Terrible FPS with Vista+DualCore+GeForce8800

I already posted this in a few other communities to no avail, first of all my configuration:

Intel Duo 2 E6600 (2x2,4Ghz)
XFX GeForce GTS8800 640MB
2GB RAM
Windows Vista Home Premium 32bit
Newest Drivers for Mainboard + Graphics Card
All Vista Updates, Hotfixes, Service Pack etc..


This respectable system runs Crysis, Gears of War and all the other nifty DX10 games at high quality settings with excellent FPS, so I assume(d) everything is worked fine.

Then, I installed and tried playing good old Guild Wars, since above games are .. arguably .. pretty shallow in comparision

And I was in a for a shock!

On average, no matter which area, 15FPS! Changing the graphics settings - and this is important - made no difference at all. I had the exact same FPS with 800x600 lowest settings as I had with 1600x1200 highest settings, 4xFSAA etc..

However, I realized the fps drop is proportional to the view distance. When looking directly at a wall or at the ground, I get (still ridiculous) ~40-50fps. Once I look into the beautiful mountains they drop to 10 or lower.

On top of that, as soon as my FPS drop (e.g. as soon as I stop looking at a wall or ground) i get horrible interface lag. Keystrokes and Mouseclicks are registered with like 1 second delay. Not sure if that is normal in GuildWars or just me ...

Any ideas? Simple solutions probably won't help since I tried and asked ALOT already

From what I've heard, GW doesn't run well on dual core CPU's. I don't know this personaly, but I've read it on forums. I would recommed setting the affinity of GW to run on one core only. After a quick search on Google, I found this --->
http://www.overclock.net/faqs/92457-...core-cpus.html.
Hope it helps.

does this happen in both fullscreen and windowed mode?
does this happen with any other games? (dx9 problem?)

silly thought I know but might be worth trying with low sound settings

i have the same problem with my quad core and vista 32 bit. already tried changing the affinity (tried it with 1, 2, 3, and 4 cores).

i have a dual core on my xp machine with zero problems.

Your problem could be your DirectX. I'd say give it a try with DX9.0c, GW doesn't use anything from DX10 anyway.

I have a quad core q6600 vista home/3gb ram/geforce 8500gt and had the same problem. I was able to fix it by doing this

assuming you are on a wireless internet connection

open command prompt as administrator after you have connected to your wireless internet.

1. enter this: netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=no interface="wireless network connection"

2. hit enter. you should get a confirmation it has been disabled.

3. start gw and you should be good to go.

4. next time u restart your computer, it won't recognize the wireless connection, so go into command prompt and enter this:

netsh wlan set autoconfig enabled=yes interface="wireless network connection"

it should find your internet then. rinse and repeat and it should work.

goodluck. if you have question whisper me.

ign: R Langdon

Thanks for your input so far!

@natural_Causes: tried that, makes no difference

@quest_3: happens regardless of any graphics settings, whether that be resolution, windowed mode or detail settings. This also happens with other DX9 games yes, namely Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and World of Warcraft

@Aera: I will try that, but its not a solution since that disables every other game I play which are all DX10

@R.Langdon: Nope, I don't have wireless LAN, I got a "normal" netgear router which never caused any problems before. I also don't see how that would affect my framerate?

Maybe a Driver issue? I've been hearing Nvidia has been putting out some crap drivers lately, if so, then go try to dig up an older version of your card's drivers and see if that helps, who knows.

are you starving it for power?

how many other apps are you running while gaming?

are you/did you mess with the clock speeds?

what version driver are you using? (there is a new beta driver out now[174.74], i've yet to run into any probs with it)

are you using ntune? (curious)

Isn't ET:QW on the doom3 engine? The doom 3 engine is opengl if i remember correctly and thus that game probably is too.

That's only the case on machines with other issues. It can still potentialy be an issue, but I experimented with it for a while, and while I had initially thought it had helped, it turned out to be a non-issue.

Try Disabling SLA and use only one GPU. You don't need all that power.

Turn on Frame rate limits at 60, that shouldn't make a difference, but it can't hurt.

Try running gw -image first and then run the game. perhaps background network traffic could be causing an issue.

Run it in windows mode and see if any other apps spike in CPU usage using Task Manager. Perhaps you have a software conflict.

my 4800 runs it at 60 no problem

@flubber

- I run zero other apps while gaming, and I just fired up 3 messengers, IRC, bittorrent and launched warcraft 3 in the background just to test it -> no effect AT ALL on my framerate whether those programs run or not

- no I didnt mess with anything, I "plug&play" usually.

- I tried every single driver NVIDIA spat out in the last year

- what's ntune?

@Bront

- what is "SLA" and how do I disable it? Using only one of my CPU's (via task manager) made no difference

- I always monitor my traffic, cpu usage etc - nothing is runnign in the background, the cpu is at 20% tops while running GW, yet still it lags like no tomorrow as soon as I stop looking at a wall :-/ As I said, there is no trivial solution

My bad. I ment SLI, and you're only using 1 GPU. I need more caffeine.

and when you were trying out said drivers, were each removed properly before the installation of the next? I like to use this program (add/remove works fine too)
http://guru3d.com/index.php?page=driversweeper
to put it simply, it's a control panel for your FX card. some people like rivatuner better, but ntune is much more user friendly.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html

for tweekers: (advanced users)
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163

/edit
I'm running almost the same setup but with another e6850...and of course it crushes GW in the FPS depo. (it's not to demanding. if you know what I mean)

yea, I use DriverCleaner which probably does the same. So far I just used that NVidia Control Panel (and to be honest I didn't do much with it, left everything at default settings except for disabling vsync since I heard many people solving their FPS problems that way - made no difference for me though)

I'll download that RivaTuner and fiddle around a bit with it, thanks again for your input!

I don't really get that part? e6850? why does it crush GW?

same setup, different processor(and i'm running ultimate).

"it" is referring to the system as a whole. meaning there is something terribly wrong if you can only pull those numbers.

so just for comparision, can you set everything to highest (in case you havent), enter "The North Wall" mission, get a view that captures as much distant landscape as possible, and tell me your FPS? Just for comparision, I get around 15FPS now when I do that. When I look a the ground, around 150FPS.

I also overclocked my 8800GTS by 50Mhz now using the RivaTuner, and there is a noticeably increase in FPS, so that kind of helped!

windowed 200 fps+
1280 x 1024 300fps+

all the candy but Vsync enabled.

with vsync 75 fps.

my Hardware is no where near as nice as yours, and I rarely drop below 60.

Are you running any mods? (I would guess no, but I'd rather ask). Are you patched to SP1? Was this a clean Vista install or an upgrade?