Curse

InBourneFlechette · Jan 15, 2007, 04:09 AM // 04:09

I have a Dell OptiPlex GX110 with a Pentium III processer at 833Mhz, 256MB of DDR SDRAM, 2 ancient 40GB Maxtor hard drives, and a PCI Radeon 9250 with 256MB of Memory. I have DSL internet, I have installed Guild Wars perfectly, and my account works fine. If I turn all the graphics settings down quite a bit, I can get around 40FPS in an area without any other players. On the other hand, I start getting anywhere from 4-11FPS in heavily populated areas like "Lion's Arch" with a rediculous amount of lag. Additionally, I takes about 4+ minutes to load a new map, which gets very frusterating if you travel between cities often. Is there any possible way to decrease my loading time? I have defragmented both my hard drives without seeing any decrease of time. Any and all help would be much appreciated.

eggrolls · Jan 15, 2007, 09:00 AM // 09:00

Slow load is probably caused by the lack of memory. 256MB isn't enough to get fast loads. Your computer is heavily using the page file (virtual memory) on your hard drive, which adds a significant amount to load time.

Take my older computer for example: P4 2GHz, 256MB memory. Loading maps took a while (1-2 minutes) since the hard drive is taxed with both loading and swapping to the page file. Compare that to my newer computer: Sempron 2800+ with 1GB memory. Loading is much faster (say, 5-10 seconds) because the computer doesn't need to utilize the hard drive as much for virtual memory.

Your other problem, the 4-11FPS in LA, is probably caused by a combination of everything in your system: the meager 256MB memory, the video card, and the old processor.

Frankly, in order to decrease loading time and improve FPS would be to buy a new computer. Sure, you can add more memory, but memory is pretty expensive, and you'd be investing in old DDR memory which can't be reused in a new computer. The video card can be upgraded, but it wouldn't make any sense to do that since the rest of your system is still slow, making little difference overall.

Milennin · Jan 15, 2007, 09:08 AM // 09:08

I've exactly the same problem.
I was wondering if buying an upgrade of another 256MB RAM would be enough to lower the loading time to a few seconds?

lightblade · Jan 15, 2007, 09:17 AM // 09:17

Yes, memory is the big bottle neck, or did I mean small? Anyways, if you're using Windows XP operating system, that alone consumes 256MB of memory.

Dimitri_Stucoff · Jan 15, 2007, 09:31 AM // 09:31

Windows XP minimum system requirements is 512 Ram if I recall correctly... though Dell does sell some XP OS machines with less then that. Go figure, selling inheriently flawed machines. About all you can do if you do not want to shell out more money is use your task manager to end task on everything but the bare minimum to keep your computer running. Things such as realplayer, DVDplayer, MSN, Yahoo, AIM (things that just kinda sit there and occupy memory and the computer does not really use). You can also disable any devices your computer is not using at the time. For instance if you have a LAN connection no need to enable your wireless card. This will save you a little bit of memoy. Also, try not running anything else besides windows and guildwars and see if that along with the suggested endtasks.

I myself am not a windows guru and cannnot tell you all the tasks you should end however I do know Realplayer, and DVDplayer (or something by that name) should be able to be ended without any adverse effects on your computer. Should you need to use them they simply place themselves back in memory. These two tasks saved me ~20-30 megs of memory when I got rid of them.

Oh if you plan on warping to a busy town you can change your setting to bare minimum and try running the previous version of GW (the one that used Direct X 8). I find running my game on lower settings helps a good bit (a lot when warping into a busy town, changing setting can be done from the character selection screen by pressing f11)

Hope that helped.

InBourneFlechette · Jan 15, 2007, 03:58 PM // 15:58

I tried using DX8, but that didn't do much. I started up the computer without running any background tasks, but that didn't help much either. The only thing that seemed to work slightly was to run Guild Wars in windowed mode and cut the screen in half. This would cut the load times by 50 seconds or so.

So I guess I need a new computer... Well, if you build your own system, is it cheaper than buying one from, say, Dell or Gateway?

(Thanks for the help.)

rohar · Jan 15, 2007, 04:17 PM // 16:17

The other thing you can try to do, which provided a little bit of relief for me, is to download ALL the image files to your hard drive. Go to your Guild Wars Icon, right click and select "Properties" then add "-image" (do not include quotes) to the end of the target string.

Do not run any other processes and be prepared to wait about 30 minutes for this process to be completed. Guild Wars will automatically shut down after this process is complete, so you'll have to remove the -image switch and restart Guild Wars to see how well it works for you.

You will have to do this with each build of guild wars, though typically small updates do not take more than a minute or two to download the entire image file. For ease of use, I've created two shortcuts to GW on my laptop, one with the image switch and one without.

Coridan · Jan 15, 2007, 05:11 PM // 17:11

also try adding -heapsize xxxxxx to the end of your command line...its an old windows trick that makes the program try to use more memory....

xxxx= half your RAM so 256Mb would be 128000 i think :P

InBourneFlechette · Jan 15, 2007, 07:10 PM // 19:10

Thanks, but I tried both the -image (this did take a while) and -heapsize extentions with no results. I don't think the problem is downloading, but it's loading, decompressing, and all that other junk. Would it be possible to specify the heapsize a little higher (to 150000 or so) to give it some more memory? Will that crash my system or will it increase performance?

Milennin · Jan 15, 2007, 09:35 PM // 21:35

I thought -heapsize didn't work anymore...