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

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.