Random FPS drops

Good evening!

English is not my first language, so you have to excuse if you find any mistakes

Anyway... Lately I've had lots of FPS drops. Normally my system run Guild Wars at around 60 FPS with no problems, but now it drops to less than 10 randomly. I haven't figured out if it happend while I'm doing anything particulary, because it feels so random.

And, yes, I have tried to reinstall GW. I am doing it now for the second time. My system is the following:

Amd Athlon 64 3500+
1024 MB RAM
nVidia GeForce 6800 GT 256 MB


I have the latest drivers from nVidia. Both motherboard and graphic card.

Could anyone help me with this? Maybe I have to take the hard step and reformat...


Torstein

It happens to me as well....I've been playing GW for a year and up until the Canthan New Year weekend I was getting about 40 FPS with Average Ping of around 50 ms. Now my game regularly locks up and I get this...



I use -image before playing when I know there's a new update, de-frag my drive regularly, and I know it's not my vid card, memory, processor or broadband.....

Hi, i have this annoying problem too.

my FPS is ok at 50-70 in explorables and around 20 in large towns. However at the beginning of a battle or when some action happens, FPS will drop incredibly to only 3-5 for some seconds before going up again.

It always happens during battle even if i reduce the audio quality to the min for my Sigmatel intergrated audio.

I'm using a ati x550 128MB card and 512 RAM.

This could be caused by a number of things. The two most likly be causes are:
Since you've started playing guild wars you've installed programs on your computer which run in the background and take up your ram. The sudden drop here would be caused by your computer making use of its page file which would cause your performance to drop drastically. The most likely background programs that can eat up performance are anti-virus software. (mcafee, norton, etc) Just turn it off when you play.

And for you Yol, If this does not seem to be the case then you may need to defragment your gw.dat file. I defragment my computer about once every 2 weeks religiously and it my gw.dat was still in 968 fragments.
Read more about it here:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10037429
Don't bother with Power Defragmentor GUI just download Contig and and do exactly as it says in the post. With 968 fragments it took about 12-20 minutes to defragment. It only took me once to get it down to one fragment, but you may have to do it several times to get it at least to 5 fragments. Reinstall the game will be the equivalent, but once you sign on again and re-download the updates, maps, and other essentials those will become fragmented.

Oh and Torswin, your english is superb. Maybe one or two words left out, but your grammar and vocabulary are beyond that of plenty of people who have english as their first language.

You are not alone.. i have tried everything i can to figure out the problem. I reinstalled guilwars twice. on two different disks. with and without the -image switch. tried every driver there is for my nvidia 8800gts 640mb card. even running dual boot with vista to test the latest drivers.
defragged all disk several times.. all for nothing... got horrible lag..

All other and newer games runs absolutley fine. (bf2142 nwn2 oblivion etc etc.. and they run perfect with no lagg att all.)

Im gonna stop playing gw very soon if they dont fix the lagg soon...(im playing on euro servers and have a good 6mb dsl line.)

PS! ser du e fra tromsø du å :P må være nåkka med linjen fra norge. æ kjøre bluecom men vet att personer med telenor har samme problem.

(hes from same place from in norway..)

-nosound switch gives me +30 fps

Ok, i don't know what I'm doing right, but I'm having little or no lag at all... I just went a week without lag...

Let me guess...onboard audio CODEC? That's why I'm not a big fan of onboard audio - it's typically just a CODEC and all of the audio processing is done in the driver, which means your CPU is doing all of the audio signal processing. IMHO it's worthwhile to buy a sound card that has its own DSP.

Hey,

check your video drivers..

disable some graphics it worked for me if only my pc worked now! (cant play guildwars

Ive been having this problem, i have 512MB of ram atm, just ordered another 1GB, GW was always fine before nightfall, but i think the game is more needy now.

I also get much better FPS with no sound, could i solve this by adding an external soundcard rather than using my onboard one?

I've been having some random FPS drops lately too, even after using -contig on the Gw.dat file and other things. It seems to be related to the lag issue the end of the Canthan New Year's festival left behind.

Not much to do but hope ANet fixes it.

For me, I can play an hour or two before the drop happens. Then the game is highly unplayable until I restart GW.

I have the same problem, when I enter a town my computer will freeze for XX seconds depending on how many people are there, as well as when loading into an explorable area. I found that it happened when the new year's event started. I've never had any problems before, my FPS will go to 1-2 and I'll get pings of 20,000+. I defrag my harddrive about once a month or so or whenever I see I need to, and I also did many of the things that are suggested like defraging the gw.dat file and reinstalling the client. But for me it didn't improve my performance at all, if anything it made it worse

Nightfall is definitely more needy than the last two previous chapters, i'm guessing they made some changes to the game engine for better rendering or something like that.

Anyways 512MB ram is a little low for GW period, especially if you have resource consuming tasks like antiviruses and firewall running in the background while you play. 1GB+ runs GW a lot better.

Sudden drops in FPS has been going on here too. I experience it when entering crowded towns, battling a big mobs, and even just running across an empty area that I had cleared of mobs. I know my system can handle the game, more than a year of playing. My gw.dat file is not fragmented, I keep an eye on it. My dialup connection is the same, won't even start game unless at 52. I shut off all background programs except firewall, always have done this for all online games.

One thing I have noticed though; I run 3 accounts, 2 of them are Prophesies only and the 3rd has all 3 chapters. Far less lag, fps drops, on the 2 Prophesies only accounts. Don't know why, but that is the case.

Well i un-installed ATI CCC and that gave me a big performance boost, also installed the extra 1GB of RAM, its smoother than the fonz now.

I get a mini lagspike in the inventory window I never got until recently. I think it's the rendering of the top four portraits or your character that causes it, but I never had it before all these other errors came up.

It's certainly possible you'd see an improvement. My CPU usage dropped quite a bit when I installed an X-Fi Fatal1ty.

You could get an Audigy for around $30, or an X-Fi XtremeGamer for $100. The Fatal1ty is too expensive for what you get IMO, although it's a good card. Creative is pretty much the only one left selling stand-along cards, I think.

nah, i'm using creative x-fi

Is it the one with an onboard DSP or the one that does software audio processing?

it is real x-fi (xtrememusic), not one of those new budget cards which don't even have a x-fi processor.

Not sure the sound is the problem, especially on the Euro servers. If you check the network news on the official site, it says they have been having latency and packet loss problems.

Over the last week, I've seen it get a lot worse, almost to making the game unplayable in any serious way.

Tonight I noticed my ping going up and down from to around 25k at times and the FPS varying anywhere from 10 to 60.

I used http://www.speedtest.net/ to try my connection, and I get nothing like these problems on their tests.

I can only conclude Anet have serious server issues