Guild Wars 2

I was wondering if anyone here has any personal experience using SoftXpand with GW2.

For those who don’t know what it is, it’s software that basically allows you to attach 2 mice, 2 keyboards, and 2 monitors to a single PC, and run 2 workstations off of it. What this means for us is that 2 people could run their own instance of GW2, each using their own account, off of one computer:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hUsQXMkgd2o

In the above YouTube vid, a couple is running a dungeon together using 1 PC with SoftXpand. They say there’s no lag, or at least no more than if they were each using a separate PC. The video is blurry, so it’s hard to tell how much lag there really is. They do say that each of their monitors has its own GPU.

Has anyone used this? I’m currently the only one in my house who plays GW2, but some of my family members are interested too and I’d like to be able to play with them without shelling out for a whole 2nd gaming PC. Sounds too good to be true though.

Correction to the above: the couple in the vid is running WvW, not a dungeon.

Bump. No one has used this w/ GW2?

Nope. Have you looked at the minimum spec required for doing this sort of thing? Alternatively just play with the options window opened and make sure vsync is off and look at the average FPS you are getting. Will you be okay with it if it drops by half(probably more)? If you are used to a certain FPS then dropping below a certain threshold can make things feel sluggish.

Then there is memory usage. GW2 usually uses around 1.1G for me. Does your system have that much to spare?

For CPU you are probably looking at a minimum of a quad core.

Hmm … there is a free trial. That is probably simplest.

I’m planning to take advantage of the free trial. But because I’ll need a 2nd monitor, GPU, keyboard and mouse to even try it, I’d prefer to know a little more about this setup beforehand.

While it makes sense to assume that FPS would be cut in half using this software, I don’t think that’s what happens. In this YouTube vid: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=exK5DHAF0ow a guy demos SoftXpand with WoW. In a highly populated area, both his workstations were getting ~45 FPS, while in less populated areas he said (didn’t show) he was getting ~60 FPS. He didn’t mention how many FPS he was getting before using the SoftXpand setup, and I’m aware that WoW is going to be less graphics intensive than GW2. But I doubt that this software was cutting his FPS in half, unless he really was getting ~90 FPS in busy areas and ~120 FPS in normal areas using a regular setup. I think giving each monitor its own GPU allows for FPS to stay within a normal range.

Dont want to bring this up from the dead but I sent in multiple emails concerning this and from what they say is that it can get you banned. This software does work like in the video but to achieve that you need a pretty capable machine and for most games, two copies of the game. I have a capable PC and I have one GW2 account but my younger brother also got one.

PC specs
Intel I5-3570K @ 4.20GHz
16GBs of RAM
Nvidia GTX 660 TI on primary monitor
AMD 5830 on secondary monitor

We have used SoftXpand to play Borderlands 2 on Mid-High with PhysX on high at about 50 to 60 with Vsync on.

I want to use SoftXpand to play GW2 with my brother for two reason.
1) I dont need to skype or use anything to communicate when he is in the same room as me.
2) I dont need to buy and replace the computer that he has been trying to play GW2 on. (It’s a cheap early 2008 Dell barely hitting the minimum specs for the game)

My 2 eurocents: 100% legal. It follows the basic rule of one keypress = one action.

But personally I’d just use 2 PCs instead. It’s cheaper to buy 2 WvW capable PCs than 1 PC capable of playing WvW twice.