Anyone running Guild Wars 2 with similar specs?

I have a gaming PC and my wife has inherited the Alienware. She wants to start playing GW2 with me. I can't afford to upgrade or buy a new PC and I'm curious if anyone is running GW2 on spec to similar to mine, and how playable is it?

I know she wont get to max it, but I'm hoping she can at least play on an enjoyable settings.

Specs: Q 820 1.73ghz 8 gigs ram Radeon 5850

 

Should be able to play it on high settings without any problems. You can always use sapphire trixx to oc the gpu to an easy 750/1100.

 

An update. It runs like complete crap . I'm getting 10-15fps on low settings. All drivers up to date. I'm surprised by this. I can play BF3 and Skyrim easily enough. Perhaps there are some issues with GW2 and Radeon that I'm unaware of.

 

Double check to make sure that you didnt accidently turn on stealth mode, also make sure you are in high performance. While gaming check what temps through hwinfo64 you are hitting and see if the gpu is being throttled at all through gpu-z.

 

Hey Shaun, I have similar specs to yours and from the settings, the most taxing feature is Shaders. With Shaders set to low, I can get upto 60 fps is open areas and around 30 to 60 inside cities, with Shaders set to High, I get 40 to 60 in open areas and 10 to 30 fps in the cities (Lion's Arch especially). Also you will find that the fps sinks to 5 to 10 when zerging in WvW, this is because of the increased poly count and lack of optimization from Arenanet's part. But don't worry, Arenanet has been improving and optimizing GW2 since the beta and now everything is bearable.

My advice - set shaders to low, set shadows to off and play in fullscreen mode. Lowering the resolution does not help much.

Also, once in-game, turn the stealth mode on for 5 secs and then switch it off. Notice the difference

 

I play GW2 with an i5 540m CPU and a 5850m GPU. The game seems to play pretty well for me on mostly low settings. I sometimes use Catalyst Control Center to bump the GPU clock settings up to 680, but it doesn't really seem like that makes much of a difference. I use low settings for most things though, and I have Anti Aliasing, Post Processing, and Reflections turned off. My textures are set at Medium and I set the Frame Limiter to 60. The game is still playable on lower settings. Maybe you just need to turn things down a bit.

 

I tried messing with some settings and managed to find a pretty slick balance between performance and graphic quality. Maybe you could try try them and see how they work for you. Animation:High, Anti Aliasing: None, Environment: High, LOD Distance: Med, Reflection: None, Textures: Med, Render Sampling: Native, Shadows: None, Shaders: Med, Post Processing: None. I should also add that Throttlestop made a noticeable difference for me. With these settings, a GPU clock of 680 (probably not doing anything), and Throttlestop on, my FPS stay out of the teens in Lion's Arch. I get between 40-60 FPS when I'm wandering about on my own in the environment.

 

It ran great on my M15x with an i5 and 260M. Set shadows to low and turn off aa/af.

 

I forgot about stealth mode! That's all it was. Thanks. Now my wife can play.