Curse

Silent Coyote · Apr 15, 2007, 06:17 PM // 18:17

I've been getting a problem where, randomly when a sound starts to play the entire sound system will crash and I won’t get any sound until I restart the client. It isn't just effecting GW either, as it stops whatever I'm listening to in windows media player as well. The only way to get sound working again for other apps is to go into the control panel and change the sample rate of audio and then back again.

It is however being caused by Guild Wars as it only started since the update and only happens when GW is running. My guess is it’s a driver problem, but I've updated to the latest sound drivers so not a lot I can do about that. Will have a try with -dssound and see if that fixes things.

My System:
Windows Vista 32bit
Creative Sound Blaster 2 ZS

EntityMaster · Apr 16, 2007, 03:50 AM // 03:50

Any of you tried Dominar's recommendation posted here
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10143863
It solves my fps problem, as least in certain area of the map.

Kuldebar Valiturus · Apr 16, 2007, 07:42 AM // 07:42

I found a reason for the scratchy sound I was getting, feel like an idiot: at some point after the patch my Sound Quality Level setting in the Guild Wars Options got turned down to about half way. <doh>

I still use -dsound switch because it appears to improve my FPS by 10-12 and I feel better forcing it to use my Hardware and Eax

Another thing I did <that's is hotly contested in some geek forums> that gives shows me results, is reduce my Pagefile size to 256-512 MB. I wasn't brave enough to get rid of it completely although my system ran fine without it. Since I have 2 gigs of RAM this keeps a lot more stuff working out of memory versus paging to the much slower hard drive. I certainly notice an improvement to Windows XP's "snappiness". Minimizing and alt-tab is a lot smoother with less disk thrashing. But, you don't want to try this if you have a low memory system.

At the end of the day, all these things aren't fixes so much as attempts at work-arounds or compensation for a general performance decrease since the last update. Now, some folks got the better part of the deal but not all of us were so lucky. I think the audio engine may still need some fine tuning due to particular issues with certain machines, but that's just my opinion, of course.

Hengis · Apr 16, 2007, 01:44 PM // 13:44

I too have been suffering from terrible performance since the audio upgrade.

My PC specs are:

Core2Duo E6700
2 gig ram
Geforce 7950GT
Creative X-Fi Extreme sound card
Windows XP

Basically, before the update my PC would run everything totally maxed out at 1650 x 1050 with 4xAA perfectly.

I also had Vertical Sync enabled as the PC would easily manage the required 60 FPS. (I personally much prefer the smoothness of video with Vsync enabled at 60 FPS without any video tearing, to 130+ FPS with a fair degree of tearing.)

After this update I am suffering from jerky video and frame rates falling to as low as 20 FPS.

I have tried downloading a new gw.dat, tried the various sound switches, updated all my drivers, deleted and recreated my paging file, defragged, chkdsk, and other general maintence all with no effect.

Even taking off the AA still does not guarentee a constantly good frame rate.

I have not as yet tried the "LargeSystemCache" fix suggested in another thread and will give that a go later, however, having to change registry entries to make a game playable should never be required these days! (God, that reminds me of having to make game specific boot disks with custom Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files for some games back in the days of DOS! - Wing Commander anyone? LOL)

I am really hoping that a real fix to these issues is released soon as I am not really enjoying playing the game at all right now.

ducktape · Apr 16, 2007, 11:50 PM // 23:50

After playing for 20 hours this weekend, I dare say the lagspike problems are either from the GW servers, or sound problems caused by specific skills triggering, or sound effects in certain areas of the game.

I played for 10 hours straight on saturday and I played in the shiverpeaks the whole time, specifically Tasca's Demise, Mineral Springs, Frozen Forest, Icedome, Ice Floe, and Talus Chute. The lagspikes were horrible, I had death penalty left and right because I would get a lagspike while I was running around and then appear in the middle of an enemy group, or I would get a lagspike right when I drew aggro with my bow or first engaged an enemy group and then I couldn't do anything for a couple seconds and my party would get beat up pretty bad when it shouldn't have happened. I would also usually get a lagspike almost every time Little Thom used Charge!, I wished he was a hero so I could disable it. I was pretty pissed off and it wasn't very fun to play. I noticed that the lagspikes seemed especially bad when encountering ice imps and stone summit, and not so bad around avicara, trolls, or jades. After I killed all the enemies in a zone and ran around, the lagspike problems almost went away completely.

I played for 10 hours straight on sunday and I played in every area of the crystal desert in prophecies besides Dunes of Despair and The Arid Sea. I had almost no lagspikes, and whenever I did get lagspikes it seemed to be related to being near scarabs or sand giants. Little Thom does not have Charge! in the desert so thankfully I didn't get lag from that either. As it was on saturday, after I killed all the enemies in a zone and ran around, the lagspike problems were all gone.

All of my settings were the same for both days of playing. I have windows XP, AC97 sound, the february directx (haven't bothered to get april's yet) and I'm using the -dsound switch to run the game. I have the Use Hardware Acceleration box checked in GW, but not the Use EAX box since that has made problems for me before. I have the GW sound quality set at the first notch, i.e. not the lowest setting but the next-to-lowest setting.

I find it interesting that without changing any settings on my computer, and only changing the areas I played in, there were huge differences in the occurence of lagspikes. Last weekend when I was also having bad lagspikes, I played in Snake Dance, Dreadnaught's Drift, and Lornar's Pass. Seem suspicious that there are rampant lagspikes in the shiverpeaks and a lower and more tolerable amount of lagspikes in the desert? I'm betting this is something on ANet's end and there will be a fix like the old "Fixed and audio issue that was causing performance problems in the Ring of Fire islands" patch coming to us soon. At least, that's what I hope

Kuldebar Valiturus · Apr 17, 2007, 01:50 AM // 01:50

It's the same subject but a different approach to what may be causing the lag-snags.

Dominar has a thread topic about how there may have been some change in the game's memory management system when the -heapsize switch was removed from the game.

It is an interesting theory, and he has a proposed tweak to counter it if you feel adventurous.

Timmeey · Apr 17, 2007, 06:52 PM // 18:52

Hi,

just wanted to say that i tried everything suggested in this thread (and also that tweak with the syscache) and i'm still getting those lags and freezes. But the really annoying thing is, everytime i get those lags, the music i'm listening to (wether ingame music, or mp3 played with winamp) also gets "laggy" means getting slowed, and distorted. If anyone has another idea, pls tell me, or what would be better, anet should release some sort of a bugfix that will solve that problem

thx and i hope will get better soon!

Mineria · Apr 18, 2007, 07:52 PM // 19:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Forjo

Gaile, thanks for the update.

I was wondering, though. Why are you guys supporting Fmod instead of OpenAL? OpenAL is an open-source standard also and is officially supported for hardware acceleration in Windows Vista.

-Forjo

OpenAL is altso supported by later Creative sound cards drivers. But I think enabling hardware mode and EAX in game applys to the hardware.
Running GW on XP64 with SB X-Fi, and sound still works fine with full 5.1 surround after the update.