Video card overloading / crashes client to bug report

Miugre - Heavens Tear

I guess this is mainly a question for folks who are knowledgable about video cards/GPUs. I recently rebuilt my desktop PC with a new motherboard and a few other pieces of hardware, keeping the hard disks, optical drive and video card from my last machine. The video card is (I believe) a GeForce GT 220 by Galaxy - not the best card by any means, but it gives me a smooth enough framerate anywhere except West District. What I'm noticing are a bunch of strange things which, according to people in my guild anyway, are evidence of the card being overloaded.

The original problem was crashes to the bug report screen. These could happen randomly or, more recently, when the framerate remains slow even in situations where the lag had already abated. For example: I'll be standing in Plume, waiting for the NW NPC to appear so I can grab my badge... waiting far away from the "ball of lag." Then the NPC would appear, I'd turn on performance mode and turn off the proxy visual effects so I can get close and grab the badge. Then I make it back to the tele platform or wherever and sometimes the framerate will still plug along, eventually ending in a crash to bug report.

Or at least, that's what used to happen. As of this week's patch, I'm not so sure anymore.

The other day I was getting ready to do a Metal run, warping over to Hidden Orchid from South Arch, and I notice that the teleport map image changed; it's not the regular map image, just a basic blank map with the waypoints on it. A minute later, I'm riding over the hills leading to Sanctuary and I see that the ground textures up ahead are blurred after a certain point. Trying to pass that point led to me falling through the ground endlessly, forcing me to relog at which point that problem vanished. After that Metal run finished though, I noticed half the NPCs in South Arch had no textures on their model (they looked pure white all over).

The ironic part is... I have a laptop with an integrated video card (I believe by Intel) which doesn't have any of these problems with PWI. Sure, its framerate is utter **** in a hat, but at least when it gets overloaded it just blacks out the screen for a second or two and then comes back without crashing the client. If I could get that to happen with my GeForce card instead of all these crazy symptoms, I'd be perfectly happy.

I've been meaning to upgrade my video card for a few months anyway, but I don't want to shell out money for a card when I don't know if it'll have these problems or not. So what I'm wondering is, is this a quirk specific to GeForce cards (or certain ones in that line), or is there some obscure client setting I should be using that I'm not? Basically how can I guarantee that this card, or perhaps its replacement, won't have these issues?

For reference, I use the following graphical settings most of the time: terrain textures on, distance/water/plants/clouds etc on medium, sun/moon and shadows on but none of the other checkboxes (VSync etc is off). The video card has 1GB of dedicated DDR3 memory and requires 300W of power - on my old machine that's exactly what I had for a power supply, but for the new one I made sure to get a 500W. I can look up any other relevant data in a few hours when I get back to the machine in question. :P

Thanks in advance.

Allisandre - Sanctuary

I'm pretty sure the GT220 does not consume 300W of power. It's actually closer to about 60 watts. Especially considering that it's only about half as good of a video card as the 8800GT was 5 years ago, which uses about 100 watts.

What you're describing sounds more like a problem with a video driver, or some other system incompatibility. (Some video codecs can cause issues.)

I will need both a copy of your dxdiag.txt file, and a link to a published Speccy report taken while you are having the issues.
(Remember to use the [code] tags for the dxdiag info and to remove any trademark characters so it doesn't get cut off.)

Take the Speccy report at the time that you are having the graphical issues in the client.

Miugre - Heavens Tear

Stood in the lagball in Lost City tonight and of course crashed in due time. The graphical glitches weren't happening though.

I can't seem to find a dxdiag.txt. I take it this relates to DirectX? For what it's worth, I always hit Cancel on the bug reports (because honestly, who would read them) so if that's causing it not to save logs, sorry.

I got a snapshot but I think I just now learned you can't publish snapshots you took previously. >_> Why, I don't know. I had about a 30s window to take the shot so I just went with Save rather than Publish because NW was starting in 5 minutes and I wanted to switch quickly to my laptop to participate.