Problem with Shaders on Medium/High

[Cinnamohn]

Over the last 2 weeks of playing, I've occasionally ran into an issue where my computer will simply shut off and reboot itself when certain things happen in the game. It usually happens when I'm zoomed in (downed state) with several ground-targeted spells colliding on the screen, but I just recently also had it happen while I was swimming next to a waterfall.

I discovered this after the first reboot happening as soon as I fell into the water at the base of the falls and then again while I was dealing with the zombie that jumped on me as I logged back in. To prevent a third time, I turned all of my graphics from the complete maximum to the complete minimum before entering the game. I then stood under the waterfall and turned up one setting at a time, pausing for several seconds between each one. Everything was working just fine until I clicked Medium on Shaders - it was nearly an instant reboot. I then tested High while standing further away, and it happened a bit later than the previous. I was even watching my GPU usage (was @ 30%) and temperatures (were in the mid 60s) to see if anything was abnormal.

So, I can run the game completely fine with everything maxed anywhere, except in a few specific places. Otherwise, I can have Shaders on Low and avoid the issue altogether. I have absolutely no clue what's causing this.

I'm using an Intel Core i5-3570k, 3.4 GHz processor and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 with the 306.02 Beta driver.

[Deleted]

There is something wrong with shaders in many games nowday, not sure who's fault it is (game developper, Nvidia/ATI driver).

Shaders are causing lag the first time you cast spell in diablo 3 too, forcing you to use each skill once while in town to avoid lag at the first cast of each spell in fight.

That's happening too in SC2, each time a new unit appear, for the first match after launching the game, you get a small noticeable freeze, every time a unit dies for the first time you get that little freeze too. Big engage will usually lead to a lot of "new unit" death animation and can cause several second of freeze.

A custom made map was made (called Unit Prelauncher) that create and kill every units in the game just for your computer to load every shaders. Until you leave the game everything run fine afterward. That custom map is so played that it was quickly prompted at among the top of the custom map pool...

I'm not sure how shader are loaded in GW2 but they are located on the hard drive, and must uploaded to your GPU which is a very slow process. And for some reason game designer do not load them "just in case" and decide to load them on request. I think that a massive delay in that loading may be causing your crash. Perhaps your hard drive read/write is too slow, and the request just time out and the GPU crash? You could try to defrag your hard drive.

[ManiaCCC]

I had different problem ...but there are few things similar... I saw some graphical artifacts and my PC just crashed/freezed and rebooted(not always, sometimes just freezed and I had to hard reset it)... When I lowered settings, everything was fine.. I have GTX 560Ti ,, GPU usage and temperature were in good position as in your case.. After few trial and error tests, I discovered, these problems were caused with low voltage on GPU core.. I just increased voltage on GPU core, and game became perfectly stable on highest possible settings without any issues.

[kliffharry]

Shaders are causing lag the first time you cast spell in diablo 3 too, forcing you to use each skill once while in town to avoid lag at the first cast of each spell in fight.

This could be fixed by moving all the data files to a USB 3.0 stick or on aa SSD. Turned out the conventional hard drive doesn't load stuff fast enough. Will try to put GW2 on a USB stick and see if it helps.