Help - Gw.exe running 100% CPU usage and is extremely choppy

ok, let me start off by saying - I'm no computer n00b. I'm fairly savvy with keeping my system clean and running smooth. I have done everything under the sun, and yet, the cure of my issue eludes me.

Basically, my favorite (ok, only) game I play is Guild Wars. I was an alpha tester for over a year and a half before launch and it will always have a soft spot, like a kid you helped raise and you get all excited to see it grow up and become successful. I even have an NPC in the game named for me and my father (dad & daughter alpha test team) for being one of the recognized testers. (Mosreh the Exile - Mosreh is my our last name, Hersom, spelled backwards and our guild is Legion of Exile.)

The issue is in the last month or more the game lags beyond belief and runs at 100% CPU usage, so the whole computer crawls. As soon as I kill the gw.exe process, the computer goes back to normal. I have no other issues, it started happening about 4 - 6 weeks ago - some time near my updating to Factions but I can't remember if it exactly started at that time or it's just a coincidence.

These are my computer & network specs, please note these have been the SAME exact specs I've been using with GW successfully for over a year, none of it is new or changed (ok, SP2 is newer but still I used GW successfully for months after updating):

* Dell Inspiron 9200 Laptop
* 1g RAM, something something processor, I forget, but the 2nd best they had when I bought it
* ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128 VRAM
* WXP home SP2
* Trend Micro internet security 2006, ports open and gw.exe on exception list to have open unlimited access
* I'm on a wirless network, DLink 8.11G, I have the router configured to keep the TCP ports it needs open 6112 & 80 - I have excellent signal as I am all of 12 feet away from the router. I connect at 54Mbps according to my wireless connector.
* I have Charter cable internet, 3M down and 256k up.
* To combat the tendancy for a laptop to get hot, it is literally sitting on a baking cooling rack with a small desk fan pointed right at the back and down. My computer is always cool to the touch even in the middle of game play.

This is what I have done:

I log into a user called Game that has all fancy stuff stripped with classic interface. Nothing in starts in the background except neccessary stuff and and anti-virus (I even exited that when I was desperate).

I have updated my chipset drivers.

I have updated my DirectX.

I have updated my video drivers to the Omega lastest version.

I have run scans of spybot, adaware, a registry cleaner, and deep scanned from my Trend Micro.

I have uninstalled all programs I dont need and deleted files. I have 30% free hard disk space.

I ran disk clean up and 4 defrags!

I have uninstalled & reinstalled the gw client. I turned down all the graphic options to the lowest they can be (game looks ugly like that, btw - and I used to be able to run the game with 75% max settings no problem.)

I used a tool at endlagnow.org to see that lag is 100% client related and I am getting a lousy 5 frps!

anyone have anymore ideas??

everybody is getting it, its a game issue not computer.

Is it related to Factions? And is there a thread you can point me to see discussion on this matter if "everyone" is getting it? I'm highly distressed.

It's not an "issue" most games use close to 100% of the CPU power.

But I am sure 5 frps and the choppiness/lag isn't normal...

mine does the same sometimes and i cant figure out why .. :S

That's true.

I can't think of what exactly what the problem it might be though.

My GW used nearly 100% cpu since i installed it (summer 05) .. so thats not the problem i guess.

You run on notebook. Theres one more option i can think of, ... .. wll, two options :P

1, Some crappy windows update
2, dont you install som new /upgrade/ software for cpu frequency control ?
i hope you know what i mean ... if your cpu frequency isnt lowered , because of some reason ...

if dont helped ... i ll check hdd usage during playing ... or check RAM with that ms utility

I had the exact same problem until I started running GW with the -dx8 parameter, got rid of my anti-virus and stopped using TS.

Same problem here, since one month or so. Freezes kill me

100% CPU usage is normal, except for hyperthreading / dual-core CPU's. That's not the issue.

Don't know if this is the issue, but do you have Fast User Switching turned on? If you log into your other account that way, a lot of processes from another user account are still active, and that could be what's choking your computer. I always keep FUS turned off on machines with multiple accounts. In Task Manager, check the box to "Show Processes from All Users" and see if a lot of extra stuff pops up.

If that's not it, then try other 3D apps (games, rthdribl, etc.) and see if the problem persists. Verify that your GPU hasn't somehow been underclocked. Check your overall RAM usage in Task Manager while GW is running, to make sure somehow all your memory isn't being eaten (GW can use up to 300MB, so don't panic if you see that).

Also there's some speak of the sound system in GW causing some complications.

Got stuff like DirectMusic installed? Try adjusting the sound quality (restart the client after changing the quality so it comes to effect!)

Ok, I get it, 100% CPU usage is normal. But the 5 frps and the extreme lag is not. I mean it looks no better than the flip books you used to make as a kid. It's impossible to play, you can't react in time for anything.

I understand the switch user thing, again, I'm actually a tech support analyst in real life. I do not have anything, anywhere, running in the background.

I don't have other 3D apps to test, do you recommend a free one?

My GPU is not underclocked.

I did use task manager to run tests and no other system is hogging CPU cycles. As I stated above, as soon as I kill gw.exe my cpu usage drops to like 3-5%.

Oh, and I used the -image switch last night for the hell of it and so it's not that it's streaming anything, I'm still horrible this afternoon.

This is kind of a long shot, but try setting the priority of gw.exe to "lower then normal" or maybe the reverse, "higher then normal"? (if you don't know how to do that: 1) open task manager [ctrl+alt+delete], 2) go to the gw.exe process, right click on it and scroll down to priority> set it to lower then normal, see if that works. then try higher then normal to see if that works.)

I know you said you're "computer savvy" but I included the directions in case some one else has the problem.

I'll edit this post if I find anything new.

I'd bet you some $ that it's probably occuring now as opposed to always because of the updates. the game is getting more and more complex by the day, so it's no wonder people's computer that used to be able to handle GW are having a harder time now. I looked around and couldn't find any significant solutions to this problem, good luck.

First of all 100% CPU usage is not Normal! I have 3 machines at home and all run at various amounts of cpu usage ranging from 17%-80%. The Dell laptop (80% with ati x300, pent4 HT 2.1GHz, 1.5GB RAM) is the highest and experience the most lag, dropped frame rate; then the toshiba (25% go 5200 nvidia, pent4 HT 3.2GHz 1GB RAM), followed by the gaming machine (17% ati 1800x crossfire addition, pent5 dual core 2.67 GHz 1GB RAM). Even oblivion the most demanding graphics engine to date, only hogs about 65-70% percent processor time during graphics loads and drops to about 35% during gameplay.

Part of the problem is directx 9.0c, the other part is some where hardware driver related. I have notice, even with the ATI gaming machine that GW will spike to 80-90 % under heavy graphics and network connection issues. Where as the Nvidia always stays around the 25-30% range regardless of conditions, in-game or out. ATI settings are very picky and the newest drivers and controls seemed even more buggy then the older set. I'm not home so i forget the version numbers ATM..

This weekend i experienced far more drops and lag issues then ever. Mostly since i think there was a high demand on the network and partly due to the d/ling of patches to gw itself. Thus far i have not found optimum settings for the ati model cards to even remotely get the processor overhead down past 67% on the Dell laptop.

This has been an on-going issue with every ATI based graphics machine i have used to play gw since factions release. Basically, no matter what settings you use, in either GW or through the card drivers, the processor is bogged, frame rate perfomance suffers and alternative programs (like TS) struggle for processor time (forget opening IE without an insane wait time). The only ATI machine that has run GW smoothly (processor demand wise) is, suprisingly enough, a Mac os x powerbook pro with boot camp. Which is yet another dual core machine with a spiffy ati (9600 i believe) video card.

In a nutshell, it's something hardware related, something specific (so it seems) to ATI and certain INTEL machines (or MOBO's) and Directx 9.0c. I wish i had an answer as well, since my g/f is quite unhappy with GW perfomance and has to do silly work-arounds just to get TS open.

Guild Wars has become lag wars. I used to lag A LITTLE sometimes in HoH where there are 24 people squeezed together. Now I go to RA where there are 8 people and my game turns into a powerpoint slideshow of how to die horribly in GWs. I lag about the equivalent of what I lag when I'm trying to run through the forge in WoW ><.

I have no clue whats causing it, but whatever it is, it needs fixed. A whole lotta people are gonna quit because I'd say 50% of people are experiencing this and its impossible to play under these conditions.

If your not gonna fix it. You need to tell us the problem so we can cope with it using our own settings.

Whenever I get serious lag, I check the CPU monitor at GW is maxed out at 100%

if you try and reduce it's priority, it won't let you.

Nvidia = Series 7900 or even lower one 7300 SLI you will rock !

Sometime it's network issue ..
I would eliminate wireless ( older wireless has dead spot ) go with wired for now avoid interfre about your household appliances.

I'm not sure ATI 9700 is ,check the compatibility.
Most gamer go with 2 Gig RAM.
If you want performance I 'd say go at least 2 Gig You won't disappointed.

Check your trace route, Ping hop , sometime net congested ...
i hope it help ,

Check your sound settings. They changed the options menu that might need you to reset some of the options.

If a game is not using 100% of the processing time, it just means your processors aren't being fully utilized by the game, nothing more. It can means one of several things:

a) You've got some other application or process chewing up a lot of time. Where is the other processing time going? If it's 'System', then it's probably spending a lot of time in drivers (sound, video). If you see it going to other applications, you need to clean your machine out. If the excess time is going to 'System Idle Process', then it's either b) or c).

b) Your machines are GPU-bound instead of CPU-bound. If your machines have more powerful processors relative to their video cards, your CPU has to wait for the video card to finish processing before it can continue (because there's no use processing a frame unless it can be rendered). Thus, it simply goes to sleep and frees CPU time until the video card is done.

c) The game isn't able to utilize 100% of the CPU time, because of multiple processors or cores. The bulk of most games' executable code occurs in a single thread. It's highly likely that Guild Wars is no exception. A dual-core machine won't ever run a game at 100% CPU power unless that game evenly divides all processing power among multiple threads. You'll see more CPU utilization of these chips in the future, especially with Intel's new multi-core processors + next-gen consoles utilizing multi-core processors.

Don't assume that just because your machines work a certain way that everyone's works the same way. Different configurations will produce different results. My machine has a relatively slow processor with a somewhat faster vid card. As a result, my CPU is nearly always pegged to max with nearly any modern game (getting time for me to upgrade).

Mystra, sorry to get off topic. Try turning sound quality down to the minimum if you haven't done that yet. Since you're using a laptop, I'll bet all the 3D sound is being mixed in software. Or, you could turn off sound altogether with -nosound, just to see if that helps. It sounds like you've tried most everything else. Good luck!

Gw uses 90-99% cpu usage for me (never 100%, for some reason), and i get 15-30 fps... only because i have a crappy video card.

It could be that your laptop is overheating. Try using it on a different surface or blowing a fan at it.

Sound is down to lowest setting along with video. (And yes, I restarted game - hell, I've done so much updating, scanning, rebooting...)

Guild wars tech support wants me to resize my paging file to nothing, defrag, then make it huge (min twice my memory & max 4x my memory).

Sounds like hogwash to me but hey, I'm desperate.

Are you running in windowed mode? Switching from windowed to full screen and back often causes weird issues. Frame rates display as normal but the game is severely choppy. Usually changing districts or zoning fixes it.

Wrong, most games use close to 100% because they don't send idle commands like 'normal' programs do.

Oh and there is no pent5 - LOL!

Hockster, that I would have noticed. Besides, I always play in fullscreen.

I did notice my frps goes up to almost normal when there is NOTHING moving in my visual field, like facing a cliff or an expanse of terrain. Turn towards people/npcs or fire, etc, and then my frame rate drops faster than a brick.

What CPU did your Dell Inspiron 9200 come with, and what is its active core temp when running GW? Do you have any apps that can read your current core temp? Intel CPU's do normally throttle down when they run into overheating issues, causing some application lag.

My current system is a Dell XPS M1710 with Core-Duo T2500 (2ghz) and NVidia 7900GTX-512mb video, SP2, McAfee Antivirus + Firewall, etc. It reads 50% core utilization with GW and multiple IE browsers active. I have noticed some performance hits with the latest GW releases, though nothing as detrimental as what you're encountering.

Hyperthreading causes one physical processor to be seen as two to the operating system, and Guild Wars doesn't use multiple processors, so it ends up taking 50% of all CPU power at max (full usage on one core). Atleast my AMD3200+/1GB/GF6800GT eats 100% at all times when running GW, without any lag.

50% due to the two cores, GW uses 100% of core1, leaving core2 to 0% usage, thus 50% total CPU usage.

Seeing that it is an ATi card and knowing what poo the drivers for it are most of the time.. have you tried downgrading the drivers to some older ones, instead of just slapping the new ones?

I don't know why everyone is conversing on how to fix this issue at the individual level when it's clearly a server or routing issue. Why? Because so many people are experiencing similar problems all around the same time. This happened when Factions was in the works and close to release, and it's happening now.

There are over two million accounts (can't say players cause some are bots) and they all have to receive the updates. Also, not everyone plays every day. Heck, I'm in the middle of my 3rd month of not playing (I go online periodically to get updates), so it will be an ongoing issue for a little while. I suspect about another week and then about a week before and after the release of Nightfall we will be experiencing this kind of gameplay. I haven't been able to check this yet, but I'm suspecting there is a general geographic area (be it large or small) that is having these symptoms which could be because of bottlenecking, but who knows.

I'm over on the east coast (sort of) and I'm not experiencing any of these problems. Heck, I have a single-core cpu with a 6800GT agp card with a gig of RAM and I max GW at 94/95% with it mostly running at 80%. I'm running on a 3Mbps dsl connection, which is sucky quality and I want to go back to my other dsl connection, but I digress.

I've had this occur once or twice and all I could do was let it run it's course. If it's a server/other-than-you issue, there isn't much you can do. That's my 2¢.

- Riplox

Run the game with a -nosound flag added to the shortcut. See if that makes any difference. If it does then the sound card and/or drivers are being retarded. Probably not much can be done about that on a laptop.

If it doesn't change anything change the shortcut flag to -diag. Check the network section for any large ping responses on hops. Send that report in to Anet and see what they say about it.

Edit: Just noticed you're on a wireless router. Can you run a cable and try a wired connection? GW has been known to be very picky on wireless connections.

Since the PvP Nightfall weekend, I've had the same problem with heavy lags but its almost only happening when theres a lot of action on the screen...like in PvP or whenever many spell effects is triggered simultaneously.
I dont think it has to do with other people hogging bandwidth while downing updates from Anet. If it would, those lags would appear in other areas as well (when your idling or in small towns or during travel).

I play other games (mostly FPS's) and I run Oblivion, doom3, HL2 etc in 1600x1200 resolution with all settings maxed out and i get nice framerates in those games. Got 100/10 Mbit internet connection which is almost too much...

Still, Guild Wars is almost unplayable for me as it is. Annoying indeed.

System:
Win XP 64bit ed.
AMD 64 3800+ Venice @2,4GHz
2GB low latency DDR 3200 memory
Radeon X1900XT 512MB (catalyst 6,7)

Gw always has my processor (AMD opteron 146 @ 3ghz) running @ 90-99% in game, but as soon as it minimizes it stays at 100%, and i get a constant 75 fps unless there is network lag.
Pretty much every game i play utilizes all of the processor power it is just the way the game is designed.

Server issues won't cause the FPS to drop down, instead, game would still draw the frames as fast as before, but nothing would happen/happens at a delay, ie. lag.

But it could be related to the application? Could a change made in the executable cause issues with my framerate?

Well, I did what the tech support dudes asked with the page file, made zip, zero, nada change. My FRPS is still in the toilet.

And if I hadn't mentioned it before, if I open a box (like inventory, or talking to the merchant, etc) my game FREEZES for several seconds sometimes up to a minute and then unsticks finally and shows me the box.

I tried running it with the -nosound switch, and OMG it worked! And I had already adjusted my sound quality to it's lowest setting. Now, I'm by no means super smooth, and in towns it's still kinda touch and go, but I was able to watch my framerate run between 25-50 in the explorable areas and 15-30 in towns.

Anyone know of a thing I can do to improve this? because playing in silence is creepy...

Fine here's the technical specs then. Perhaps do some research before you comment.

Processor: Intel® Pentium® D Processor 950 (Pent series 5 as shown in sys properties for the laimen)
Mobo: ECS 945P-A
GPU: 2- x1800 crossfire ati
RAM: 1GB Dual-channel DDR2 533
Storage: 2-150 GB (RAID0) SATA2

Systems vary as to where the processor time is spread, no problem there, run taskman (ctrl+alt+del) and see this for yourself. Very few of the games (directx) *i've* played monopolize processor time, simple because it's not needed. The GPU pulls frames to render (using direct draw) with little to no effort for the cpu, no higher calc functions in buffering frame data. Many OpenGL apps however tend to split up buffer/cac functions because it's frame on demand calculating and will utilize processor time fully (like an x-box/360).

All programs utilize idle command functions in as much as a _WAIT status is utilized by frame rendering. It's a core sys function and not app specific for the most part. Plenty of apps are written to bypass many processor functions to utilize secondary hardware, such as buffers and frame renders.

As i mentioned, it's not normal for the higher end video cards to hog the processor and stall the system (especially after an alt-tab or minimize). If you were to write support, they would have you do several things to minimize proccesor overhead, including a clean defrag as mentioned, to lower system wait time during hard drive buffering.

Although ATi mobility x300 isn't a high end card, since the release of factions, my g/f's dell is simply bogged down, where as before there was a far less demand for processor time, also i mentioned the nvidia go 5200 system didn't take that sort of hit. 3 things have been altered since, Directx upgraded to 9.0c, video driver update (after the issue was noticed) and the release of factions. Those were my points as simply as i could express them.

Hyperthread isn't dual core nor a multi-processor setup. HT was designed to split up threads through a single core (hardware level, no system/app specifc changes needed). Dual core not being monopolized is mostly due to the operating system kernel. Dual core is fairly new and act's quite differently then multi-processor systems, hopefully with the release of vista and directx 10 apps will utilize processor time more efficiently.

Yes, ATI drivers/catalyst have taken a turn for the worse i think, very buggy.

I think this is the main issue and have seen it throughout the support threads. the new sound upgrade for gw has taken video frame rate and dumped it. Sound proccesing seems to really slam some systems and running eax with sound at max quality just screws with frame rate. I was getting 60+ and then changed the sound to max with eax and got no higher then 30-40 on a dual x1800 system with processor overhead running at 85%, very screwy. This one you can lay total blame on A-net/NCsoft.

As far as this last weekend (and even some last night) I was getting horribly unplayable lag (network lag). Inventory windows freezing, stalled movement, casting freeze, etc.. GW being a network reliant game, a laggy network will cripple the game and honestly, it didn't used to do that, you'd simply warp back a bit, now you're totally at a stand-still with dropped or waiting network packets. With this problem, pinning it down to a-net is a lot tougher, but my g/f who was playing right next to me, had very little lag at all, so I'm thinking it's more a server issue, then a network one, sorry a-net.

So to summarize:

1) It's not unusual nor neccessarily an issue in itself to have gw.exe run clost to 100% CPU usage.
2) Playing with the -nosound option greatly increases your performance and frame rate since A-net "upgraded" the sound in the game.
3) In addition, there are known issues with server side lag, especially when they do major updates (such as announce Nightfall and offer previews).

Am I missing anything here, for those who come a-reading this thread in search of their own answers later?

Where did I say that Hyperthreading is dual core or multiprocessor? I said HT causes one physical processor to be seen as two to the operating system, nothing about HT being actual two processors or cores, just that it looks like two processors to the system.

Would you mind trying the -mute instead of -nosound (saw Gaile mention this in a different thread) and reporting the results? Naturally, turning off sound will improve frame rate. It's sort of like saying that turning off rendering will improve the frame rate. The question is what is slowing down so much and why?

Apparently, instead of disabling the entire sound system, -mute processes the sounds as normal on the game client (I presume this means it loads and decompresses any sound effects/music), but does not send the output to DirectSound. I'm wondering if this option was put in to help them debug this problem. (?)

Any info you can report here may get viewed by the devs, and help them to fix whatever is going on with the low frame rate caused by the sound (it seems to just affect certain computers). I feel bad for these folks, because the sound is way better for me since the upgrades, but it would be really annoying to have to turn the sound off to get a decent frame rate.

oblivion only uses 80% of my system resource... and GW is no oblivion.

I have not had any lag or fps issues with any of the recent updates...

I also doubt its a sound-related issue...



Now, you say you have updated drivers... but are you sure you cleaned out the old ones properly? I didnt for like a year, and once I used Driver Cleaner Pro, I have had 40-60 FPS according to my Fraps fps meter.

Another issue, could be TOO MANY anti-spys they might hate each other and mess up the registry (win xp has registry issues)

Also port 80 is making your computer suseptable to hacks (although extremely unlikely) from what ive learned in my WC3 days... But im not going to pretend like i know what im tlaking about with the Firewalls.....

Hope you get it figured out... I konw from experience how frustrating fps can be when you kNOW it should be working.