Is there a way to set my framerate lower?

May seem like an odd question, but WoW was causing my older processor to overheat, so I had to set the framerate lower using a console command, and that helped a lot. I was wondering if there is a similar way of doing that in GW. Thanks for any info

Yup.

* Right click on your Guild Wars shortcut and select 'Properties'.

* In the 'Target Area' field you will see the location of your Guild Wars executable file: "..\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"

* Write the desired command line arguments after the quote marks, each separated by a space:

So it'd look like: "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe" -fps (Number here) and such.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Switches

If you just enable V-Sync it'll cap the amount of FPS to your monitor's refresh rate, but it that's not enough, do what Brianna said

If your CPU is overheating, get a better cooling system......well unless it's a laptop.

QFT, best way to do what you want. Enabling V-sync would most likely put more stress on your CPU.

Better question: why does your CPU overheat?

I'm pretty sure the -fps command won't reduce strain on your processor. I'm running on a Core 2 Duo at 2.4 Ghz, and even when I turned every graphical option down and limited the game to 5 FPS I was getting 50% load (IE the most a dual core processor can get from guild wars) while AFKing the 9 rings during the festival. If I hadn't had a second core to run other things on during the weekend the computer would have been pretty much unusable.

If your processor is overheating thats really bad. Is it in a warm or confined area where it could heat up easily?

u can go to power options, and set the maximum cpu usage a little lower

I think that's a pretty harsh test. 9 rings (well, the whole of Monastery during the festivals) is always full of people - it's not the fps, it's the sheer amount of rendering.

I would think

How do you know it's not the GPU overheating? That happens more often... Have you opened up your computer and blasted all the dust out lately?

The error message/error handling is very different when comparing a CPU overheating to GPU overheating.

Than you got something terribly wrong with your PC lol With a dual core you need to set Gw.exe in task manager to only 1 core. Even then with you system specs, you should exp no graphical lag.

Cool, thanks for the info. I know it's my processor, because I have a system monitoring utility, and my computer only freezes when the processor gets too hot. And limiting the FPS in WoW drastically reduced my proc usage and thus my proc temps. No more crashing It's a pretty old processor. AMD FX-55.

Any AMD FX processor should run Guild Wars without issue. Sounds like you have a serious issue with either silicon degradation or an OS bound issue. What are the average temps you are seeing from the FX-55?

I agree - my son's running GW just fine on an X800 - an even older AMD GPU.

To clarify: I am able to run guild wars just fine on my PC, I was getting a good 80 FPS during the festival while on the 9 rings. I was limiting my FPS because I wanted to lower the CPU usage so that I could have more power available for other applications over the weekend. But apparently there is no CPU usage drop between 80 FPS and 10 FPS.

I am also able to run the game just fine on an old Athlon XP 1500+ with a radeon 9500 GPU. The confusing thing is that no matter what settings I have on either machine both will take up 100% or nearly 100% of the CPU time. Yes I have restricted GW.exe to only one core, it still happens. I've never experienced crashes or problems because of my dual core processor anyway.

EDIT: using -dx8 -fps 5 -mute -noshaders commands, staring into a wall at the empty seeker's passage registers 50% CPU usage. I think guild wars just consumes all CPU time and then limits what it displays after the fact. Someone check it out to see if its just me.

I run GW on my old rig with the same processor with no problems at all. If your processor is overheating, there's a very serious problem that's also very fixable. You should never have to do what you did.

You might try a new cooler and dab of paste...

Limiting FPS will lower the CPU load and cause less heat. It also normal for GW to use 100% of the CPU. It doesn't mean Guild Wars is using 100% of your CPU all of the time, it just means that it has access to 100% of your CPU. If there's another program that requires CPU power than Guild Wars will give the other program whatever CPU power that programs requires. There's no need to manually reduce CPU usage since your OS already devides CPU usage automatically.

That figures. Leave it to microsoft to make the item labeled CPU usage NOT mean the amount of CPU time being used, but instead available CPU time.

EDIT: Wait that doesn't exactly make sense, I run other programs that use up smaller %'s. By your explanation whenever I am running any single program it should display as having access to 100% of the CPU, which doesn't happen. Instead most other programs end up taking about 5-10% of the CPU usage and the rest is unused. Might it be that Guild Wars always just requests 100% CPU time and then its up to the operating system to decide how much to give it?

Most programs don't exhibit this kind of behavior especially the smaller ones which require very little CPU processing. It depends from program to program, mostly high end programs which require a lot of CPU processing will exhibit this kind of behavior. Programs that don't exhibit this kind of behavior just display the percentage of the CPU they are actually using.