Leamas.5803

The some time ago was over 2 years ago, a lifetime ago in software. Mr Fayth kindly posted a link to it. That was before HoT or the 64-bit client were released. They also claimed in the same statement that a 64-bit client would provide little improvement, yet here we are. Yes, the engine would obviously have to be rebuilt from the ground up. It was done for both WoW and FFXIV, which both started their lives on DX9, so it's not an impossible task.

That's all well and good but the crashing and framerate drops have gotten so much more worse than when this reddit post was written, which was before the 64-bit client or HoT were released and a lot can change in 2 years. I figured a more recent statement might be in order. It's got to be getting hard for them to ignore. Back then, going back to when I first started having crashing issues in 2012, you might see someone complain every couple weeks and a thread might get 10 or 12 replies. Easy to bury, easy to ignore. Now, it's almost a daily thing and threads grow to pages long. There are people complaining about client crashes, hard system crashes and systems spontaneously rebooting, now there the new type of crash that seemed to come up in the fall with perhaps the big Windows 10 update, where GW2 just stops responding, but the system doesn't crash and you can gracefully recover the system by logging out of via ctrl-alt-del. Using a less invasive anti-aliasing seems to have improved this for me. In ALL cases, the claim is that it ONLY happens in GW2. The random sub-10fps framerate drops, which I have also experienced and seems to affect entire instances, are more recent and seem to largely coincide with the release of PoF. Then there's the terrible latency and lag spikes that are making WvW and PvP unplayable for many that has plagued GW2 since the Comcast DDoS attacks in the fall and has seemingly followed them to the Amazon servers. GW2 has some serious issues and if some of it is not DX9 related, then so be it, but they really need to start looking at what it is. So, the short answer is that a 2 year old explanation is not good enough since the problems have ballooned and gotten much worse. I also call BS on upgrading to DX11 not making any improvements, especially on supported hardware. If that were the case, neither Blizzard nor Square Enix would have bothered to upgrade WoW and FFXIV, respectively. That's like saying upgrading video drivers won't improve stability.

I'm convinced that the only thing that speaks to them is people leaving the game. Between lag/DC issues, frame rate issues and crashing issues there are some serious problems with this game and there are A LOT of people complaining on the board. For every person who actually posts something, there are probably thousands more that silently stew and just get pissed off. IMO they're making a huge mistake ignoring some of these issues.

Anyone know, primarily the ANet people moderating these forums, if ANet is planning to upgrade their graphics engine to support DirectX 11? I have strong suspicions that a lot of the crashing and frame rate issues we've been seeing may be related to ANet's continued reliance on DirectX 9, which came out in 2002 and has long been outdated and is horribly inefficient by today's standards. Even WoW and FFXIV, both of which came out before GW2 and started their lives on DX9, have upgraded their engines to support DX11. I realize they're both P2P games and have deeper pockets, but how long can ANet sustain GW2 on such outdated technology? I've been following these crashing problems with GW2 for 5 years and the number of people complaining about it has increased exponentially over the last couple years. Basically since HoT was released. I used to think, OK, maybe I have flaky hardware, but if that's the case, A LOT of people seem to have flaky hardware. ALL indicators point at the software being the problem, and DX9 is a prime candidate.

Keep in mind, it's F2P now, but it wasn't for the first 3 years, when it was B2P, and a large part of the long term player base bought the original game plus the expansions. It didn't go F2P until the end of August 2015. They should have been more on this and I think it's starting to catch up with them. They really seem to be reaching the limits of what they can achieve with their current engine and it's showing the cracks.

The more I read about this issue, the more I'm starting to think, the problem lies with ANet's graphics engine, which is based on DirectX 9. Most modern games are using DX11. DX9 is not designed to so some of the heavy particle and shading effects that are present in GW2, and so they have to jump through hoops and do hack code to get it to work. The only "real" solution would be to use DX11, but that would require a complete redesign/rebuild of the graphics engine right from the ground up. It seems most of the major MMO players, such as WoW, FFXIV and ESO all run on DX11 now, some which were originally DX9, so ANet has fallen gravely behind in technology and I worry that graphics drivers will start deprecating some the out dated functionality in 16 year old DX9. I don't know if ANet has this is in the works, but they should have been planning a DX11 upgrade years ago.

LOL I'm sure it will. I've been playing on and off since Sept/Oct-2012, first started having these problems the following December, when I got a new machine with the 670, and first reported it to ANet mid Jan-2013. I still remember, in those days, I was using nVidia driver version 306.97, since GW2 was the most stable on this at the time (310.70 was completely unstable with GW2) and used that driver until 36x.xx, which I had to install, because FFXIV and ESO would not work on 306.97, so for a while I was switching drivers back and forth, depending on what I was playing, which was a royal PITA. ANet original said it's hardware, the hardware vendors (eVGA/nVidia) and tech support where I bought the machine say it's the game. So, I was stuck in the middle of a he-said-she-said with no fix and could not get the card RMA'd since no one could reproduce the crash. :pensive:

Fix it this month? LOL It's been a problem with GW2 for over 5 years and it will still be a problem with GW2 when GW3 comes out. :p

I don't think only PvP servers. I think they moved all their services to Google to escape the pretty much constant DDoS attack Comcast had been getting for the few weeks previous. It was causing all kinds of routing and lag issues. I'm in Western Canada and my traceroute (When I could actually get it to finish) was bouncing through the UK before hitting Texas. Now on Google, the lag spikes, even in PvE, are a real hassle in large meta events as are map load times, frame-rate drops and rubberbanding. This seems especially true in the larger PoF maps and high population areas like LA and RS where it can take upwards of 10 seconds to load all the textures.

To the OP. Which 670 is it? I have an eVGA 670gtx SC (Super-clocked) and to this day have always had the exact same issue since I got the card at the end of 2012. That computer also has a comparable generation CPU with an i7-3930K and 16GB of RAM. I fixed it by down-clocking the video card. I played the entirety of HoT like this without a single crash when, previously, I will typically get a crash every 15-30 minutes if I don't down clock. nVidia Inspector is a great little program for quickly changing the clocks. This does not fix it for everyone, but it has fixed it for many. The problem is that it is completely non-deterministic. Of course it's an ANet code problem. Even if it IS some sort of flaky hardware or combination of hardware, the fact is that for pretty much everyone who reports it, they say it only affects GW2 and no other games or applications. That means that ANet is doing something most other developers are not or not catching some error that most other developers are. I find it interesting that you're running a 280. I think you're the first with an ATi that I've seen in 5 years of following this issue. This almost exclusively affects nVidia.

That actually is the exact definition of "not" a server side issue. You are all connected to the same server and on the same map at the same time. If it would have been a server issue it would have affected everyone in the map, not just 5 people. What you saw was a problem with a node on those players route to the server. Regardless of where they are located each ISP uses different nodes based on their contracts with providers across the globe. As you get closer to the actual server location more people share the same nodes, people who cross oceans usually share the same nodes as well. My guess is that it's one, or more, of Googles routers having throughput issues since this really wasn't a problem before the move (And before the DDoS attack on Comcast, which started this whole thing). I've recently experienced similar issues during the event at Sebelkeh in Vabbi were large swaths of people would suddenly start lagging and framerates under 10fps (Lasted for about 30s). Last time I did it, not everyone, but a handful of us actually got dismounted and knocked out of the air while gliding down from Market Ruins WP. It may not be ANet's physical server(s) that are having issues, but I'd bet good money on it being a problem with their provider, Google.

GW2 is well known to be CPU intensive, but I think it depends greatly on the setup and your settings within GW2. I run it on 4 different machines: Laptop - i7-Q740 - 8GB RAM - nvidia 445M - HDD (5400rpm) - Windows 10 Home (Has never crashed)Desktop - i7-2600K - 16GB RAM - nvidia 660 (No factory OC) - HDD (7200rpm) - Windows 10 Ultimate (Has never crashed)Desktop - i7-3930K - 16GB RAM - nvidia 670SC - SSD - Windows 10 Ultimate (Terrible crashing issues unless I downclock the video card. Hard crash requiring a system hard-boot)Desktop - i7-7700K - 16GB RAM - nvidia 1080OC - M.2 SSD - Windows 10 Ultimate (Has crashed a couple times, but the type you can log out of Windows with. Started after Halloween for me) Sitting idle in Crystal Oasis, the laptop (The machine I have in front of me) is using under 50% of the CPU. Try setting your graphics to best performance just to see if it helps, then turn things back up. Is it an old machine? What are your CPU/GPU? UPDATE: On the laptop, doing the event at Makali Outpost, I spiked at 70% usage, but was averaging closer to 55%.

Well, good luck with that. This has been a problem that has plagued GW2 for over 5 years. I first reported these types of crashes around this time in 2013. Well, it was hard crashes, not these new one that you can actually get out of by logging out of Windows. It's NOT hardware. That machine is still used by my kids, with all the same specs. GW2 still remains the only thing that crashes on it. ANet has basically sluffed it off and there is, or at least there was on the old forum, a sticky with a couple things to try, but they've NEVER acknowledged that it might be a problem with their software. The closest thing we ever got was a statement saying that GW2 is "sensitive" to overclocking and while downclocking my video card fixed the problem for me, it does not work for everyone.

The problem is that there are at least two different types of "major" crashes here. Now I'm not talking the typical application "CTD" (Crash to desktop) with the pretty little crash reporting screen. System crash: Symptoms typically are looped sound, blank screen, requires a hard reboot, mouse and keyboard stop responding. Sometimes the computer will reboot itself or just spontaneously shut off. It's most common that the problem exists ONLY in GW2 and ALL other games, stress test tools and benchmark apps work flawlessly.Game crash: This is a crash where the screen freezes and the game just stops moving, like looking at a picture. It doesn't generate any errors and doesn't give you the opportunity to submit a crash report. You cannot get out to the desktop using the windows button or alt-tab and the game cannot be shut down using alt-f4, but the system can be recovered gracefully by using ctrl-alt-del, then logging out and back in. These seem to be a relatively new type of crash for GW2 and I only started seeing people talk about them in the last few months. I first started seeing these after Halloween ended and I believe I've only gotten them in PoF maps, but that's not surprising given that's where I've been playing mostly since Halloween ended. Before Halloween, my focus was primarily on Season 3 and HoT content.In my opinion, BOTH crashes are bugs in GW2 given that it ONLY ever seems to affect GW2. I've experienced both crashing types on two different systems, with system crashes on one and game crashes on another. For system crashes, downclocking my video card fixed it, but it does not fix it for everyone (ANet has openly stated GW2 does not like over-clocking). For me, the game crashes are not as common as the system crashes were on the old system. I seem to get a game crash every couple days and while I have not figured out a "solution" for it, it seems selecting an antialiasing mode that is less intensive improves the situation. I first experienced crashing issues (System crashes) with GW2 in December of 2012 and first reported them in January of 2013. After years of following these crashing issues, I've come to the conclusion that GW2 is just plain flaky.

I'll check power options, but I think this has already been done. Quickstart and sleep, shouldn't matter, but the HDD sleep might. Setting power management to performance rather than balanced can sometimes help as well. I had long term crashing issues with GW2 on another machine and think I did some things like this as soon as I got the new machine. My hard drive should never go to sleep regardless the settings, it's a 6gbps M.2 SSD. That said, what myself and Sarge are experiencing isn't Windows freezing. It's GW2 freezing. We can still bring up the ctl-alt-del screen and log out of Windows to get control back. So it's an application level crash, not the OS.

This exact thing has also started happening to me. It's done it twice now, both after the Halloween event ended. Before and during Halloween, it was fine. Nothing of note in Windows event viewer, other than some odd DCOM errors. How about you Sarge? Like you said, the game just stops and you can't alt-tab out. You can start a task manager, but cannot bring it to the foreground. The only way out is to log out so Windows forcibly kills GW2.

I HATE UW anything. The ONLY time I go UW is when it's required for story or map completion. I avoid UW so much, after 5 years playing, I still only have a rare breather and only one weapon equipped. The second is the original green weapon I put on back when I first started playing.

I have similar issues, mostly on my laptop which is an older i7 with an nVidia gtx445m video card. Basically I'll look like a flying corpse for 5-8 seconds before the game catches up and the camera snaps to my location. It's most noticeable in LA. Even with my desktop, which is an i7-7700k, 1080 video card and GW2 installed on a 6gbps M.2 drive, I don't get issues with mounts rendering, but I'll see map elements such as building and trees with delayed load times, sometimes up to 3-4 seconds. ANet needs to change the map load priority to accommodate slower connections and computers with their minimum specs. Now, at 3Mbps, I don't have an incredibly fast Internet connection, but most map elements should be loading from the hard drive, which should be pretty instantaneous with that drive. Basically they need to change load priority so that all required map and character elements are loaded in to memory before activating the player in to the map.

That is a good point. They claim the human eye can't see beyond 24fps, which is why TV signals used to be coded this way (PAL - 24fps, NTSC - 30fps, but interlaced, so effectively about the same as PAL). I don't know how much truth there is to that, but I can say for sure, that if I'm panning quickly or doing something that requires a lot of precision, like the clock tower or Skipping Stones JPs, you really feel the difference between 30fps and 60fps. 30fps is actually quite jarring visually. Beyond 60fps, it's more about whether the hardware can keep up with the speed of the video or not. Now, this is typically more important for movies where you'll get artifacting if the hardware can't keep up. For games, unless you're doing stereoscopic rendering, most games don't have that kind of fast motion. When it comes to movies, things with a lot of fast action can require much higher frame rates/refresh rates. When buying a new TV, the movie Speed Racer is the ultimate test to see if it can keep up. It should also be noted, as well, that there isn't a whole lot of point in having the frame rate unlimited if the refresh on your monitor is 60Hz since the monitor won't be able to render it faster than 60fps, which means the computer has to spend extra cycles to down-sample the video. 60Hz for monitors, is fairly standard, unless you specifically go looking for a monitor that with do 120Hz, or higher. Monitors that have a higher native refresh rate also tend to be quite a bit more expensive, starting at about $450cad for 27" at 1080p.

I don't think it's anything to worry about. It's certainly not an uncommon thing with games. Basically, it's initializing the video driver and reserving the screen before it renders the character selection screen. You'll also notice that after the first blink, while you see see your desktop and start menu, you can't use the start menu or task bar. Again, this is normal.

This is a common story. I brought mine in to tech support 3 times. It's not just MSI, eVGA can be bad for it as well. You almost always see a 10xx series card because that's what's current today. I have a 670 with the same issue and it has been a problem with pretty much every generation of nVidia cards since at least the 400 series. Back 3-4 years ago when I actively trying to find a cause, rather than a band-aid, I remember seeing forum postings about this that were already years old at that point, and it's always one specific game. Apparently one of the GTA games was also notorious for this type of crash. I can say for sure, that it pretty much exclusively affects nVidia cards and for most who report it on this forum, it pretty much affects GW2 exclusively. I don't think I ever remember seeing anyone reporting this issue with an ATi card. I did notice over the weekend that while doing the JP in Draconis Mons I was getting framerate drops and later during the same session, just standing at the bank in Rata Sum, not even moving around, I was getting a consistent 9fps...a far cry from the 100-150fps I typically get. I had to exit the game and go back to clear it up. That is with an eVGA gtx1080 that doesn't even hit 60C running GW2, liquid cooled Intel i7-7700k processor, 16gb of RAM and GW2 installed on a 6Gbps M.2 drive. Given the meager system requirement for GW2, this system should barely be working. ANet is doing something in GW2, that most other developers are not, something that's not using the hardware properly, and/or not releasing resources properly.

I'm going to guess it's a Superclocked or FTW version? The EVGA factory OC'ing plus Nvidia boost brings some cards up to 20-25% over clocks. Which is hitting ridiculous levels of OC'ing. Since it's EVGA, I'd download EVGA Precision and use that to tweak settings. For a 670, I'd down clock by 50mhz and bring up the voltage to 1.012. There was a bios update from EVGA for that card. You can find it on the EVGA forums. It's likely not going to help the GW2 issue though. Have you cleaned the cache and local.dat? My wall of text above from Oct 18th has more info. Once the game creates a new Local.dat, I copy and paste the file into the same folder to create a duplicate. This way I can rename and run off duplicates and not have to worry about putting in my login info again and again. Yes, it is a SC version. As abomally pointed out, it's getting hard to find cards that are not factory overclocked, was the same then. In general, I've always had good luck with eVGA cards and have been using eVGA since the 200 series, when I switched over from ATI. I had installed BIOS updates current to about 2 years ago, which did not help. In my case the WIndows event log indicated an nVidia problem with an nvlddmkm.sys crash right before the system crash. Down clocking the GPU completely fixed the crashing, but I also went heavy and reduced the clocks by a full 15% I think. GW2 does not require a super powerful GPU and is more CPU dependent and the 3930k is more than sufficient, so it was still plenty to run the game pretty much maxed out for graphics. As for cache and dat file(s), I've gone so far as doing a full clean install of GW2, on a fresh clean install of Windows, meaning putting a clean GW2 on immediately after Windows install and updates finishes.

Perhaps a corrupt data file since reinstalling fixed it. Looks like it had issues loading certain textures.

No, I said it's random. It can range from seconds to hours, like most others who have this or similar issues. In all the years owning the computer it has only ever happened in GW2. In my case it goes away if I down clock the GPU, so I use nVidia Inspector to quickly change the clocks back and forth. I played the entirety of HoT on that PC down clocked and not a single crash. We don't have to down clock for anything else the kids play, such as Garry's Mod, L4D2, Outlast, Minecraft, Roblox, Terraria, among others. I've put hundreds of hours in to Skyrim and the only crashes I've had here were due to bad mods and too many save files (And the plethora of bugs that always come with Bethesda games). Many hours in to L4D2, HL2, Alien: Isolation, Wolffenstein: The New Order, Darksiders, Bioshock Infinite, Portal 2, FFXIV, ESO and many others. Never this kind of crash. As far as games or apps go, it's unique to GW2, at least on that machine. I don't dispute that it's hardware, but there is something VERY specific that ANet is doing that most other developers are not that is triggering a crash on said hardware, or perhaps something they're not doing that most other developers are doing to prevent it, either way, the end result is the same. Years ago, I read on the nVidia forum that one of the GTA games is/was also plagued with this issue, but I don't have any of them to test it as I don't like them. May have been the eVGA forum too, I've spent a lot of time on both over the years.

Does OCCT give you a log or tell you what it did or what the fault was? Have you replaced the PSU and have the GW2 crash go away? What, if any, messages in the Windows Event Log are you receiving at the time of the crash? Do those messages match between the OCCT crash and GW2 crash? I still find it peculiar that in pretty much all cases, GW2 is the only trigger. We've also had many people who've replaced their PSU and not had the problem go away, Exstazik and Sir Vincent III, just in the last few postings. I wonder if OCCT is managing to stress the PSU in to a crash, but ultimately unrelated to the GW2 problem.