Guild Wars FPS loss when minimizing in Vista

That's really interesting.

I don't think anyone running "Home" has this problem. It's all other versions of Vista (e.g. Business, Ultimate). That may be a key indicator - but we don't have a sufficient sample size to be sure yet.

I reformatted my computer and downloaded all the latest Microsoft updates and drivers again. Installed Guild Wars again and the problem still there. I really think it is ArenaNet is lacking the support for Windows Vista in there games. They got to fix this.

They've now replied to me with the KB articles in question:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194/en-us

These have just been released, so should be on Windows Update today/tomorrow. I'm at work so haven't tested them yet, I'll let you know tonight when I get home and fire them up.

My guess is that ArenaNet are trying to fix this (they're going for Vista certification), but it's a thorny problem to track down because it's inconsistent (note some people in this thread have it, and some don't). The trick's going to be working out where the problem is.

They work very well: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10184517

I installed them a while ago and got a nice little performance boost.

I have the same low fps problem like other vista users have. I can't really tell if the updates give me some performance boosts. And it definitely did not fix the fps loss after alt-tab or minimizing.

Vista Home Premium
Intel Core 2 Duo T7600
2 GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce Go 7600

I've just installed them and they don't fix my alt-tab issue either. I don't know if my system's faster or not, but I do know that Guild Wars wasn't generally starved for resource so it might be hard to be objective about that.

Ah well - back to PlayNC, I'll let them know it's not a fix.

Zang. Ok, we've now got our first Home Premium user, so Home users aren't immune. All respondents are using nVidia cards though. I think this is narrowing it down some.

What drivers are you using Entity?

I'm currently using driver 165.01 from laptopvideo2go.com. Just upgrade from 158.51 too.

Cool as. My laptop is running some 98.xx driver I think, a really ancient thing that's the "latest" WHQL offered by Windows Update (the previous HP driver was 95.xx I think).

I'd love to get some more reports from the people whom it's working for to see if their drivers work ok - it's possible that only newer drivers are having this problem, and regressing back to the stone age might fix it

That post at the nZone forums is posted by me. (See user name)

The 'problem' isnt limited to Home.

Its also not a problem with GW. The 'problem' is with Vista itself when you have Aero running. Aero makes use of you GPU, both the RAM and the GPU itself, and when you start a game fullscreen Vista will handoff exclusive use of the GPU to GW...now you Alt-Tab, Aero kicks back in and grabs part of the GPU RAM and processing cycles which slows GW down...then you Alt-Tab back into fullscreen GW but this time Vista does NOT release the GPU fully to GW.

I expect the solution to this will have to come from Microsoft because it looks to me to be a result of the way the OS handles the handoff.

PS: For clarification, GW runs perfectly under Vista with performance close to XP when you use the latest drivers, just check Nvidia or ATi's websites for the latest versions.

That's a really interesting theory, I will try it out tonight when I get home.

It's possible this is the case. I have my doubts about it being entirely not related to GW, because I don't get this problem with other games on my system, but the root cause may be correct.

Have you confirmed this yourself by getting the issue with Aero and then making it go away by disabling Aero?

On other news, I had PlayNC ask me for my DXDiag and to run an antispyware check on my system, which I'll also do tonight. They look to be taking this a bit more seriously now, and trying to problem solve it with me - I'm pretty happy with their approach now.

This is also true - when GW starts and before I minimise, the performance is actually better than under XP. It's smoother, smaller pauses at texture swap and a slightly higher average frame rate.

I can test this easily because I have two identical machines, one is my wife's and one is mine - we both play GW. She's not gone to Vista yet, and still has XP; the hardware is otherwise the same (down to the vendors of the graphics cards). Hers is just a little bit slower than mine, and suffers from some interesting network effects I don't get. Vista is generally a betterment, except for this one annoying issue on minimise

I dunno if this is right, but if I remember correctly this vista fps issue began with the massive update Anet had back in April, along with the new audio engine thing?

Dunno sorry. I wasn't running Vista on my machine until much more recently (I installed it I think in June, or maybe late May).

Hyper's (according to the nZone thread) tried disabling his audio drivers completely so that should have ruled that out.

I've now confirmed that this is not the case for me. Disabling Aero has no effect on the problem with Guild Wars on my system.

I am dissapointed with Windows Vista, After installing Vista Ultimate i found my FPS has dropped to a constant <10 with "Fastest" settings in game. I can't tell whether it is lack of support or Vista itself..

Nasty

I'd recommend opening a ticket with PlayNC - the more information they get on Vista problems the easier it will be to narrow down the culprit.

If it's Vista, they're in a better position to lobby MS for a fix than you or I

Has their been any complaints with this problem with ATI users or is it just nvidia users? Also I called anet support up and this guy didn't turn me down by saying we cant do anything for you becuase your using Vista. He had me disable lots of things and run me through their tests to see if it was the cause and try the new 2 microsoft updates and no luck. He said other users have contacted them with the same problem but he said the number has not been big enough for immediate action. He said that they are looking into it though.

Hopefully it will be fixed when GW:EN come out.

Just nVidia users as far as I can tell, which points fairly strongly towards a driver problem. It's really hard to determine though as (and ANet basically said this to you) the sample size isn't large enough to do anything with just yet.

EotN is fully Vista supported, and ANet are seeking Vista certification - so like you, I hope this will be resolved shortly.

Well i havent noticed any drop on fps when i minimize gw on vista.
My specs:
AMD x2 4600
2GB Ram
Geforce 6800GS
Vista Ultimate 64bits

Before, i would notice not a drop in fps, but vista taking a full minute switching application, but that disapeared when i got another gig of ram, so i supose it was just my low access speed to virtual memory.

Ricciardi