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Okay, I'm new here. I registered primarily to discuss a particular problem I'm experiencing that really hit me out of nowhere. It's something that I've never seen, especially given the circumstances. I'm not sure if this is fixable, or what, but maybe you guys can help!
So, earlier today, my GTX 280 was working great as usual while I played WoW, Crysis 2, Skyrim and several other random games, including some oldschool stuff for fun. I've had this card for around 3 years and it's never failed me; no problems at all!
Well, I went to join in on the Guild Wars 2 stress test that was live earlier for a single hour and the first time, the storyboards crashed and I could not alt+tab or anything, but the audio was still there in a really odd and distorted form.
So, I rebooted my PC and tried again. I was able to enter the game world, bypassing the story and roaming around for not more than 15 seconds before the game locked up and started going crazy. My display driver kept crashing, with a kernel error, over and over; nonstop.
But here's the odd part: My entire PC was not crashing. I could get back to my desktop easily when that happened, despite it happening multiple times. My video card is not totally fried, but there's definitely some sort of problem.
With that in mind, I tried several versions of various nVidia drivers, including older ones, the newest beta driver and even the standard Windows Update version, all with no luck. And what's worse is, every single game is doing this now! It's as if Guild Wars 2 destroyed my PC! It makes zero sense!
Opening my case and cleaning everything out is a weekly ritual for me, as well as checking all connections. I did that stuff again anyway just to be safe, but it was obviously of no help.
Like I said guys, I've tried everything I've found to try, as well as various things I thought to try on my own. This is a new system with an 3rd gen i5-3450, 16GB of 1800mhz RAM, a 7200 RPM 2TB hard drive; it's all new, aside from my 650W Corsair PSU and this trusty ol' EVGA GTX 280 video card, neither of which appeared to be having any sort of trouble prior to loading Guild Wars 2.
And, to give you a few more details about exactly what happens in game...
The game will load fine and run through the menus, settings, etc. As soon as the graphics load, every game runs for maybe 4-10 seconds, with stuff like WoW reaching times up to maybe 30 seconds. But after that point, weird green streaks run across the screen, which I guess would be considered artifacting. And eventually, after 3-4 seconds, the screen goes black (or locks up), windows restarts the display driver, and every game repeats that process over and over until I control+alt+delete and end the process manually, after which everything runs smooth again. Heck, I can even alt+tab out of the games while they're going crazy and utilize all windows features, programs and even stuff like webcam video chat and YouTube videos just fine. It's only the game window that goes crazy.
Perhaps the weirdest part of this is that I can leave the game running, minimized, no matter what the game may be, and windows will stop restarting the display driver. Everything runs smooth. But clearly, there's no point in keeping a program open that gets stuck in such a loop, so.. I'm at a dead end.
I don't know what to do, but that's all of the information I can come up with. It doesn't seem like the card itself is dead, as that usual results in artifacting and problems that carry over into the desktop environment. Maybe there's something wrong, but I don't know what it could be. And if it's not a hardware issue, what the heck can I do to fix the problem?
Any help is much appreciated; thank you guys!
So, earlier today, my GTX 280 was working great as usual while I played WoW, Crysis 2, Skyrim and several other random games, including some oldschool stuff for fun. I've had this card for around 3 years and it's never failed me; no problems at all!
Well, I went to join in on the Guild Wars 2 stress test that was live earlier for a single hour and the first time, the storyboards crashed and I could not alt+tab or anything, but the audio was still there in a really odd and distorted form.
So, I rebooted my PC and tried again. I was able to enter the game world, bypassing the story and roaming around for not more than 15 seconds before the game locked up and started going crazy. My display driver kept crashing, with a kernel error, over and over; nonstop.
But here's the odd part: My entire PC was not crashing. I could get back to my desktop easily when that happened, despite it happening multiple times. My video card is not totally fried, but there's definitely some sort of problem.
With that in mind, I tried several versions of various nVidia drivers, including older ones, the newest beta driver and even the standard Windows Update version, all with no luck. And what's worse is, every single game is doing this now! It's as if Guild Wars 2 destroyed my PC! It makes zero sense!
Opening my case and cleaning everything out is a weekly ritual for me, as well as checking all connections. I did that stuff again anyway just to be safe, but it was obviously of no help.
Like I said guys, I've tried everything I've found to try, as well as various things I thought to try on my own. This is a new system with an 3rd gen i5-3450, 16GB of 1800mhz RAM, a 7200 RPM 2TB hard drive; it's all new, aside from my 650W Corsair PSU and this trusty ol' EVGA GTX 280 video card, neither of which appeared to be having any sort of trouble prior to loading Guild Wars 2.
And, to give you a few more details about exactly what happens in game...
The game will load fine and run through the menus, settings, etc. As soon as the graphics load, every game runs for maybe 4-10 seconds, with stuff like WoW reaching times up to maybe 30 seconds. But after that point, weird green streaks run across the screen, which I guess would be considered artifacting. And eventually, after 3-4 seconds, the screen goes black (or locks up), windows restarts the display driver, and every game repeats that process over and over until I control+alt+delete and end the process manually, after which everything runs smooth again. Heck, I can even alt+tab out of the games while they're going crazy and utilize all windows features, programs and even stuff like webcam video chat and YouTube videos just fine. It's only the game window that goes crazy.
Perhaps the weirdest part of this is that I can leave the game running, minimized, no matter what the game may be, and windows will stop restarting the display driver. Everything runs smooth. But clearly, there's no point in keeping a program open that gets stuck in such a loop, so.. I'm at a dead end.
I don't know what to do, but that's all of the information I can come up with. It doesn't seem like the card itself is dead, as that usual results in artifacting and problems that carry over into the desktop environment. Maybe there's something wrong, but I don't know what it could be. And if it's not a hardware issue, what the heck can I do to fix the problem?
Any help is much appreciated; thank you guys!
