Guild Wars FPS, oh noes, Vista, so many woes!

Alright team, I need to pick your brains.

I have literally though of everything regarding this issue, and cannot figure out a solution.

Leading up to the event: I installed Vista 32bit Ultimate on my older PC today (new fancy one is MIA). This PC has a dual core E6750 65nm Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB (other 2GBs of RAM are dead) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066 RAM (running at 800MHz EPP), and 2x 7900GT eVGA KO cards in SLi config, a 620watt Enermax PSU with completely stable rails and voltages down the line. It has 3 Sata 3.0Gb HDDs, the main install drive being a 16MB cache Maxtor SataII drive.

I have tweaked all I can tweak. I went though hell doing VGA BIOS flashes on the 7900's, in order to even make Vista function graphically. After solving that issue, everything seemed to be going a ok.

I started Guild Wars, and got a clean, crisp 60 FPS (Vsync enabled) I minimize GW all the time while playing, for song changes, internet browsing (mainly the wiki and or game updates), and dealing with TeamBuilder. I minimized GW, and when I maximized it again about 40 secs later, my FPS had dropped to 4-12 FPS. No matter what graphical setting I put it on, even staring right at the ground I couldn't pass 25 FPS in the Guild Hall.

I have tried to think of what might be causing this. My brain is exhausted from work yesterday and today. With all these issues with Vista, I am about to scream. I need you guys to help me figure out a solution. I will look at every suggestion. If I haven't tried it, I will; if I have tried it, I will tell you so you can try another solution creation. Please guys, this issue is even stumping me.


Thanks everyone,
Rahja

Hmm, I may have figured it out. I ran TF2 and minimized it. When I reopened it, my FPS was completely normal, and quite high (with settings maxed out). I think the gw.dat may be corrupted. I am going to uninstall guild wars, delete the current .dat, and redownload everything via -image tonight. I hope it works.

uninstall Vista...

seriously it will save you a lot of headaches

I'm tempted to agree, but we can try a few things.

Does the FPS drop stay after you load into another area?
Does the FPS still drop if you run guild wars in a window?
Does the FPS drop still occur if you minimize guild wars and then immediately maximize it?

I don't think .dat corruption would lower fps like that, the .dat is just a resource accessed by the exe so I would think the exe would need to be bad for that to happen. Loading a texture or a sound shouldn't impair performance if its corrupted, at least not nearly that much. And that wouldn't explain why it works fine before you minimize it.

I'm wondering if Vista is doing some kind of funky memory management, possibly dumping the gw.exe memory space into the page file and not bringing it back into memory when you go back to guild wars

Hmm, that's amazing! The legendary Rahja is stumped. For now that is. It happens.. especially with me, just about every time.

I think you may be right about the Guild Wars .dat file, I wish we had a Diag tool that we could run to ''Scan'' the .dat and check to see it's condition. I can dream though.

However, I have heard of Guild Wars having troubles with SLI configs sometimes, it may just be that. Try turning off SLI and see if the problem persists.. but I'm quite sure you've already done this, just throwing it out there in case.

EDIT: To The Meth, I think I have heard of corrupted .dat's causing FPS problems in one or two instances.. but I don't know where to find the threads.

While I would love to uninstall Vista, I plan on upgrading this rig in the very near future will some serious hardware I am getting from work, for which Vista will be required.

@Meth: Yes, it stays low if I load into another area. Yes, it still drops while windowed, and yes, it still drops if I immediately maximize it. No other game is doing this right now, so I think my hunch has some merit.

@Osiris: Actually, what would really save me headaches would be not having to program ASM cache systems all day long... ouch, my brain... We started our new project, and these first few weeks are going to be long and tedious.

When the FPS change, did you happen to look at your computers pagefile usage compared to before the FPS drop?

Vista without GW running is using 1,171MB/4332MB of my pagefile.

With it running and minimized, Vista consumes:
1,839MB/4332MB of the pagefile. My RAM usage goes from 750MB to 1.29GB, with an available 2GBs.

So that doesn't seem to be the route of the issues. TF2 minimizes and maximizes just fine.

Oh, and as an update, the new GW.dat file didn't solve anything.

I just can't see what is causing this... oh well, maybe it will come to me tomorrow. Sleep time, my brain is dead.

I don't know - Guild Wars just gets weird when you minimise and maximise. I often minimise to check wiki, take a bathroom break and when I maximise I get the peculiar lagging heroes syndrome - you know, where they all stand still and jump a few feet every few seconds while you're running.

I'm under the impression that GW just hates being minimised :/

I get that as well, but this is totally different. My FPS drops to 9-15 (range depends on what is on screen), and I can turn down every setting, disable sound, run in DX8 mode, etc, and it never changes. If I change the resolution from 1920x1200 to 1024x768, my FPS goes up to a whopping 20-25.

I used to get 120 FPS with everything maxed, 1920x1200 on this particular rig. I tried goofing around and setting everything as low as it could go, and @ 1024x768 and I was getting 400+ FPS. So... something is wrong. Anyways, I am off to bed this time, fo' real my hommies. If any of you have a moment of genius this evening, post it.

On XP I have no problems maximizing and minimizing, but I also always run window, but even in full screen, no problems.

On Vista, it's a bit different. It disables the Aero theme in full screen, so Aero has to re-load all the time if I'm in full screen, annoying. Does this with most games though, it's not just Guild Wars.

Don't know.. try disabling Aero?

I'm using vista ultimate 32bit, on a C2D E6420 with XFX 8800GT 512MB, and 2GB RAM. I overclock the CPU and 8800GT a lil too. There's no problem with me minmizing and maxing, takes just around 1 second to switch, and 2 second to be stable (eg. you get out of game, and only 2 seconds later can you click your icons and stuff).

No problems really for me.. have you tried disabling vsync? Or updated your drivers? (had to ask this obvious question) Maybe do a run of the services on your PC or do a full virus scan (Kaspersky would be good, there's a free trial.) Also, consider just using one 7900 to see if using 2 of those babies are causing the problem.

I'm not an expert in anything, but that's what I would do if I were you.

Yeah, Rajah, update your drivers - you know what those damn nVidia people are like

Indeed, i'd try disabling SLi and seeing how things work with just 1 card

Never had problems with SLI in GW on Vista x64.
Which drivers are you using?
You got the latest chipset driver for your mobo/windows installed?
What background app's (visus scanners etc) do you got running?

X-fastest 175.80 seems like a good set of beta drivers.
Might have issues with other games, but they work perfect in GW and WoW for me.

<chuckles quietly to himself>

I have this same thing happen to me. It only happens with guild wars and only on vista. The game runs great as long as I keep it in full screen mode, but if I minimize it for whatever reason or hit alt/tab or the win key by accident, it shreds my fps. It'll seriously drop to 5-10 fps, and renders everything completely unplayable.

I can save you some time though. Reinstalling Guild Wars will not fix it. Turning off Aero will not fix it. Turning off desktop composition in the the shortcut properties will not fix it. I've tried the 'usual fixes' when it comes to games and vista and nothing works.

Only thing I haven't tried yet is running the game in XP compatibility mode.

I have to guess that its some kind of graphics driver issue.

We can rule out the vista background memory usage processes since the problem appears even if you immediately switch back to GW. And we can probably rule out some kind of unknown vista process taking up CPU or GPU time because otherwise the FPS would change when you went from low to high quality graphics when instead it only changed when you swapped resolutions.

this is just a shot in the dark, but it might be because the graphics card is stuck in "low power 3D" mode.

modern graphics card has 3 utilization levels: 2D, low power 3D, high power 3D. low power 3D is the one vista uses to run aero. it is also used in games right as you start it, where the graphics card sort of "warms up" and goes into high power mode a split second later.

it might be possible that your card is stuck in low power 3D after you've alt-tabbed. if that's the case, it might be a driver issue.

I have Vista 32-bit and I'm running Aero. I don't have any problems when switching from Windowed mode and back, but I don't minimize GW. I play in full screen mode and when I check wiki, or Guru, or w/e, I go to windowed mode. My guess though would be something like Moriz above - it sounds like GW is getting stuck in some other mode.