Your Hardware and Guild Wars!

Triplexx · 05-24-2008, 05:08 PM

All credits for this goes to Gabrial Heart of guildwars guru!!!

PS: The prices in this guide is outdated by now.

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Your Hardware and Guild Wars.
Hopefully this guide will be an evolving one, but it's premise is to help folks with a frame of reference when buying a computer or when having issues with Guild Wars running on their current hardware. This guide will not however deal with solving any specific issues, but will have some key points, where hardware is a concern with game play.
First some terms and descriptions:
FPS (Frame Per Second): This is the speed in which your screen draws each step of animation. Not unlike frames of a filmed movie, each frame of the game is a picture. The rate in which it draws each frame is the difference between an enjoyable gaming experience or one of frustration and screen lag. Frame rates around 30 fps makes for fluid game play, each character moves without jagged stepping and seems more like real-life movement. You can find out our FPS by using fraps, Teamspeak overlay, etc. or using the -perf command at the end of gw.exe by getting the properties of the alias and add -perf to the target location box.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit): The real heart of 3D gaming. This processor is the central unit for processing all screen draws and directly affects FPS. Even with a slower processor, you can easily expect to see a very playable game with a good card. Check out this thread for details on deciding on cards [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect): This is an internal slot located direct on the motherboard. A standard PCI slot is the slowest slot currently available. Although the bus (the lines that interconnect each component to each other) allows 64-bits of data to pass through them, they typically only handle 32-bits per clock cycle. Most of the newest cards can run between 33 and 66 MHz yielding 133-166 MBps (MegaBytes per second) in one cycle. You can connect many different types of cards to in this slot, including a Video card (GPU), Networking Cards, Hard Drive Controllers (SCSI, ATA, SATA) and so on.
PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect-Express): Like the name implies, this is a PCI at hyper speed. This slot runs both ways (serial) at or above double the rate of original PCI, reaching speeds of 200-400 MBps up to around 4 Gbps (Gigabits per second). Typically described as a 16x bus with direct memory access. This is the fastest bus/slot available to date.
AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port): There are 3 flavors of this slot and is specifically developed for GPU's, a 2x, 4x and 8x, with a throughput of 533 MBps, 1Gbps, 2Gbps respectively. This bus is only a single lane, again one with direct memory access (unlike PCI), meaning it doesn't need to goto the processor to access RAM.
MOBO (Motherboards): So many to choose from when building yourself a PC. Look for PCI-E slot(s), FSB speeds of 566 or above, RAID controller, SATA-100 or better, 16-32-bit sound EAX, 100-1000 BaseT Ethernet, Dual-Channel DDR2 or better and making sure you have the correct socket socket/CPU combo. Tackling building your own PC is not to the weak of heart, electronically illiterate folks. But you can save yourself a nice sum of cash going this route.
CPU (Central Processing Unit): The heart of the computer, this unit has a say in every process the computer executes. Most, if not all 3D games are not as dependent on CPU speeds as one might think. Most of the intensive processing that is utilized is at the GPU. There are 3 flavors we will be looking into among 2 manufactures. Intel's Pentium series comes in many flavors as does AMD, but we will be touching on Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Hyper-threaded and Pentium- D (dual core), Both Pentium 4's have lower level models, such as the Celeron and Centrino (mobile/laptop). AMD has the Athlon 64, 64 FX, 64 X2(dual core), Sempron and the Turion (mobile/laptop) processors. Remember though, Guild wars will run quite decently on a 1GHz machine with a good GPU. So processor choice isn't as vital to a gaming machine, unless we talk about doing multiple things, while guild wars is running. i.e. Web browsing, Teamspeak, Checking mail, etc.
RAM (Random Access Memory): A very vital aspect to gaming is RAM, but bigger isn't always better. Guild wars can run on a 256 MB machine but at or around 1 GB is typically where it will cap out on performance. A 2 GB machine isn't going to speed up Guild Wars playing tremendously, if you even notice a difference at all. Again there are many flavors, but the most vital issues you should check out is single-versus-dual channel and slot speeds/configuration.
Hard Drives IDE/ATA, SATA, SCSI (Advanced Technology Attachment, Serial-ATA, and Small Computer System Interface): These storage devices depend on spinning platters and RPM's (rotations per minute), caches (1 MB or greater), seek times (lower is better) and transfer rates are specs to look out for. Currently SATA is the fastest around, offering 1.5Gbps transfer rates and seek times under 4.6 milliseconds, which can be further improved using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configurations. Many newer MOBO's (motherboards) support RAID configurations at levels 0 or 1 or 0+1. RAID requires the purchase of 2 drives of equal size and speed to take full advantage of performance improvements. RAID level 5 configurations are the most common, but they are typically only supported by added a controller in a PCI slot, although there are a few MOBO's that do support level 5. Hard drives deal with loading times in game play as well as lag when RAM is short through a system call ed Virtual Memory. If there isn't enough room in RAM or the system decides to buffer unused latent data from RAM to the hard drive for later use, data gets shuffled back and forth, this task falls on hard drive speeds and transfer rates. The entire game and all applications unused are stored here till launched.
Networking (Wireless, Ethernet, USB-Cable Connections, DSL, Modem): When you purchase an internet connection, you have the subscriber basic options, through your local cable company using the cable-tv signal as a carrier, or through your local phone service provider via a modem (dial-up) or DSL. Although you can purchase a dial-up connection from many providers, DSL is typically a phone service provider option. There are exceptions to this, yet typically those alternative providers *buy* time on the local phone company lines to offer you DSL, so in some form or another you may have to deal directly with your local phone company. Cable is usually the highest speed alternative to the three, with DSL coming in second and dial-up last.
Wireless usually deals with your in home connection(except in cellular situations) to a router. This router *talks* to the modem (cable, dsl or dial-up) and distributes the data through the *air*. Ethernet routers, which often are provided with wireless options, use wired cables with 8-pin connectors and offer the best possible transfers even @ 10-baseT (10 Mbps) at the cost of limited mobility. Lastly, many cable and DSL modems come with USB connectors that connect directly with the PC and are only limited in bandwidth by other devices connected, like mice, keyboards, external hard drives/cd writers, some sound systems, etc. USB can give you a lower cost option to share an internet connection by using a PC with internet connection sharing enabled. By plugging in the USB modem to the PC that's sharing and using a crossover cable to connect another PC via ethernet, you can by-pass the need for a router. You can also use a hub (a passive router) to connect multiple PC's to the internet from that one sharing PC. Hubs are often cheaper and much easier to set-up, just plug in and go.
Minimum System Requirements:

Windows XP/2000/ME/98

Intel Pentium III 800 Mhz or AMD Athlon +1000

256 MB RAM

CD-ROM Drive

2 GB Available HDD Space

ATI Radeon 8500 or GeForce 3 or 4 MX Series Video Card with 32MB of VRAM

16-bit Sound Card

Internet connection (56k dial-up)

---Cost -$200-500---

Although this system will let you play the game, it's only going to play it, mostly you can expect between 5-15 FPS, @ the bare minimum graphics settings. Expect to have exceptional screen lag!
Recommended System Requirements:

Windows XP/2000

Intel Pentium III 1GHz or AMD Athlon +1200

512 MB RAM

CD-ROM Drive

2 GB Available HDD Space

ATI Radeon 9000 or GeForce 4 Ti Series Video Card with 64MB of VRAM

16-bit Sound Card

Internet connection (cable or DSL)

---Cost -$1000 to $1500---

As you can see a Pentium III is sufficient, but looking at the RAM and video cards is the key to where your going to see GW perform like a champ. You can expect 25-40 FPS with this set-up at medium-high to highest settings.
Strongest Performer:

Windows XP/2000

Intel Pentium-D (dual core) 2Ghz or better : AMD Athlon xp +3200 or better OR go crazy and buy a $500 conroe :)

1 GB RAM Dual Channel DDR2 or better using 2-512MB Chips with the same specs/manufacture

CD-ROM Drive

2 GB Available HDD Space (SATA-150 in RAID 0 config @ 10k RPM)

ATI Radeon 1800/1900/x800xt or Nvidia nForce 4 SLI x16 @ 256-512MB of VRAM

32-bit Sound Card with EAX (blaster, audigy or better)