Guild Wars 2

I’m using a laptop that uses a Geforce 9400M. On the Geforce site, it says the 9400M doesn’t support Windows 7. My game can run on this laptop but has huge frame drops randomly throughout playing and forces me to restart Guild Wars 2 about 5-10 times per play session. I have the latest drivers, am plugged into the wall, and have changed my control panel settings so it’s set to High Performance. Would switching to Windows XP R2 make my game play better since my GPU is more compatible? Or since my GPU isn’t great enough to run the game, will reinstalling the OS be in vain?

Doing some research, some people have suggesting attempting to use the drivers here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

According to this site: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/nvidia-geforce-9400m-9600m-gt-windows-7-does-not/606e1b45-8791-48b2-ba85-059cd4c119ed

You need to modify the .inf file.

I find that generally, WDDM-based drivers tend to have lower FPS in comparison to XPDM-based drivers, simply due to XPDM drivers commonly being kernel-mode and directly only using the video card’s RAM for texture data, whereas WDDM is user-mode and copies video card memory into system memory as well (on DX9 games, which GW2 is).

ProphetSword.5427:

Doing some research, some people have suggesting attempting to use the drivers here: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

According to this site: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/nvidia-geforce-9400m-9600m-gt-windows-7-does-not/606e1b45-8791-48b2-ba85-059cd4c119ed

You need to modify the .inf file.

Thanks for the answers guys. I check out the first link and I couldn’t find a driver that supported my GPU. I’m not sure what else to do to get this thing running smoothly. What’s weird is my game runs completely fine when it first boots up. After about a minute of playing, my FPS goes from and average of 25 to 8-10. I then restart Guild Wars 2 and it works fine again. This process repeats until I get a client that plays with no lag. It’s like I need to reroll my game client. I don’t understand this behavior. If my laptop and run the game at 25 FPS on a “good roll”, why not all the time? This behavior has nothing to do with what’s going on in the game too. I’ve done dungeons no issue, but sometimes I just log in and am no where near anything, and it lags…

To have intermitten good game play makes me believe that there is somthing tasking the processor or video card in back ground.Try running task manager with the performance tab up when your taking a hit check the cpu usage see if its being overloaded and try running a video card monitor software for the same thing but more for how much memory usage is being used on the card to if its going over the memory amount that on the card.

the nvidia 9400m is a legacy device now on windows 7/8 and will use the wddm drivers.

If Nvidia aren’t doing drivers and your manufacturer isn’t doing updated drivers then you have to just accept that.

laptops were not meant to last more than a few years at best older laptops last longer due to far higher standards than current laptops, which is probably why your’s still works.

in any event you have limited options due to it being a laptop, you can’t upgrade the graphics or the cpu or cooling or the motherboard, so you have to either accept what you have and go with it or change to either a new gaming laptop or a desktop.

the issues you are seeing may be a result of the age of the machine as well which doesn’t help matters, gw2 is not exactly a light game and isn’t the best optimised either, and that’s obvious when a many with dedicated gpu’s are struggling for better frame rates.

Thanks for the input everyone. To Brewnix, I have checked Task Manager and the only processes running are the bar-bones of Windows and Guild Wars 2. I did a fresh installation of Windows 7 before and have installed nothing but Firefox on the system. Whenever I have GW2 open, my CPU usage goes to about 40%. I don’t know what my GPU is at but like I said, if I can run fine occasionally, why not all the time? It’s strange, it’s like I need to warm up my computer before I can play the game. It’s almost down to a science. It take about 30 mins of starting and restarting GW2 and “rerolling” the client until it works. The 30 mins it pretty consistant; not literally at 30 mins every time, but close.

I probably should have mentioned this before but I’m running GW2 on Windows 7 Ultimate on a MacBook Pro from 2009 using Bootcamp. I have a 2.53GHz dual core, 4 GB RAM, and the Nvidia Geforce 9400m graphics card. Does anyone else have this same setup?