues, but more commonly just terrible performance.

they of course, tried to fix the issues with drivers. however, that was like trying to hold back a tsunami with sandbags. everytime new games came out, S3 cards almost invariably screwed up. the S3 ViRGE series were so bad that many gamers called them graphic DEcelerators.

I believe I switched back to older drivers before, I even had 169.21 instalator on my computer. I'll just give it another try...
well graphic glitch itself may be funny and interesting, but another issue I have according to this is that after it happnes, I have to minimise and miximise the game which from now on takes ~10 seconds... also every loading between maps takes approximately that much. it's not very problematic in PvE, but imagine you are a flag or relic runner and due to your bad luck [it happens randomly] suddenly you have to stop for 10 seconds... it can cost you victory and it's the worst issue connected to this 'funny' graphic error.

Just out of curiosity I put my XFX Geforce 8600gt in a friend's PC, and he had a similiar issue on WoW...

Whilst borrowing HIS card (pretty much the same model) I had no issues. So it looks like I've got a duff video card... pity I replaced my mobo & psu thinking they were the issue.

Hopefully the supplier will replace my GFX card this time...

I am having the same exact issue with a GeForce 9600GT.

The funny thing is, I've played GW for over a year on a 7600GT always using the latest nvidia drivers and never had so much as a hiccup.

Then I upgraded to the 9600 and I'm getting this. Also, NO other games, including new stuff like FarCry 2 and Dawn of War 2 cause me any issues.

Will rolling back drivers actually help? the 9600GT only goes down to like 17X ???

I did like fusa suggested and installed 169.xx drivers. and well yes, I haven't got that problem since over 3 weeks. fingers crossed it will stay like that and thanks for advice
I don't know about 9600GT, though.

Um when I minimize or maximize it takes 30 seconds or minutes to come back. so consider yourself lucky with only 10 seconds to deal with. Mine happens because the game has a tendency to naturally minimize itself for no reason, not a graphic error. Then there's looping, where the same sounds plays for like 50 times in a row because the card doesn't have enough memory to handle a whole bunch being drawn on screen at once. You have it good.

Interesting.... 8600/9600GT common issue?

What is concerning me most about the issue is the fact that you are having to rollback to an older driver set to compensate for a new issue. Driver releases beyond 169.xx should have repaired the issue found in any driver release that created the initial issue.

Also what is concerning is that it is only occurring on the MDT2 and the MDT2-1 chips (you know them as G92 and G94)

I am beginning to seriously wonder about this issue. I might have the Helpdesk open an investigation into this.

Just built a brand spanking new second computer for myself and stuffed the 8600GT's in there, the graphics glitches still happen with both of my 8600GT's.

I changed every single part in that computer, even bought a new case and drives, the only recycled part is the 8600GT's, so I'm going to go buy an entire new card, probably a GTS 250. I think you should really look deper into this issue Rahja, it's a plague.

Hey guys,

I came up with two solutions to the issue and have had luck so far.

1. In windows XP. Go to display settings, troubleshooting tab. Then uncheck "write combining". Reboot. This seemed to fix the issue but caused a loss of performance.

2. I found out MSI "factory overclocks" the 9600GT. I downloaded RivaTuner and lowered my clock speed from 700Mhz to 650. So far this has made the game stable, and also allowed me to turn write combining back on. This was the optimal solution as the performance hit ws negligible.

Hope this helps everyone.