Guild Wars Forum

Hi,

first post here. Sorry for my rusty English.

I'm trying to play Guild Wars with CG 7.1.2 on a MBP with Mac OS 10.5.5 (C2D 2.2 GHz, 2 Gb RAM, nVidia 8600M GT/128).

It works almost perfectly ... no need to use the switches. But ... wichever level of detail or resolution I choose the game suffers hiccup. The behaviour is similar to the one you can experience with serius connection latency or with a really fragmented hard drive.

If I rotate the camera around my toon, the framerate suffer the first time and then become smooth. But when I start running ... the hiccup becomes a show-stopper. It seems to me that the graphic rendering is not an issue here (no glitches, pretty good framerate ... 20-40 FPS at max detail).

Maybe it's because GW is self-contained on a single giant file and CG has some issues with the file-system I/O ... is it possible?

It's possible. Make sure you have no other apps using CPU or RAM. There may be an issue with virtual memory paging.

Make sure you haven't configured your hard drives to spin down when possible (Energy Saver pane of System Preferences).

However, it's possible the problem is something fundamental like compiling shaders. DirectX allows shaders to be precompiled and saved as binary objects which can be switched in and out very quickly. OpenGL requires that some kinds of shaders are recompiled from text every time they are switched. This can cause noticeable pauses.

What hardware do you have?

The hardware is described in my first post ... I'm going to add more RAM (4 Gb) and to change the internal HD with a bigger and faster one (7200 RPM/16 Mb cache) in the next few weeks.

I've tried GW with the new 7.2 release ... the game renders without glitches (as it did with the previous version) but the hiccups are the same as before :(

Anyway, hope is not lost :)