Ati radeon 9800 256mb Dell Inspiron Laptop bad fps :(

hey everyone:

Im having some problems running guild wars on my laptop, im not sure if its either really bad lag or my system, but i get really bad fps even when all the settings are on low and the slider is all the way to the left for best visual quality. I have high speed cable internet, and i have another computer that i play guild wars on that is a amd 1.7, 512 mb ram, 128mb graphics card that runs guild wars just fine, so I know it isn’t my internet connection

Ive tried:

Defraggin gw.dat, the frag ratio originally was high, but I defragged and nothing helped

I also found a posting about turning the quality down about the audio, and I turned the quality down and that helped a little.


I’m using the most updated driver for the graphics card from dells website, and i used dells diagnostic software and it reported that there were no problems. The bad fps is so bad I cant even play on the computer, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Does submitting a support ticket really do anything?

I have guild wars factions and nightfall and they both run poorly. In the past ive tried uninstalling guild wars factions and reinstalling factions, but it didn’t help.

Thanks everyone for your help



Dell Inspiron Laptop
WinXp Pro
P4 3.4
512 mb ram
ati mobility radeon 9800 256mb

One thing that I see is a bit of low system ram. If you have the money upgrade to 1 or 2 gigs of ram in it. I also use a laptop but I get pretty good FPS on mine (in the range of 25+ depending on the area). Mine is not a top of the line gaming laptop (don't want to spend a fortune on something hat will be outdated in a couple months), but it does decent. Here are my specs for comparison:
HP Pavilion dv8315 laptop
Windows XP Pro
AMD Turion 64 1.8ghz cpu
1024 megs of system ram (1 gig)
ATI Radeon Express 200m with 128 megs of dedicated ram (seperate from system ram)
2 hard drives: Main 100 gigs secondary 120 gigs

This is not top of the line if you go per gaming rig settups but it plays Guild Wars fine.

Mega Mouse

I have a Dell inspiron 1200 with onboard graphics, which runs guild Wars fine. I had to roll back my graphics driver to get it to work properly tho. Check game compatibility with your Graphics card maker.

My PC Specs:
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 3582MB RAM ( 4Gb RAm here )
Hard Disk: 320Gb space
Page File: 338MB used, 5125MB available
Card name: RADEON X600 256MB HyperMemory
Manufacturer: ATI Technologies Inc.
Chip type: RADEON X600 (0x5B62)
DAC type: Internal DAC(400MHz)
Display Memory: 256.0 MB
Current Mode: 1280 x 1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)

I'VE DONE:

1)Install/reinstall GW
2)DYNAMIC IP RESET FROM MY ISP NUMEROUS TIME
3)HOPING TO USE "STATIC WAN IP FROM THE ROUTER" BUT FAILED TOO...
4)FORWARDED PORT USING 6116,6112, 6112-6118 AT THE ROUTER
5)ADWARE/SPYWARE/VIRUS-REMOVED CLEANED, DONE IN SAFE MODE
6)DID CONTIG...PERFECT TO 1
7)UPGRADED MY ATI RADEON WITH THE LATEST ONE(AS OF TODAY)
8)CCLEANER & REGISTER CLEANER - IN SAFE MODE
9) -heapsize ? TRIED -heapsize 2Gb WORTH OF RAM
10)GUI POWER DEFRAG? DONE IN SAFEMODE


WAITING FOR GUILDWAR SUPPORT REPLY EVEN NOW..SIGH..TOLD ME TO READ ALL THE REPEATATIVE STEPS THAT I'VE DONE BEFORE I READ THEM

I'M AN IT GEEK,THE ONLY IT THINGY THAT I'M WEAK AT IS PROGRAMMING..THE REST ARE EASY

AGREED WITH DETHEROC, ITS THE ANET NETWORKING ISSUE/ROUTING CONFIGURATION


BTW IF I CANT GET IT FIXED BY THE WEEKEND..THERE WILL BE MAJOR HIGH END SELLING NEXT WEEK..CONSIDERING QUITING ( HAPPENED TO ME WITH MY PAST MMORPG )

p/s: Even upgrading your RAM and Graphic Driver wont solve it..trust me...

Feel Free to Flame my 2cents...

Another thing that I forgot to mention is that at certian times of the day there is an immense number of players playing Guild Wars. At these times there can and will be very bad lag due to the sheer number of players online. This acn cause you to have very low FPS issues also, try to log on at a time when there is not so many players online to see if that helps out. I also have a gaming tower that see's low frame rates at high usage times due to lag. It is not as some people think the laptops fault, but the number of players online that is causing it. Not much that can be done to eliminate the lag at certian times, but upgrading your ram will help not only Guild Wars but will also speed up your computer overall. Doing this will create moer headroom for windows to operate without having to use the paging file so much. For a bit of info the paging file is a bit of hard drive space that windows uses when it runs out of or low on main system memory which can slow a computer down. The more main system memory that a computer has the faster it will run, due to the slow nature of the hard drive seek and access times.



Mega Mouse

Definitely more RAM wouldnt hurt, like Megamouse says; also, I;d probably try thr video driver downloads from ATI itself, not Dell (I know that Microsoft's ATI drivers hurt more than help--I had that problem. When I downloaded the drivers from ATI, my system ran better)...