Guild Wars Lagging On Specified Requirements

Hello.

I recently purchased a PCI video card and decided to try out Guild Wars. I read the system requirements and decided to give it a try

Right at the very begining of the game title screen, you already can see that their is a major lag. It gets even worse when the game is loaded. I created a character and started from the very begining. I have trouble moving around for the framerate is ridiciously slow on me

This is the machine i have

Compaq Presario
2.6Ghz Celeron Processor
768MB RAM
Visiontek RADEON X1300 PCI 256MB

I put down all the lowest settings i could on graphics option and its still choppy. It is so choppy that it isnt even enjoyable to play

The thing is, is that I installed the game to an external hard drive. Could this be the case?

Please let me know what I can do to improve game performance. I've read so many great things about this game that I'm dying to try it out. PLEASE HELP!

I don't know anyone that ran anything from an external HD, thought they are best used for storage or backup (TAPES FTW!)

On those specs, the game should run good.


Edit: finding out online: its not advisable to run programs from external HDs.

Well without knowing more about the specififc instance, I would liekly say it is that you have it installed to the external HD, as Stemmin states the game should run fine on those specs, Im not familar with the Vid Card, but if its new, probably all right. Even tho you wouldnt think it should make that big of a difference maybe it is(the external HD). Is it possible for you to try to install to the local HD. Another thing I just thought of is drivers, if this is a recentley installed Vid Card are you up to date with the latest drivers, not the ones packaged with the hardware, they can be dreadfully out of date by the time it gets too your door. So those are the first two places I would start. I'm sure someone a little more technically adept will have more for you too think about. For Drivers you want to go to Radeons site, they should have one, Nvidia does Im sure they do to, sholdnt be too hard too find.

Well..

I do have the latest drivers installed, so that shouldnt be the problem. I have my chipset drivers updated as well. I don't know what could be wrong. First I thought it may be the processor, but I don't think thats the case

I have a demo of Doom 3 installed on my external HD and it runs fine.

I guess the only possible thing could be the installation to the external HD. I think I will try to install it to my internal HD to see if anything changes. If that doesnt solve the problem, I hope someone more technical may know how to solve it . Very Frustrating..

BTW.. All my other games work fine but Guild Wars.. Pretty weird

Unless your nexternal harddrive is ESATA or FireWire then you shouldn't have guild wars installed on it. The game can and will saturate the bandwidth that a USB harddrive has and will cause horrible lag. I do not recommended running Guild Warson any external harddrive due to this. Running Guil Wars on a separate internal hard drive is possible (thats wht I do).
Reinstall Guild Wars on the main harddrie inside your computer, that will cure the problem.

Mega Mouse

Ahh. I see what you're saying. Yea, I was reading the specs on my external hd and indeed it is'nt firewire. Infact, here is the link to what I have. Its not 500GB's though. I have a 250GB version

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/produ...32&language=en

So, as you say, external hard drives are not recommended for games, due to the bandwidth usage. So basically these external hd's are more for just pictures, videos, and backing up program installers and of that sort

So you think I will really notice a difference if i install it to the internal HD? I hope so. As soon as I get off work, I'm going to go try that out.

Hope things work out for you, Gw is agreat game Im sure you will enjoy.

Yea.. well so far this is what I've done.

I uninstalled from the external drive, and installed into my internal drive. It seems to be just as sluggish as before. What I did notice is that in the background of the game, something seems to be downloading. On the title screen of guild wars, theirs a major lag. I get 7 FPS, but as downloading progressed it dropped to 5. Is this normal? Will FPS rise as downloading progresses? By the way, this caught to my attention by a lighting icon on the bottom right of the screen

I'm wondering if overclocking could be an option to fixing this solution? What do you guys think?

I also tried playing army of heroes demo last night along with Quake 4 Demo.. They both seemed a little sluggish as well, but not as bad as GW.

Maybe my PC is just too old to be playing todays games. Why did I even bother buying a video card.

Another problem may be the lack of bandwidth throughput on your PCI card, they only have 133MB/s transfer rate (266MB/s on a 64bit PCI bus). Couple that with you using an external hard drive and that could easily be causing your problems.

As an example, my PCI-e card can transfer 4GB/s.

if you have the Lightingbolt it means you are streaming downloads...this will cause lag in play. Try copying your shortcut to start GW and put the -image tag after it...

should look something like

"C:\program files\guildwars\gw.exe" -image

be sure to take it off after it has completely updated your game either that or create two shortcuts one with the -image the other with out. Also i noticed u have a celeron processor...that doesn't help anything at all. Do a quick search here about switches.... like the ^^ -image i think there are others you can try to speed things up as well...

Yea..

I'm having a feeling that the celeron isnt helping me out too much either
I'm pretty sure I have enough RAM. Maybe if I had a Pentium it would run smoother. I may try other steps to improve as in one of these latest threads mentions, But I think im pretty much stuck out of playing GW until i get a new PC.

I'll aslo try to overclock my video card but i doubt a couple frames more would make a difference

I'm sure if I had a new PC and threw my RADEON X1300 in it, games would run much smoother. I don't think my video card's crap. I think the processor is. No more celeron purchases for me