Windows Vista RC1 & Guildwars

Just wanted to say hi since I'm a first poster and tell you about my experience with Vista (RC1) and GW.

My specs are:

Intel Pentium 4 3.0ghz, 1024 pc3200 memory sticks, 10k rpm harddrive and an Asus ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition card (Using latest ATI Drivers for Vista).

I must say I'm really impressed the by the game performance in Vista (RC1) so far, I got huge if not insane FPS boost when running GW in Vista. In fact, I rather play this game in Vista than on my old windows 2000 install because of the performance. But.... The game crashes after like... 20-30 min. Actually, I can hear a loud humming sound (like an infinite loop on some audio) and the computer wont respond to anything so I have to reboot my system...

Anyone else trying GW on Windows Vista RC1? Got the same issue or can you play without problems? If so, specs please :/.

I played GW on RC1 last weekend .... for 5 or 6 hours with no lockups. The only problem I had was with Creative beta sound card drivers, so I was getting intermittent sound. Apart from that, Vista played GW fine (after tweaking some folder permissions).

I run RC1 + GW on my laptop with no issues at all.

Specs:

Intel Pentium 4 3.4GHz w/ HT
512MB DDR400
60GB 5400RPM HDD
Mobile ATI Radeon 9700 128MB
Default drivers that come with the RC1 release.

What sound card do you have??

Its a laptop. So nothing special.

For some reason, the Creative drivers for Vista are all buggy and problematic.

Yesterday I decided to try out Vista, so I bought a 160 GB SATA drive and popped open my copy of Vista Beta from our Action Pack. It is the version right before RC1, but otherwise it installed flawlessly.

Every driver came up except for my SATA RAID controller, and my Sound Card. I had an Audigy, so I went to Creative and downloaded the latest Vista driver. The first thing I saw when I tried to install was a warning that the driver was going to expire on 15 November. I went ahead, and finished.

Upon reboot, I got a string of error messages, and no sound. I tried 3 other drivers with no success. Finally I just gave up and pulled out the Creative card. I have an A8V Deluxe board (I only use Asus Deluxe for my own systems), so I simply enab;ed thje 7.1 on-board in BIOS and rebooted. Vista immediately saw the internal and loaded the drivers, no reboot needed.

Once I got the game reloaded and the monster update in, I played for about 5 hours with no problems at all. I left the computer running all night and played another 2 hours this morning, again with no problems.

The only issues I seem to have noticed so far is the lack of drivers (a common isse with Beta software), Media Player not working well, and some occasional pauses.

However, it has impressed me enough to put Vista on my computer the moment we get it in stock. While they have announced prices and shipping dates for the Retail versions, we have not been able to get an answer for OEM versions.

Hello,

I tried setting compatibility mode (Windows 2000 SPx) on the guildwars client and it didn't seem to crash at all. I am not entirely sure yet but I played for at least 30 minutes...

And about that creative beta drivers. I don't use them. I simply just putted in my old creative cd and then opened up device manager and selected the soundcard hardware in there and searched for the drivers on the CD, it found some and they seem to work just fine . And I didn't even need to reboot to get the sound active - nice .

What creative card? I'm building my new system this week and I've got an X-Fi, are there drivers for this on RC1?

The Creative X-FI Drivers for VISTA (Beta drivers) that are available on the Creative Site do NOT work with RC1, I have tried them as I haven an X-Fi Fatal1ty, and I cannot get them to install and work whatever I do... Because RC1 needs signed drivers by default, and im either missing something sich as some setting somewhere to allow installation of none signed drivers, or its screwed up...

Hello,

I use the old Creative Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card, the drivers for that are really old so my best guess is that the drivers you got with your X-Fi would probably work as well if you go into device manager and search for the drivers on the CD yourself that is (wont probably work if you try to run autorun.exe/setup.exe from CD). You could always give it a try.

If you've not installed RC1 yet, I suggest having it as a secondary OS as some games and applications might not work as intended etc. .

There's no Vista Drivers on the CD for the X-Fi, im on the 64Bit version of Vista, so the drivers have to be 64bit also....

Well aware of program incompatibilities, I was running it when it was still called longhorn...

As far as the driver, I'm using the 32-bit version, so I should be fine.

My experience with RC1 has been good overall. There is an issue with realtek sound devices randomly freezing though. I wouldn't say that my frame rate has increased any, although i'm running 2-x1800xt's in crossfire, so i doubt i would actually see any improvement. This RC has come along way and for the most part i think it's a pretty stable build for a RC. The network seems peppier, system response is good overall, although memory usage has gotten less demanding since the 5000 series of releases, it's still pretty bulky. As usual though the 64 bit version is a joke, this is greatly do to device drivers and compatability. I had to screw around with the 64-bit version for several hours, tweaking driver settings to get it to even play GW. It's not much different then the 64 of winxp and I wouldn't recommend running it until all manufactures have stable working drivers for todays hardware.

I recently installed the RC1 after abandoning the last public beta. I am currently running Guild Wars using the 32bit version, explicitly avoiding the 64bit version for its well documented lack of driver support. I use a Creative Audigy 2ZS and did experience the situation that the OP described shortly after opening GW for the first time on this install. Application freeze at random point, high pitched sound, and total system lock. I did a hard reset, reran the game, DISABLED both checkmarks for 3d sound and EAX, and have not had a problem since. This is using the most recent driver available from Creative for Vista32, which STILL does not enable all of the advance features of the cards in their lineup. I guess we get what we ask for, needing to be on the frontier, testing our setups with the latest and greatest available to us today. As long as companies have their acts together for June/July when Vista is scheduled for release, what more can we really expect.

Haven't tried RC1 yet, but had excatly the same problem with beta2 and Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS with the latest drivers at the time. I tried to play gw without EAX support, but that didn't help. Liked vista more than XP though, so it's a shame I had to go back to it to play GW :P

Vista RC1 and running Audigy 2 ZS and GW ran great. I did use the vista beta drivers for the sound card and they worked.. but hardware/eax was greyed out.

I too can see me getting Vista when it's final and dual booting. Even Oblivion ran *much* better then I was expecting, in fact it was very playable.

The EAX thing is most likely grayed out because of Vista's new Sound API. Guild Wars isn't equipped to tap that new system yet.

so, should I download the Vista 32Bit? and try that? Even though im on a 64bit machine?

The main difference between the 2 is it's memory and bus addressing capabilities. Your on a 32 bit machine, unless it's ancient and most likely it's also capable to 64-bit as well (linux has been using a 64 bit kernel for some time now). Anyway, use the highest supproted version using 32 bit addressing

Ahh, never thought about the EAX thingy in guildwars but I just checked it and it wasn't checked . And I am not using any sort of Vista drivers for my soundcard as everyone seems to do, I use the old win2k/xp drivers and they work just fine