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

reinstalled my client due to lagginess and totally lagging out while doing missions. the lag seemed to improve a tiny bit but now Im getting heavy pc lag, stuttering, pauses up to 5 seconds while running, merchanting, storage agent, etc... its annoying as hell. also ever since ive had gw installed its used 100% cpu.

amd athlon 64 3500+ 2.2ghz
1gb corsair xms twinx ram
geforce 7800gt
asus a8n nforce4 sli mobo

blah, always something

First a lot of players are having this problem not just a few. Sometimes it is caused by the sound beign set wrong and other times it is caused by the player trying to run the game with tioo much eye candy. I personaly have a slight problem with lag and choppiness on my laptop, but this is mainly caused by my connection at work and not the laptop seeing as I get no lag or choppiness at home when I have my laptop connected into my wired router on DSL.
My suggestion is to open the ingame options menu, go to graphics and have Guild Wars auto detect the settings that should work well with your computer. After doing that find out what the native resolution of your monitor is (sometimes it is on the monitor and sometimes you will have to go to the manufacturers website to get it). Set the game's resolution to use that setting anything more can cause problems especialy with LCD monitors. Open the sound portion of the options panel and lower the quality to fastest and turn off hard ware acceleration. Sometimes you will have to go into the windows control panel to turn off hardware acceleration for the sound also. these things should fix most if not all problems.
Another thing to try, if you are on DSL or Cable, unplug your modems power cord while your computer is off, wait around 39 seconds or more then plug it back in. wait for it to re-aquire the link then turn on your computer. What this does is it clears out the modems internal memory and resets the ip that it has (I got this advice straight from Bellsouth's DSL help hot-line).
Doing these should help out a lot. The only things that should be running in the background is Windows important processes, your antivirus, and your firewall.
I have experience periods of slowdown during a scan by my antivirus and whenever the firewall and anvti virus update themselves. I just let them go and do what I can to continue playiing.
An other thing at high usage times, everyone may experience lag issues. This cannot be helped do to the limited bandwidth that is available. I hope that everyone can use these suggestions.

Mega Mouse

This is for the original poster, go to the maunfacturers website that made your computer and get the latest drivers for your laptop. The drivers from the manufacturer will work better than the Omega drivers because the manufacturer tests their drivers for stability where they do not test the Omega drivers. Also if something goes wrong with your laptop the manufacturer may not honour the warranty if they find out that you used unsupported video drivers.

i have been experincing the same choppy/crappy 5 framrates as well on my desktop. I have the latest catalyst and drivers for my ati radeon 9800 pro which is 6.11. Most of the time when i run gw the cpu usage is always 100% and I have played nwn2 and diamond dont experince as much lag online. the only place where i dont get lag in gw is in my guild hall .

Pc Specs

Dell demension 4600
Microsoft xp home edtion 2002 service pack 2
proccesor: intel pentium 4 2.80 ghz
Grahpics card: ati radeon 9800 pro
1.00gb of ram

I dont seem to be lagging anywhere except when I come to big cities and the usual mass of people are dancing or whatever :P. And since I have a HT cpu its at ~50% whole time. So basically I drop from 55-75 FPS down to 15-19 in those areas. Still playable though unlike issues in this thread.

-perf -nosound -heapsize=512000 <-- I run with these set

PC:
XP Pro
Intel Pentium 4 2.8 HT Northwood
1GB Ram
ATi X850 Pro AGP

You do realize that any open port makes you open to the execution of malicious code. Port 80 is a standard http port that is required for web browsing. Having it open to the outside world will make little difference in the amount of protection you will receive since your browse has to process in the bound stream of data regardless to render the pages. In other words having port 80 open or not makes you no less open to the execution of malicious code.


To the OP

I want to go ahead and say even though you have this narrowed down to sound that it is likely to still be an issue of heat. Depending on the age of your hardware, the fans will over time loose the ability to adequately cool your CPU and GPU. There is as it seems to me a lack in innovation on the ways that are used to pipe heat out of PC based laptop systems. I have gone through 4 laptops in 3 years under warranty even with compliant Cooling plates that are made for laptops. One chocked and fried the CPU, one Chocked and fried half of The GPU killing all 3d acceleration and OGL support, and so on and so forth. If you have the ability to have the machine serviced and cleaned or the ability to check it out on your own, which is actually not as terrifying as some people make it out to be, I would certainly look into it. As well as video driver rollbacks which i am assuming by now you have probably already tried.

Now as for sound, I must say most OEMs System manufacturers are just horrible at providing software level driver support. Most user have to resort to finding projects that are supported by the hardware OEM like ATI. (e.g. Omega, these drivers are recognized by ATI) Its highly likely you are using audio drivers that are as old as Windows XP is. You will probably have to hunt high and low to find a new audio codec for your built-in sound, best of luck with that. My only suggestion would be to make a problem report with guildwars and be sure to tell them what type of built-in sound device you believe you have.


Psycho as I have said before and I will say again, Your processing times be it GPU or CPU are greatly effected by a great many number of things. Simply having a great internet connection for instance does not guarantee your ability to have a clean connection to your intended route. As with many games especially those that are FPS you have the option of looking at a server list and selecting a server that provides you with the optimal ping and packet-loss. With guildwars, you are automatically assigned by region to the data center that the client and/or servers deem to be your best bet. In other words you have no control over what data-center you connect to much less if that data center provides you with the optimal connection conditions.


Lastly I can't find the quote but I would also like to note that Updates and streamed data to my understanding do not come from the game servers but from a separate dedicated site that provides only the patches and streamed content. Though since its only my understanding I could be entirely wrong.