Low FPS

Hey there,

I've been having some trouble with GW and have been ever since I really got the game. My FPS seems to be horibbly low 99% of the time. The odd time it might jump up to 20ish but most of the time it likes to hang around 5 - 7 and its cracking me up. I've had advice from different people in the guild/alliance/friends list on this matter and so far none of them has really made the impact I was hoping for.

My config:

Windows XP Home Edition SP2
Inter(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00Ghz
1.00 GB of RAM
Ati Radeon 9250 256MB (I know its old but it shouldn be this bad)
40GB Hard Drive
2MB Broadband Connection


Im currently running the game on the lowest graphics and sound settings.
Anti Alising is off.
I have just updated the drivers of my graphics card.
I have half of my hard drive space left (20GB).
The internet connection is fine, I dont lag my FPS is just low.
I have defragmented the computer within the last month.

Any suggestions as to why ive got such a low FPs and also on how to improve it?

Any help is welcome and appreciated.

Thanks

Wakka

Your video card is a very low end card, that explains why you should get around 20 fps max. As for the 5-7 fps that seems low even ofr that kind of video card.

When you defragmented your computer, did oyu use the windows defragmenter or a third party defragmenter like disckeeper? The wondows defragmenter is likely to skip the Gw.dat file due to it's size.

There's also the bad lagg try rhis sticky that has steps on how to defrag the Gw.dat file without defragmenting the whole HDD.

I used Windows defragmenter. I will try that now.

I have defragmented the Gw.dat file, it went from around 4400 frags down to 2 lol but this has only really a difference whenever I start the game its a lil smoother. My FPS is still rock bottom.

This really should not be happening, and I would really appreciate it if anyone could help me at all?

Thanks

Your video card isn't just old, it was already quite low-end the day it was released. The thing has a lower theoretical pixel fillrate than most integrated chips, including the Intel GMA 950.

You might be able to squeeze out some extra rendering speed by turning down the render quality settings in ATI's control panel to the minimum level, but don't expect more than about a 20% speedup, and by then the textures will be blurry enough to remind you of the PS2 (or the Nintendo 64, lol).

A 20% speed up would be lovely. How exactly do I go about turning down the render quality settings?

The game actually recomends the 9000 so I dont see why you shouldn get at least a smooth frame rate with the 9200?

Make sure you aren't using Anti-aliasing, Post-processing Effects, or High-quality Texture Filtering within the game's graphic options. These settings would totally kill performance on a card like that.

You could also right-click your GW icon, and in the "Target" field, type -dx8 after what's already there, which will force DirectX 8 shaders and graphics which might be more easily rendered by your video card. Like this:

Just a warning; a lot of the newer game content such as Nightfall and Eye of the North don't completely render properly in DirectX 8, I tried it once and there were tons of inaccurate colors (e.g. my Norn armor looked like I had washed it with bleach), and weird graphic artifacts. Ran fine though.

Confusing as it may be, the 9250 may in fact be a "budget" model using a stripped-down R9000 or R9200 chip, without support for higher-end rendering technologies.

the 9250 does not support DX9 to begin with. it supports DX8.1. you'll have better luck running it in DX8 mode definately.

also, make sure that the card is running in APG 8x mode... actually a better question is: is that thing AGP, or PCI?

As far as I know both the 9200 and the 9250 use the same modified version of the chip originally used in the Radeon 8500. The 9250 actually has a slightly lower clock speed to increase manufacturing yield but comes with more RAM, which is probably why ATI's marketing department decided to give it a higher model number anyway.

For the rendering quality setting(s), check out the ATI Catalyst Control Center in Windows' display options. The exact setting you're looking for may be called texture detail, mipmap detail or something, but it should do the same thing - turning it down trades texture mapping quality for higher performance, and usually gives a noticeable boost on low-end hardware.

If this started happening recently, you are probably experiencing a common plague with r200 series. The silicon used in fabrication was spun at too low an RPM in the later series (the 9250 being the last iteration) This caused premature breakdown especially if the ventilation was less then adequate. This breakdown caused significant slowdowns, and eventually massive amounts of errors.

However, if this has been an ongoing issue, it is probably more due to DX issue, considering the r200 series was DX 8.1. not 9.