Guild Wars 2

yay i run into problems almost every other day and i have attach the GW2 test thingy for anyone to have a look at.

basically, my question is: i am hitting the “out of memory” error and i want to know how to fix this.

Have you tried turning high rez textures off? That video card only has 978mbs (if i remember correctly from the game advisor file) dedicated vram and GW2 with everything turned up easily pushes over 1 gb.

Change character animation to low. Also, disable “High Res Textures” as Swordbreaker has already suggested.

here is another screenshot of how GW2 is set up on the machine.

@swordbreaker it doesn’t even give me the option to turn it on at least i hope my eyes don’t fool me

once agian, it crashes with what you guys recommmend. ;\

U have a 32bit OS with 8gb of memory installed. Maybe it glitches out because of that. You could try and remove 4gb’s and see what happens, just a idea btw. It is not the first time i have seen out of memory errors in W32 due to page filing glitches etc in several games , especially memory hungry games like MMO’s.

P.S The 8gb is not doing anything anyway in that system. At most it will be able to use 3.5gb but that depends a lot on how much memory there is on your videocard and other devices. In your case you will not have more then 3gb (rounded number) availlable for anything.

Edit: what are your pagefile settings?

It’s a known issue that has been confirmed by ArenaNet. You may be able to get away with running all on low without a crash but other than that installing 64-bit windows would fix it or waiting for a patch.

Smackjack.5071:

U have a 32bit OS with 8gb of memory installed. Maybe it glitches out because of that. You could try and remove 4gb’s and see what happens, just a idea btw. It is not the first time i have seen out of memory errors in W32 due to page filing glitches etc in several games , especially memory hungry games like MMO’s.

P.S The 8gb is not doing anything anyway in that system. At most it will be able to use 3.5gb but that depends a lot on how much memory there is on your videocard and other devices. In your case you will not have more then 3gb (rounded number) availlable for anything.

Edit: what are your pagefile settings?

The extra memory will not hurt anything. It’s just memory that is not being used (might as well pull it). I suspect his\her memory issue is the fact he\she is running a 32bit OS. Even though the OS sees 4GB of memory overall, the per-process limit is 2GB. If GW2 tops out at that. then you’ll get out of memory errors and crashes. So this means that GW2 only has access to 2GB of RAM (This doesn’t even account for other processes eating up RAM as well), the other two is reserved for the system. There is a command you can run to change the kernel memory requirement to allow the per-process limit to access up to 3GB (lowers the system requirement), but I wouldn’t recommend it as it can make your OS unstable.

On the flip side a 64bit OS has a per-process limit of 8TB (IIRC). So an application would have no problem accessing above 2GB of RAM. This same 32bit OS issue came up in Oblivion, Skyrim, TSW, and probably many more games I don’t know about. Computer games have a tendency to have a higher memory need than other applications. My suggestion would be upgrading to a 64bit OS.

@Gareni, Did you build this computer yourself?

GW2 .exe is LAA so the limit will actually be 4gb. In theory the extra 4gb should not be a issue , in practice it can. It is not unthinkable that it is and would not affect his performance at all since it is not being used but it is present.

P.S even on a 64bit os a 32bit non LAA exe will not surpass the 2gb limit.

Smackjack.5071:

GW2 .exe is LAA so the limit will actually be 4gb. In theory the extra 4gb should not be a issue , in practice it can. It is not unthinkable that it is and would not affect his performance at all since it is not being used but it is present.

P.S even on a 64bit os a 32bit non LAA exe will not surpass the 2gb limit.

I was aware that without LAA the limit for a 32bit application on a 64bit OS is still only 2GB. However on a 32bit OS, there is no LAA option for applications, the limit is strictly 2GB.

LAA was the issue with Oblivion and Skyrim. The devs didn’t enable LAA at launch. Some kind gamer (I forget his name) put out a little utility to enable those games for LAA. Then later the Devs patched it to make it LAA.

@rabbitdog yeah i build it however i don’t have access to a 64 bit version of windows so atm i am stuck with what i have. prolly gonna have to buy one sooner or later

You can just grab the iso and use the same key.

im not sure if nercoing my own post is okay but i wanted to give an update on this situation since i got around to updating my W32 to W64.

out of curiousity, do ou guys think it is worthwhile to upgrade my HDD to a 7200rpm one for hte sake of faster boot time or upgrade the ram chip to a 8gb x2?

Yes, you should have an HDD that spins at 7200RPM on a desktop. Anything else is slowing performance down.

Im not sure how much performance increase you will see from upgrading from somthing slower than 7200 rpm. That said i havnt used anything slower than 10k rpm in atleast 5 years and before that i was on 7200rpm.

The best way to see faster boot times and performance is to go from a standard HDD (any rpm) to a SSD (Solid state drive).

SSD are just to expensive as of now,you can get them cheap but dont expect them to last long,and the only increase she would see is a decrease in loading times most of all,it hardly increases fps at all,and will not make her suddenly being able to enable high res chars.if i were you i would just go for a normal hd 1.5 tb or so with 10.000RPM,dont even go for 7200.The 8gb you currently have is more then enough btw,i got 16gb but its more for heavy video editing etc.

Correct SSD’s dont help fps, but they do help reduce and/or stop stuttering from slow access times. Liek loading player armor textures, loading map icons etc.

i’ve experianced this myself when i moved my GW2 game from my HDD to my SSD.

besides the question was
“out of curiousity, do ou guys think it is worthwhile to upgrade my HDD to a 7200rpm one for hte sake of faster boot time or upgrade the ram chip to a 8gb x2?”

I know,thats why i said she shouldnt even bother with 7200 but go for 10krpm,and ignore the ssd as they are too expensive ( IMO) if she does have the money for it,by all means,go for a ssd.But 2×8gb is not necessary and wont do much for this game.

SSDs are not expensive at the moment. You can get a good 128GB model for under $100 I’d imagine. They’re certainly under 100CHF as I look.

You get an amazing amount of performance for that money. I would venture to say that a 10K RPM drive will be more expensive than a good 128GB SSD.

Per gigabyte cost is still higher on SSD’s .BUT if you already have enough ‘space’ and are looking for a drive for perfomance. I.e OS & games. Then the SSD’s easily beat the worth of a fast HDD.

A fast small sized HDD vs a fast small sized SSD. The HDD will be cheaper but the SSD is more worth it since the size issues goes out the window, a 128gb drive is enough for OS + a couple games.. so your just paying for performance. The only time size becomes an issue is if your looking for storage .in which case performance is void , no need for a SSD there.

@Gareni: Another option is to get 2 smaller drives (2x 7200 or 10k rpm) and format them to Raid0. You get the combined size of the drives BUT they act as one and increase each others performance.
The way it works is, both drives are bassicaly cut into many many strips. Then interlaced. Data is split evenly onto each strip. So a single peace of data is split into 2(or more) over the 2 drives. Meaning when reading that 1 peace of data the computer can read from both drives at the same time completing the read in a faster time than trying to read all of said data from 1 drive.

Single drive
|————————| 20 seconds read time.

Raid0
|———-| 14 seconds read time.
|———-|

EDIT: for the sake of comparison:
SSD
|————————| 4 seconds read time

Yea, exactly. So he’d probably be better off buying a 128GB SSD and leaving the old HDD in for storage.

If he wants to buy a replacement HDD he’ll get less performance and spend the same, if not more money.

If you currently have only 1 stick memory in your pc/laptop then adding a second matched stick would allow you to go Dual Channel and increase your overall memory bandwidth, this is more likely to add to the overall performance of the pc/laptop and any games.

Note: Dual Channel requires memory modules to be a matched pair for best performance and stability, by just randomly using two different unmatched modules you could cripple your performance or make the system unstable.

Adding a SSD will make your operating system start up faster and load your game faster but it will not increase your pc processing performance or increase gaming performance.

thanks guys for the help! a lot of reading however judging from everyone comments, it sounds like to me that getting a SSD would only improve overall boot time, which is nice to say the least (my PC boots up in about 20ish seconds), however ram wouldn’t do much for me unless i am going for heavy video editing; which is something i am not doing currently. At best, i would most likely have to upgrade my GPU to the Nvidia GT600 series for overall better FPS. atm, getting a new CPU/mobo is out of the question since they are expensive, or at least the one i want.

However, i think adding in that SSD would be a good start for me and then RAID 1 the other two HDD i currently have.

again guys, tyvm for helping out.

The SSDs do help increase the texture loading times in games, which can get rid of some of the stuttering you encounter sometimes in wide open spaces.

It would be a worthwhile upgrade, imo.

Game textures are loaded into memory before you enter the map, Having an SSD would not increase game performance but would decrease the waiting time at loading screens.

providing you have adequate amounts of memory, you will not see a difference once the loading screen has gone.

Upgrading to a 600 series card could create more problems in the short term as many people have experienced low performance specific to this game with the 600 series.

In my opinion I would say that the GTS450 is what is worth upgrading first as it will be the biggest noticeable change to affect GW2 performance however we still don’t know how well the game is going in terms of optimisations though.

Like I said in my previous post though, if you currently have only 1x 8GB module of ram then you would actually get better performance from 2x 4GB of ram (or 2x 8GB). By having two matching sticks of ram you can enable dual channel mode which will effectively double your memory bandwidth.

I am waiting to upgrade my pc, but I am willing and have the patience (caused by lack of funds :P ) to wait to see what happens in the next few months with GW2. my current pc has went from 10-15 fps in the beta weekends to 25 – 40fps on release to 50 – 60fps to date. So I am confident that a little patience could potentially be rewarding and perhap might save me from upgrading this year and perhaps mean i can look at better upgrades the following year.

Not every single texture is loaded into memory.

I have a 670 and have no FPS issues, as I’ve stated many times. It’s only the minority who have these issues.

upgrading to an ssd would be nice and the prices are only set to keep coming down as the technology matures, they are not unreliable and last for 5+ years longer if you set them up right from the start.

10k rpm mech drives are far to expencive and you would be better off with an ssd as they are frankly far far cheaper.

load times are the only thing that will change though regardless of which storage medium you choose to go with.

upgrading to a 64bit os should be your first port of call, you have more ram than your system can use, download the iso from ‘my digital life’ they offer direct links that work just fine burn to an iso using nero or some other software, plenty of free ones out there cdburnerxp being one that does iso’s use your current licence as it should work on a 64 bit version of the same os, make sure you download the same os windows 7 ultimate or the licence key won’t work. they may ask you to call to input a code, follow the instructions it’s really simple and hassle free and all automated.

graphics card, is fine for the purpose but it wasn’t meant for high performance in gaming, upgrading that opens a whole different issue with power supply changes.

Load times are not the only thing that will help. Overall system performance, not only booting. Every software you have will take advantage of SSD.

GW2 will load faster, going through portals will be faster. rendering data will be much faster. Also your latency and fps will be more stable level. You need to factor in the ability for the network to read the data of your drive.
Some games do very little, others game is a huge leap.
SSD do help GW2. But prices are not going to keep going down. They will stay for the time, but price will climb this year.