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

I'm at work and after word I'll be at a dinner party. So its going to be a while before I can post more specs. Here are some of my thoughts.

-It's only happing in Vista.
-It's happing in x86 and x64.
-It started happening to me before SP1 and still happens after.
-It happens on a number of driver version including 64bit and 32bit drivers.
-No one has posted this error with an ATI card. Maybe I should find one and try it.
-It's happening on AMD and Intel procs.

I have to get back to work.

Ok, I have done the communication on my end. Hopefully we hear back tomorrow. If not, I don't know when, because I have surgery on Monday, and we/they don't work on weekends.

However, I have tweaked some settings a bit and found a few things that improve (don't cure, but do help) the situation

One is to increase the size of the pagefile to start at 5.5GB and max at 6.5GB.

The second is to use the settings fusa suggested above.

• Turning off thread optimization
• Multi-display/mixed-gpu acceleration set to single display performance mode
• Turn on extension limit
• Texture compression is not forced
• Texture Filtering - Trilinear optimization off
• Triple buffering off

My FPS in Great Temple manages to stay at 20-35 with Vsync off (all options maxed, 1920x1200 rez), compared to 45-70 on the initial startup of GW (before minimizing/changing any graphic options)

I am going to try a complete reinstall of Vista, and a fresh new driver directly off nvidia.com (same on you guys would use, the 175 release)

Hopefully the temporary solutions give me enough sanity to play.

I never got SLi stable with Vista OR with GW. I ended up going CrossFireX. I'll never look back. It had a hiccup with 8.3, but 8.4 the next month fixed all and it's getting faster every driver update.

I'd throw my money at the low power 3D mode though. Seen it a few times before.

Yeh, but I hooked it up to my workstation to measure power draw and mode gate changes. It was throttling just fine according to the QDK (the in house software we use for measuring all operation modes of GPUs post mount) Something else is at work here... I think I am flying out to Cali in 2-3 weeks for a conference and lab work, so I will grab some GTX 280s to toss into this PC if I can LSU them off list.

Ooh, so casual: "I'll just wander down and grab me a pair of GTX 280s - I do this stuff all the time."

Jealous Snograt is jealous

Not quite as easy as that, but yes. I have to check them out as a lab test module, and you must be in the good graces of the particular lab manager on duty. I didn't get the chance to do it with the 9800 series.

I figured out a fix for it. Put all your settings for GW back to normal, boost your page file (virtual memory) to 5GB with a max of 6-6.5GB.

Now, here is the kicker. Flash the newest BIOS to your GPU, and immediately after doing that, flash the newest BIOS for both of your motherboards exhibiting the issue.

Once you load back into Windows, open the nVidia control panel. Adjust the clockspeed of your GPU core by 1MHz in either direction (preferably up though)

Open GW (make sure it isn't in Windows XP compatibility mode). Minimize it, and you should find it is fixed.

The issue had to deal with inner BIOS communication at post. It also dealt with a clock override feature found on the nVidia 6 series and up. It is a rare issue, and to be perfectly honest, I am surprised you had it also. Mine is totally fixed.

I'm going to flash my bios now. I've only once flashed my GPU bios, is this a normal thing to do? Where do I download a GPU bios?

You should be able to get a new GPU BIOS from your manufacturer. Check their support area. If it isn't listed, email their support and request it.