To all the people getting terrible FPS...

I just solved my problem with my FPS.
After running on a X1900XTX and a PXE it was pretty ridiculous that I was getting 7fps average outside of town. Contig defraging, reinstalling and new drivers all did nothing to help.

Turns out this was all caused by my onboard sound.
I managed to fix the problem by lowering the sound quality within guild wars to "fastest", changing my system's sound hardware acceleration to "basic" and changing the system's sampling quality to "good".

Give it a shot, in any case, lemme know if it fixes your problems.

Edit: After playing through a bit more, the framerate does start to hover around the 23fps mark after a while. So try setting hardware acceleration to "none", or as a last measure add -nosound to your command line.

This actually does work. Where as I've yet to have any problems with GW slowing down, I did with Scarface. After I installed Scarface and tried to play it, the frame rate was atrocious. Sliding the sound quality down fixed it in a jiffy though. If you're having problems with low fps in GW then give this a try.

Yeah i lowered my in-game sound quality, seem to have fixed SOME of my fps problem.

you have an X1999XTX and your using on board sound?

jesus christ

Lemme guess, your using a pentium 2.4A

How do I do this?

For Windows: Control Panel > Sound and Audio Devices > Under the 'Audio' tab, 'Sound Playback' > Advanced > Under 'Performance' tab

RUN => DXDIAG => Sound

Yah, I thought it was ridiculous when my
AMD X2 4400+
7800GT
2 gigs of ram
system was having lag spikes in GW. I run on board sound, and this fixed it!

Just tried this, thanks, should work.

will try this when i get home.
I have a AMD 2.2ghz , 1gig RAM , and radeon x850xt and getting terrible "graphics" lag, all the time. I dont remember getting this when GW prophecies was released.
it seems to be related to graphics because FPS goes up greatly when i walk next to a wall and turn the camera looking into the wall (reducing things to render on the screen?)

i have tried defrag, i have tried overclocking CPU, RAM and gpu. no noticable increases there (only GW getting unstable , sometimes crashing into bluescreen)
I have also tried different graphics drivers, (ATI catalyst both old and new versions. currently running Omegadrivers) no noticable increases or decreases there.

I have ran anti virus and anti-spyware. found nothing.

I do use onboard sound, and never thought it could be the culprit. I can run Halflife 2, DOOM 3, FEAR and even oblivion on better and more stable framerates than GW

another strange thing i noticed is that anti aliasing settings on GW appears to have no impact on framerate (its terrible on every setting) , i have tried lowering other graphical settings with no result. V sync both on and off (here i notice an small increase when turned off)

really need help here. I have some suspicion against my MB northbridge chip. it might be overheating (i measure temps up to 40c, which SOULD NOT be too much ) as my northbridge fan broke , and i replace it with a passive zalman cooler a few months ago.

edit : not even lowering screen resolution seem to increase fps much (only a little). FYI , my avarage FPS , when idling in a not too busy town is 20-30. in Kaineng center fps stuggles even more, and in PVP battles its similar to kaineng center, which barely is playable, lag spikes sometime freeze me altogether for a sec or two (timing skills is sometimes out of the question), which gets frustrating, as im sure you understand...

why dont u ppl with 500000mhz CPUs dont buy pci sound card like SB Audigy.. helps a lot

Probably because some of us don't care in the least about sound?

Sound engines still live in "sprite age" so really not worth to spend money on sound card unless you have good speakers and value sound quality. Most games have heavily compressed sounds like MP3 128kbps so good analog signal quality doesn't matter much anyway. AFAIK, there isn't even any sound hardware which can calculate sound wave behaviour on-fly.

With "sprite age" I mean that sounds are mostly pre-calculated "images" just like 100% of graphics were before. EAX, 3D-sound, etc. they are just fakes. Like post-processed "2D-sounds".

Compatibility issues are probably the strongest reason to buy a sound card at the moment.

They make em. They cost couple grand, but they do make em. Mainly for Radio automation computers, as they need to be able to do a lot without skipping, hiccupping, or causing any other problem that couple distort the audio or take the station off the air.

M<><

works to an extent, gave me +5~7 FPS, but thats just not good enough, man nightfall is so demanding.

Because a lot of people really don't care about the sound. And if you are playing with a $40 or less set of stereo speakers, you really won't hear any difference between an on-board Realtek sound chip and an X-Fi Elite Pro. And if you are playing with a USB headset (or most headphones), you really loose any improvement over on-board.

In normal use I use an Audigy card as well, but have had to remove it from my game system due to driver issues with Vista. So until Creative Labs get's it's act together, I am also stuck with on-board sound.

My audio recording system currently has a Turtle Beach Montego, because it has a superior MIDI engine then the Creative cards. In recording, it really does not make much difference, as long as it has a low "sound floor". But because I wtill work with a lot of MIDI files (mostly for background music and "bumpers"), MIDI still matters to me. Most people stopped worrying about MIDI quality years ago.

Plus a lot of your current systems are really lacking in PCI slots. So until more companies start to make cards that use PCIe, a lot of people do not have room for more then 1 or 2 PCI cards. What somebody really needs to do is make a high quality sound card that uses PCIe 4x (or even 1x). I am tired of looking at all of the new systems with those slots, and no cards to put into them.

I always have -nosound on, because I'm either listening to my Japanese music (ftw) or talking on Vent or TS. And the only time my fps gets below 60 is when my full graphics with 8x AA and 8x AIO Filtering is a bit too much for my comp to handle at 76 fps (my standard rate), which is only in a few NF areas. NVidia 7900GT ftw.

But yeah, I have onboard sound since I don't give a crap about it.