Now I’m not really the gaming type, but I do play the occasional games when I’ve got the spare time. Trouble is, my gaming computer isn’t really with me very regularly and most of the time I use a laptop. 

And my laptop, while perfectly powerful (Intel Pentium Dual Core @ 1.73ghz per core, 1GB RAM – which I hope to upgrade, Vista Home Premium) doesn’t really cope with games as it has a SiS Mirage 3+ Intergrated card (SiS M672MX).

The most common game I play is called Guild Wars. It’s a MMORPG that is installed and ran on your computer, rather than playing in a web browser. It’s a great game. You pay a one off fee like any other game you would buy in a shop, and its yours to keep forever. You can buy expansions which unlock new “worlds” but there’s nothing to force you to do so.

Anyhow, if you run an intergrated graphics card or older card, you can run Guild Wars (you can force it to run) but it won’t look particularly good even on the minimal settings. The problem I had was that you got weird diagonal lines coming from non NPCs and that characters did not look correct (almost as if it had corrupted). But if you have these problems or just poor performance, why not try the following.

Find a shortcut that links to the Gw.exe file. There should be one either on the desktop or on the Start Menu. Right click it, and click Properties. Now where it says target change it to:

“E:\Program Files\Guild Wars\Gw.exe” -dx8 -noshaders

E: ofcourse should be replaced to the letter of the drive Guild Wars is saved to. It’s probably C. Also, if you haven’t installed Guild Wars in the Program Files directory, you’ll need to locate where you installed.

Once you’ve done that, click OK. Those settings you added will force Guild Wars to run in DirectX 8 mode and turn off Pixel Shading. It will improve your frame rate as well as remove any issues with graphics rendering. 

You should notice a reasonable improvement. Some features with graphics will be removed, such as some Resurrection Shrines not looking the same. But it does mean you can run Guild Wars on older graphics cards.

Bare in mind these “mods” will only work on Guild Wars, so don’t try them on any other games. Just thought it may be useful to anyone who plays Guild Wars.