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PC Crashes Randomly Whilst Playing


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@"wanya.1697" said:maybe you can find a clue in Event Viewerhttp://www.dummies.com/computers/operating-systems/windows-10/how-to-use-event-viewer-in-windows-10/or did you have a look in C:\Windows\Minidump ? if a minidump file is there you could analyse it with different tools to get more info what caused the crash

Wow, great shout! Just tried this and managed to cause a crash. (As mentioned before swinging the camera around seems to do a good job)

Here are the error logs - there is one for the unexpected shutdown and also another error event at the exact same time! Relating to one of my drives...

Here is the picture of the critical error: Event_Viewer_Critical.png

Any ideas as to what to do next?

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@Shaft Master.9261 said:

@"AncientYs.8613" said:This could be a psu issue as well. In your specs you mentioned a gtx 1080 and usually to power that graphics card and the cpu together requires a decent psu let's say about 500watt and maximum 550watt. Also did you check your case to see if it has sufficient airflow? Because this can also contribute to overheating of individual pc components and lead to higher gpu and cpu Temps. Also the psu plays a major role in making sure your pc functions as it should. As for Msi afterburner try setting a fan curve, at 50% gpu usage set the fan at 50% speed then at 60 to 80 set Fan speed at 100% just to make sure your gpu is cooled down and does not thermal throttle.

My PSU is currently rated at 600W so in terms of raw power I think it is OK.
HOWEVER
, it is quite old so maybe that has had some detrimental effect on it? I think it is around eight years old.

Which wattage is the most important? I can see it goes all the way down to 540W which I think is skirting the edge a bit in terms of power delivery.

What do you reckon?

In terms of wattage 600w is more than enough for your system and should deliver enough power to cpu gpu and whatever else consumes power from the psu. However I think you definitely should first check any other events running on your pc to see if there is some kind of app or task that is using up virtual ram thus putting strain on your pc. and follow wanyas suggestion. If you discover nothing out of the ordinary then i can say with confidence that it is your psu. In my personal experience with my pc I have also had it for a long time, 10 years and during those years I have had to change out my psu once as it had died but after replacing my psu everything worked fine again. 8 years on a psu is quite a long time for it to be alive and functioning as it should. How is it with other games? Is it running well? Or are you also experiencing pc crashes there? In my honest opinion the engine that gw2 runs on is also very poorly optimized so it is possible that just the game itself is causing these crashes. I hope I could be helpful to you. Sorry if I couldn't provide any more information.

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@Shaft Master.9261 said:

@"wanya.1697" said:maybe you can find a clue in Event Viewer
or did you have a look in C:\Windows\Minidump ? if a minidump file is there you could analyse it with different tools to get more info what caused the crash

Wow, great shout! Just tried this and managed to cause a crash. (As mentioned before swinging the camera around seems to do a good job)

- there is one for the unexpected shutdown and also another error event at the exact same time! Relating to one of my drives...

Here is the picture of the critical error:
Event_Viewer_Critical.png

Any ideas as to what to do next?

I took a look at the error that you received and here is a guide that outlines how to fix it;https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/solved-kernel-power-41-critical-error-on-windows-10/

This might help resolve your problems with your pc shutting down randomly.

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OK, sorry to resurrect a dead thread but this has become extremely frustrating now.

I bought a new PSU, 650W Corsair 80+ Gold rated, as my current PSU was pretty old (around 8 years). I installed it and ran GW2. Everything seemed fine until I had a full PC crash and restart again!

I really have no idea what the problem is now. I can only imagine the issue lies with GW2 as all other games work absolutely fine and as I said before, when doing video editing I never run into trouble. I have found that playing with the Environment setting, within graphics settings, on low doesn't seem to cause a crash.

On a side note I raised a ticket with GW2 support last week and they still haven't acknowledged it or anything. So that avenue of investigation isn't looking helpful.

If you need any other info just let me know! Full specs and video of the issue up above. This is a hard PC restart not just normal game crash.

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@Shaft Master.9261 said:

I really have no idea what the problem is now. I can only imagine the issue lies with GW2 as all other games work absolutely fine and as I said before, when doing video editing I never run into trouble. I have found that playing with the Environment setting, within graphics settings, on low doesn't seem to cause a crash.

Scratch that re Environment settings, with that turned to low with everything else on high I still had a crash.

All settings set to max with the exception of the following:Anti-aliasing: None (Handled by NVIDIA control panel)Environment: LowLOD Distance: LowRender Sampling: NativeCharacter Model Limit: HighCharacter Model Quality: High

Ambient Occlusion: Unchecked

I will try and investigate to see which of these settings seems to be the culprit, if it can indeed be singled down to one. Unfortunately I don't have a huge amount of time to play so this may take a while.

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  • 2 weeks later...

What operating system are you currently running? I started experiencing the same issues at the same time as the recent Underwater update which was also at the same time as a Nvidia update and the Windows 10 Focus Assist update. At that time it was crashing for me after being in the game for just a few minutes, but after doing some research and testing I was at least able to get the game/system back to a point of crashing far less frequently.

My first recommendation is if you are on Windows 10, turn off the Focus Assist since several people have found that to be a coulprit to GW2 crashes and issues during loading screens. You may also try setting GW2 to be ran as an administrator that way nothing should be getting blocked due to user rights issues. What I wound up doing to best improve it for me was I fully uninstalled and reinstalled GW2, that at least got the game back to a point of playable.

It was also recently brought to my attention that GW2 has been having some issues with DirectX and tabbing out of the game which can start resulting in random FPS drop spikes until a point in which it just crashes everything. So far there has been no fix for it other than to restart the game as far as I am aware.

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  • 2 weeks later...

@Frugl.3168 said:Having recently gotten into GW2. I have been suffering from the exact same issue. Could you check your C:\Windows\LiveKernelReports to see if you have any watchdog violations from the time of the crash?

Hey Frugl,

I checked the folder you specified and I do indeed have several watchdog.dmp files. Some of them may be related to GW2 crashes however I am uncertain, next time GW2 crashes like this I'll check that folder straight away to confirm.

If it helps, I have tweaked a couple of settings which I will share now which appear to have stopped the crashing. I'm not sure how effective these tweaks truly are, however I have yet to crash following them.

Firstly, in MSI afterburner I have underclocked my GPU core clock by 128Mhz whilst upping the power limit to 120%.

Secondly, in the in-game GW2 settings I turned shaders to medium and have set GW2 to run at fullscreen 3440v1440. Prior to this I ran windowless bordered for faster alt-tabbing.

Finally, I changed a couple of compatability settings for launching the GW2.exe being:

  • Running in compatibility mode for Windows Vista SP2
  • Checking 'Disable full-screen optimisations'
  • Checking 'Run this program as administrator'
  • Within 'Change high DPI settings' checking 'Override high DPI scaling behaviour' and ensuring set to application.

I am going to try and bring the in-game graphics settings up over the next couple of weeks to check if these changes really have helped. I found that running the game on the highest settings caused the most frequent crashes, perhaps my GPU not getting enough power? Seems unlikely as I just bought a brand new 650W psu which should be ample.

The most intensive zones are Lion's Arch and The Grove and it was in those that I would suffer complete shutdowns most frequently.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:So, I've said it before, but sadly a crash like that is either hardware, or driver, related. Sadly, beyond what I have suggested I don't have any great ideas about what could be going on, but @Frugl.3168 advising checking for the kernel crash dumps is great advice.

As a further point Slippy, I have noticed something which I find a little odd. Upon disabling the automatic restart setting when my PC crashes, I expected to go to BSOD with some sort of error message. Oddly, after the game freezes and my PC crashes my screen stays a solid colour without going to any BSOD nor restarting. Is this something that you would expect?

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@Shaft Master.9261 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:So, I've said it before, but sadly a crash like that is either hardware, or driver, related. Sadly, beyond what I have suggested I don't have any great ideas about what could be going on, but @"Frugl.3168" advising checking for the kernel crash dumps is great advice.

As a further point Slippy, I have noticed something which I find a little odd. Upon disabling the automatic restart setting when my PC crashes, I expected to go to BSOD with some sort of error message. Oddly, after the game freezes and my PC crashes my screen stays a solid colour without going to any BSOD nor restarting. Is this something that you would expect?

Sadly for you, I'd associate that with being even more likely a hardware level issue: the BSOD is basically where something goes wrong, and Windows catches the error, and "crashes" because the kernel is so broken that it could destroy data if you kept running. Technically, though, the computer is still working -- Windows is deliberately stopping and showing the BSOD to avoid breaking something after it gets into a really busted state.

What you describe there is more hardware-layer stuff, where, eg, the GPU crashes, display corrupts, it messes up the PCI-E bus, systems restarts automatically because everything is a mess. Windows doesn't get a chance to BSOD because, well, the whole system is dead, not just some internal software level thing.

(That BSOD behaviour is the correct response, btw. It really is situations where continuing could cause all sorts of horrible corruption to the system, and only happens when something is really, really wrong. In case anyone wonders, given the "technically still working" part.)

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@"SlippyCheeze.5483" said:Sadly for you, I'd associate that with being even more likely a hardware level issue: the BSOD is basically where something goes wrong, and Windows catches the error, and "crashes" because the kernel is so broken that it could destroy data if you kept running. Technically, though, the computer is still working -- Windows is deliberately stopping and showing the BSOD to avoid breaking something after it gets into a really busted state.

Ugh, oh no!

I don't suppose you know if there is anything I can do as a consumer? I bought the GPU off Amazon February 2017 and have all the original packaging. Would you recommend trying to get a replacement? Is this something that's typically done after a year.?

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I used to have a very similar issue with another game. For me it was a case of the GPU dying.I don't want to scare you into that being the cause as its a worst case scenario thing, but that's my experience with a full system lockup and restart like such on desktops.

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@TexZero.7910 said:I used to have a very similar issue with another game. For me it was a case of the GPU dying.I don't want to scare you into that being the cause as its a worst case scenario thing, but that's my experience with a full system lockup and restart like such on desktops.

Hi Tex,

Do you know if there is a way to test my GPU to see if it's not functioning properly?

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@Shaft Master.9261 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I used to have a very similar issue with another game. For me it was a case of the GPU dying.I don't want to scare you into that being the cause as its a worst case scenario thing, but that's my experience with a full system lockup and restart like such on desktops.

Hi Tex,

Do you know if there is a way to test my GPU to see if it's not functioning properly?

I'm not sure if there is or isn't. I know mine was logging errors pretty frequently though when this was the case. Usually an NVKDMXX(or something close to those letters) error would show up right before the restart.

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@TexZero.7910 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I used to have a very similar issue with another game. For me it was a case of the GPU dying.I don't want to scare you into that being the cause as its a worst case scenario thing, but that's my experience with a full system lockup and restart like such on desktops.

Hi Tex,

Do you know if there is a way to test my GPU to see if it's not functioning properly?

I'm not sure if there is or isn't. I know mine was logging errors pretty frequently though when this was the case. Usually an NVKDMXX(or something close to those letters) error would show up right before the restart.

Sadly, yeah, I don't really have anything more than this. A good start is probably checking that the power cables are plugged fully in, it is firmly seated in the PCI-E slot, and that the fans are not clogged with dust or whatever.

Beyond that, yeah, it might be worth trying for a warranty replacement if it is still covered. May or may not fix the problem, but it probably can't make it worse.

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@SlippyCheeze.5483@"Frugl.3168 "After a painfully long wait with GW2 support (however totally worth it), I got a response with a proposed solution to the issue. Happy to say that I haven't experienced a hard crash/reset of my PC since and have even been able to crank the graphics right up.

It appears the crashes were being caused by programs starting up with Windows. This is really weird and I have no idea why this would cause a hardware level issue, but anyway.

The GM's steps were as follows...

  1. First, open the Windows Start menu and type in "MSCONFIG." This will start a search for any "Apps" called "MSCONFIG."
  2. The first and only result should be "System Configuration." Left click on this. A new window will appear called "System Configuration."
  3. Click the "Services" tab.
  4. Click "Hide all Microsoft Services" at the bottom and once done, click "Disable All" (you MUST click "Hide all Microsoft Services" to avoid deactivating essential programs).
  5. Click the "Startup" tab.
  6. Click "Open Task Manager."
  7. A list will be generated of all the applications you have set to start when Windows first boots up. Right-click on these applications one by one and select "Disable." Once completed, click "Ok" to save your changes. This will prompt you to reboot your computer. Please do so.
  8. Once you return to Windows, try connecting again.

I hope this helps you Frugl as I know you are experiencing a similar issue!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thank you for posting this!!! I have been having the exact same problem since July 1st. I've done everything I could think of. I'll try this too.

So I tried this, but then I got a Blue screen with error stating: DPC Watchdog Violation and I have never gotten one of those before.

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