The System
AMD 3200+
Abit KN8 Ultra with onboard nForce4 Audio
1GB PC3200 RAM
nVidia 7600GT
AGM 1440x900 Widescreen LCD
The problem
Things are fine. I can peruse the cities and towns and have beautiful frame rates, even with 4xAA turned on. Rates hover in the 40s with people on screen, and as high as 200 when I'm staring at a wall. That's what I expect.
I go outside of any outpost or town, and encounter my first foes are when the issues start. I slay them. They die. So do my framerates. They NEVER return to pre-foe levels. They will not climb past 40fps no matter what I'm looking at or where I am. Looking straight into a wall, or striaght into the sky at the exact same spot that gave me 220fps pre-foe will result in 40fps post-foe.
This happens in Prophecies, Factions, and in Nightfall.
Things I have tried
- Uninstalling and reinstalling drivers. No effect.
- Defaulted my system clock speeds back to default. No effect.
- Overclocked them back. No effect.
- Defragged my .dat file. No effect.
- Made sure nothing else was running in the background. No effect.
- Disabled the nView enhancements to the game, such as Anisotropic filtering being forced. No effect.
- Redownloaded the client. No effect.
- Turned off 3D sound. No effect.
- Monitored temperature levels of the 7600GT for overheating. Did not occur.
- Monitored temperature levels of the 3200+ for overheating. Did not occur.
My Thoughts
Well I'm plum out of thoughts. I don't know where to start looking next. This does not happen on friends' systems who also have Guild Wars that I've asked. The system *can* handle the game just fine. It shows that by running at very high framerates until I meet my first foe. And then the frame rate never exceeds ~40.
Are there any known compatibility issues between GW and hardware that have yet to be fixed? Are there any software packages that when installed can interfere with GW's performance, such as virus scanners, copy protections shemes, etc?
It does not act as if the hard drive is being hit for cache, or that the system is "busy". The frame rates just never elevate back up, regardless of the video settings in GW or in the global driver settings. AA can be cranked or off, AF the same, screen resolutions lowered. The result is the same: a fast performance before my first foe is reached. And then the game basically plays like dung, with rates dropping to 12 in town and never climbing past 40 again.
Any thoughts to help me out?