Guild Wars, despite its low system requirements, still requires a decent bit of horsepower to run without a hitch. Any game with loads of people online walking in and out of view can tax a computer's performance. To help you maintain consistently playable frame rates, we've gone ahead and identified all the major bottleneck sources where performance could break down.
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Benchmarking a multiplayer online role-playing game can be tricky as you have to be very careful about where you go and what you do to create a reproducible test. In Guild Wars, whenever you enter a combat zone, you're not playing with the rest of the world; you play either by yourself or with a few chosen teammates. We chose to go solo in a nice open spot that we felt would represent the game. Once we chose our spot, we had the character spin in circles for a full minute and recorded the results with Fraps.
The test certainly isn't the most taxing scenario, but it is reproducible. With that in mind, the numbers might be slightly higher than what you would experience in town where 50 people could be wandering around, or while playing with a few teammates in a creature-filled area.
Guide Sections
Guild Wars isn't a terribly demanding game for computers to run, but tweaking some of the settings and an upgrade or two will help you get the most of your online experience. We've divided our guide into four sections: video card, game settings, CPU, and memory. In each section, we report performance results with a dose of our own in-game experience mixed in.
Game Settings
With most modern machines you'll be able to set everything to high and enjoy the scenery. But if you can count the dust rings on the inside of your computer, you might want to tone down some of the quality settings to improve frame rates. We experimented with the different in-game graphical settings to see which options affected performance the most.
Graphics
Guild Wars has some surprisingly low hardware requirements. Those of you out there with a GeForce 2 GTS could theoretically play the game, but we wouldn't recommend it. In our tests, we used everything from the GeForce 7800 GTX to the GeForce 4 MX 440. In total, we used 10 video cards across two test beds.
CPU
Guild Wars only needs a Pentium III 800MHz CPU to run. We don't have a test bed that has that slow of a CPU, but we did use our Athlon 64 4000+ running at 2.4GHz to test Guild Wars. To see how well the game scales, we reduced the speed of our Athlon 64 4000+ down to 2GHz and then further down to 1.6GHz to see how the CPU affected performance.
Memory
We varied the amount of system RAM (256MB, 512MB, 1GB) on our test bed to see if it had an effect on frame rates. We also got a hold of some low latency Corsair memory to see if higher quality RAM helped performance.
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