Help - Gw.exe running 100% CPU usage and is extremely choppy

ok, let me start off by saying - I'm no computer n00b. I'm fairly savvy with keeping my system clean and running smooth. I have done everything under the sun, and yet, the cure of my issue eludes me.

Basically, my favorite (ok, only) game I play is Guild Wars. I was an alpha tester for over a year and a half before launch and it will always have a soft spot, like a kid you helped raise and you get all excited to see it grow up and become successful. I even have an NPC in the game named for me and my father (dad & daughter alpha test team) for being one of the recognized testers. (Mosreh the Exile - Mosreh is my our last name, Hersom, spelled backwards and our guild is Legion of Exile.)

The issue is in the last month or more the game lags beyond belief and runs at 100% CPU usage, so the whole computer crawls. As soon as I kill the gw.exe process, the computer goes back to normal. I have no other issues, it started happening about 4 - 6 weeks ago - some time near my updating to Factions but I can't remember if it exactly started at that time or it's just a coincidence.

These are my computer & network specs, please note these have been the SAME exact specs I've been using with GW successfully for over a year, none of it is new or changed (ok, SP2 is newer but still I used GW successfully for months after updating):

* Dell Inspiron 9200 Laptop
* 1g RAM, something something processor, I forget, but the 2nd best they had when I bought it
* ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 128 VRAM
* WXP home SP2
* Trend Micro internet security 2006, ports open and gw.exe on exception list to have open unlimited access
* I'm on a wirless network, DLink 8.11G, I have the router configured to keep the TCP ports it needs open 6112 & 80 - I have excellent signal as I am all of 12 feet away from the router. I connect at 54Mbps according to my wireless connector.
* I have Charter cable internet, 3M down and 256k up.
* To combat the tendancy for a laptop to get hot, it is literally sitting on a baking cooling rack with a small desk fan pointed right at the back and down. My computer is always cool to the touch even in the middle of game play.

This is what I have done:

I log into a user called Game that has all fancy stuff stripped with classic interface. Nothing in starts in the background except neccessary stuff and and anti-virus (I even exited that when I was desperate).

I have updated my chipset drivers.

I have updated my DirectX.

I have updated my video drivers to the Omega lastest version.

I have run scans of spybot, adaware, a registry cleaner, and deep scanned from my Trend Micro.

I have uninstalled all programs I dont need and deleted files. I have 30% free hard disk space.

I ran disk clean up and 4 defrags!

I have uninstalled & reinstalled the gw client. I turned down all the graphic options to the lowest they can be (game looks ugly like that, btw - and I used to be able to run the game with 75% max settings no problem.)

I used a tool at endlagnow.org to see that lag is 100% client related and I am getting a lousy 5 frps!

anyone have anymore ideas??

everybody is getting it, its a game issue not computer.

Is it related to Factions? And is there a thread you can point me to see discussion on this matter if "everyone" is getting it? I'm highly distressed.

It's not an "issue" most games use close to 100% of the CPU power.

But I am sure 5 frps and the choppiness/lag isn't normal...

mine does the same sometimes and i cant figure out why .. :S

That's true.

I can't think of what exactly what the problem it might be though.

My GW used nearly 100% cpu since i installed it (summer 05) .. so thats not the problem i guess.

You run on notebook. Theres one more option i can think of, ... .. wll, two options :P

1, Some crappy windows update
2, dont you install som new /upgrade/ software for cpu frequency control ?
i hope you know what i mean ... if your cpu frequency isnt lowered , because of some reason ...

if dont helped ... i ll check hdd usage during playing ... or check RAM with that ms utility

I had the exact same problem until I started running GW with the -dx8 parameter, got rid of my anti-virus and stopped using TS.

Same problem here, since one month or so. Freezes kill me

100% CPU usage is normal, except for hyperthreading / dual-core CPU's. That's not the issue.

Don't know if this is the issue, but do you have Fast User Switching turned on? If you log into your other account that way, a lot of processes from another user account are still active, and that could be what's choking your computer. I always keep FUS turned off on machines with multiple accounts. In Task Manager, check the box to "Show Processes from All Users" and see if a lot of extra stuff pops up.

If that's not it, then try other 3D apps (games, rthdribl, etc.) and see if the problem persists. Verify that your GPU hasn't somehow been underclocked. Check your overall RAM usage in Task Manager while GW is running, to make sure somehow all your memory isn't being eaten (GW can use up to 300MB, so don't panic if you see that).

Also there's some speak of the sound system in GW causing some complications.

Got stuff like DirectMusic installed? Try adjusting the sound quality (restart the client after changing the quality so it comes to effect!)

Ok, I get it, 100% CPU usage is normal. But the 5 frps and the extreme lag is not. I mean it looks no better than the flip books you used to make as a kid. It's impossible to play, you can't react in time for anything.

I understand the switch user thing, again, I'm actually a tech support analyst in real life. I do not have anything, anywhere, running in the background.

I don't have other 3D apps to test, do you recommend a free one?

My GPU is not underclocked.

I did use task manager to run tests and no other system is hogging CPU cycles. As I stated above, as soon as I kill gw.exe my cpu usage drops to like 3-5%.

Oh, and I used the -image switch last night for the hell of it and so it's not that it's streaming anything, I'm still horrible this afternoon.

This is kind of a long shot, but try setting the priority of gw.exe to "lower then normal" or maybe the reverse, "higher then normal"? (if you don't know how to do that: 1) open task manager [ctrl+alt+delete], 2) go to the gw.exe process, right click on it and scroll down to priority> set it to lower then normal, see if that works. then try higher then normal to see if that works.)

I know you said you're "computer savvy" but I included the directions in case some one else has the problem.

I'll edit this post if I find anything new.

I'd bet you some $ that it's probably occuring now as opposed to always because of the updates. the game is getting more and more complex by the day, so it's no wonder people's computer that used to be able to handle GW are having a harder time now. I looked around and couldn't find any significant solutions to this problem, good luck.

First of all 100% CPU usage is not Normal! I have 3 machines at home and all run at various amounts of cpu usage ranging from 17%-80%. The Dell laptop (80% with ati x300, pent4 HT 2.1GHz, 1.5GB RAM) is the highest and experience the most lag, dropped frame rate; then the toshiba (25% go 5200 nvidia, pent4 HT 3.2GHz 1GB RAM), followed by the gaming machine (17% ati 1800x crossfire addition, pent5 dual core 2.67 GHz 1GB RAM). Even oblivion the most demanding graphics engine to date, only hogs about 65-70% percent processor time during graphics loads and drops to about 35% during gameplay.

Part of the problem is directx 9.0c, the other part is some where hardware driver related. I have notice, even with the ATI gaming machine that GW will spike to 80-90 % under heavy graphics and network connection issues. Where as the Nvidia always stays around the 25-30% range regardless of conditions, in-game or out. ATI settings are very picky and the newest drivers and controls seemed even more buggy then the older set. I'm not home so i forget the version numbers ATM..

This weekend i experienced far more drops and lag issues then ever. Mostly since i think there was a high demand on the network and partly due to the d/ling of patches to gw itself. Thus far i have not found optimum settings for the ati model cards to even remotely get the processor overhead down past 67% on the Dell laptop.

This has been an on-going issue with every ATI based graphics machine i have used to play gw since factions release. Basically, no matter what settings you use, in either GW or through the card drivers, the processor is bogged, frame rate perfomance suffers and alternative programs (like TS) struggle for processor time (forget opening IE without an insane wait time). The only ATI machine that has run GW smoothly (processor demand wise) is, suprisingly enough, a Mac os x powerbook pro with boot camp. Which is yet another dual core machine with a spiffy ati (9600 i believe) video card.

In a nutshell, it's something hardware related, something specific (so it seems) to ATI and certain INTEL machines (or MOBO's) and Directx 9.0c. I wish i had an answer as well, since my g/f is quite unhappy with GW perfomance and has to do silly work-arounds just to get TS open.

Guild Wars has become lag wars. I used to lag A LITTLE sometimes in HoH where there are 24 people squeezed together. Now I go to RA where there are 8 people and my game turns into a powerpoint slideshow of how to die horribly in GWs. I lag about the equivalent of what I lag when I'm trying to run through the forge in WoW ><.

I have no clue whats causing it, but whatever it is, it needs fixed. A whole lotta people are gonna quit because I'd say 50% of people are experiencing this and its impossible to play under these conditions.

If your not gonna fix it. You need to tell us the problem so we can cope with it using our own settings.

Whenever I get serious lag, I check the CPU monitor at GW is maxed out at 100%

if you try and reduce it's priority, it won't let you.

Nvidia = Series 7900 or even lower one 7300 SLI you will rock !

Sometime it's network issue ..
I would eliminate wireless ( older wireless has dead spot ) go with wired for now avoid interfre about your household appliances.

I'm not sure ATI 9700 is ,check the compatibility.
Most gamer go with 2 Gig RAM.
If you want performance I 'd say go at least 2 Gig You won't disappointed.

Check your trace route, Ping hop , sometime net congested ...
i hope it help ,

Check your sound settings. They changed the options menu that might need you to reset some of the options.

If a game is not using 100% of the processing time, it just means your processors aren't being fully utilized by the game, nothing more. It can means one of several things:

a) You've got some other application or process chewing up a lot of time. Where is the other processing time going? If it's 'System', then it's probably spending a lot of time in drivers (sound, video). If you see it going to other applications, you need to clean your machine out. If the excess time is going to 'System Idle Process', then it's either b) or c).

b) Your machines are GPU-bound instead of CPU-bound. If your machines have more powerful processors relative to their video cards, your CPU has to wait for the video card to finish processing before it can continue (because there's no use processing a frame unless it can be rendered). Thus, it simply goes to sleep and frees CPU time until the video card is done.

c) The game isn't able to utilize 100% of the CPU time, because of multiple processors or cores. The bulk of most games' executable code occurs in a single thread. It's highly likely that Guild Wars is no exception. A dual-core machine won't ever run a game at 100% CPU power unless that game evenly divides all processing power among multiple threads. You'll see more CPU utilization of these chips in the future, especially with Intel's new multi-core processors + next-gen consoles utilizing multi-core processors.

Don't assume that just because your machines work a certain way that everyone's works the same way. Different configurations will produce different results. My machine has a relatively slow processor with a somewhat faster vid card. As a result, my CPU is nearly always pegged to max with nearly any modern game (getting time for me to upgrade).

Mystra, sorry to get off topic. Try turning sound quality down to the minimum if you haven't done that yet. Since you're using a laptop, I'll bet all the 3D sound is being mixed in software. Or, you could turn off sound altogether with -nosound, just to see if that helps. It sounds like you've tried most everything else. Good luck!