Guild Wars

What works

installer - patcher - playing the game

What does not

The game has a really poor performance compared to playing it in Windows. (AMD Sempron 2600+, 1gb RAM, NVidia 5800GT - 5-32 fps). Also many graphical glitches like wrong textures on player models or textures are at the lowest resolution an get sharper while walking across them. GLSL has to be disabled or the performance is really really low and the graphic glitches appear. Turning the details of the game down had no reaction to the performance - no more or less fps.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Many things because this game is freaking big.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

NVidia driver version 177.67. Had to deactivate GLSL. I testet the game with the highest and lowest details without any difference in the performance.

NOTE: Guild Wars usually doesn't require any special settings to get working. The advice listed below is only for those who require help installing, running, or troubleshooting Guild Wars.

Installation:

Simply use the installer found at guildwars.com. Unzip the installer and run it using Wine:

wine GwSetup.exe

Running:

WINEDEBUG=-all wine "C:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe"

WINEDEBUG=-all will stop the flood of fixme messages generated from normal use. If you require debugging, omit this option.

Troubleshooting:

• Make sure 3D works in native applications before blaming Wine. Try glxgears, or a 3D game such as etracer or supertuxkart.
• Use the latest version of Wine. Type 'wine --version' to check.
• Use the latest version of your graphics driver.
• Try different versions of Windows in winecfg, such as Windows XP and 98.
• Under the winecfg Graphics tab, try experimenting with the window settings if you have window/resizing issues. It is recommended to run the game in a virtual desktop for performance and other reasons.
• Turn off Compiz Fusion or KDE desktop effects.
• "Guild Wars has encountered an unrecoverable graphics driver error and must terminate" (bug #12870) is caused by fglrx, not Wine.
• OSS graphics drivers (aka radeon/radeonhd/nouveau/intel) will provide poor performance with wine games, it is recommended to use the binary nvidia driver or fglrx for ATI.

If you are having graphics issues, use regedit to try some registry keys:

• UseGLSL=disabled (Use this if you have a low end graphics card, Intel graphics, or if you are having performance problems.)
• DirectDrawRenderer=opengl (Already the default with up to date versions of Wine)
• OffscreenRenderingMode=fbo (Already the default with up to date versions of Wine)
• Multisampling=enabled (Already the default with up to date versions of Wine)
• RenderTargetLockMode=auto

Appending these flags to the run command may help you:

• -dx8 - Uses DirectX 8
• -noshaders - Disabled shaders, along with -dx8 this will improve performance (but make the game look pretty bad)
• -dsound - Uses DirectSound
• -nosound - Disables sound

Other tips:

• In Options > Graphics, set the refresh rate to 60hz or the highest you have listed that is within your monitors range and turn on vsync for improved responsiveness in some cases.

Using FBO as the ORM crashes with fglrx drivers

This is not a Wine bug, it is a fglrx bug. Please do not open a bug for this, it will just be closed.

See the fglrx bug for more details, or check the HOWTO for this app for a workaround.