FPS rate in Guild Wars on Laptop

[12ogue]

Hi. This is the first post I made on this forums . I'm not a computer buff so please bear with me.

My dad gave me his old laptop from Korea, and its model was never released in America. Despite it being sort of a "work" laptop, I managed to get a hold of it and see how well it can perform. I do have my own desktop which can play most games as well as an old Area 51 model of Alienware in my storage.

The topic that I have has been frusturating me for the past 2 days is here. I understand that the laptop isn't exactly a "gaming" PC, and it does lack quite a lot of requirements for gaming needs. My brother, who owns a Dell Inspiron laptop seems to have customized it into a powerful machine. It manages to play WoW and any other games with ease at the top notch graphics. This laptop; however, seems to sink at a hole when it tries playing Guild Wars.

Guild Wars, as you probably know, has minimum requirements for a flowing game. This laptop seems quite compatible for such performances, but it does not. I read through the Guild Wars Guru website discussing on the FPS on a laptop, and I heard it was quite awful.




Apparently, all what they said was true, but it did seem that my laptop was capable of still performing OK at least so I gave it a try. I logged onto my characters, and the loading screen took about 3 minutes, and then it was almost a lagfest in the populated cities. I couldn't see my character for some minutes and the entire movement just kept tearing itself to pieces. Eventually, I managed to get instanced into an explorable location. It still had that horrible loading time and the movement was a bit choppy. I noticed; however, I moved a little smoothly as it progressed a bit, and then a little choppiness here and there. I've noticed that I managed to go smoothly when I just stood still and casted a skill. No choppiness there, but when I moved, it happened again.

Then I tried the Random Arena and Alliance Battle in Aspenwood. That unbearable loading time got me in the game when the game was already 1 minute through. And I suffered a HUGE choppy movement problem, which got my entire team killed off. However, there were times where the entire match ran smoothly (a bit odd). I took my chances and lowered the graphics entirely and it still had the same old problems. I tried changing the refreshing rate in-game and it seemed to improve just a little bit. Guild Wars also has an option that configures your graphics for the best performances. I noticed it changed mine to actually a quite decent graphic boost. This was when I concluded that it wasn't necessarily because of the graphics, but the FPS.

I don't know much about FPS. Is there a way to find out my FPS or something? Or do any of you have a suggestion I can take just to improve the performance and kick out the choppiness? I tried most fixes that my friends and other forums mentioned to do, but the game won't budge. Any help would be appreciated...

Here's the spec of my laptop:
Samsung Sens P30
Intel Pentium M Processor (Centrino) 1400 MHz
1.40 GHz
256 MB of Ram
ATI 9200 Mobility Radeon

 

[LU4sTrooper]

I've been playing Guild Wars since the prohecies BETA, and it's evolved quite alot since then. Having played the game on a multitude of systems, I've noticed it can be very strenuos on a computer, and you'll need a pretty decent rig to run it nicely.

I noticed your laptop isn't exactly the best of them all, the RAM is on the minimum of the requirements, and the Graphics chip isn't exactly the newest card around. However there are a few things you can try to improve performance. Read down this list, and do these things in order until you reach a smoother experience.

1. Close all background applications running on your PC (virus scanners etc included) this will free up lots of system resources.

2.On the in-game video options turn off reflections and shadows, as these can bog down older cards

3.On the in-game video options, make sure you turn off anti aliasing, this can be straining on older systems.

4.On the in-game video options lower the texture/terrain qualities, these can hog precious memory.

5.On the in-game video options Lower the resolution, this can yield smoother FPS.

Hopefully these tips will help the game run smoother, tell us how you get on

 

[Mr_Threepwood]

As LU4sTrooper said, you can't really expect tons of performance out of that laptop. However there are some more things that you can do that will help.

1. Optimize windows to minimize memory usage (get rid of some of the un nesessary services).

2. Set a page file that won't change in size, like make the page file minimum 2.5 gigs and the max 2.5 gigs.

3. Defragment your hard drive.

After doing all the things that LU4sTrooper and I have suggested you might get some better performance.