Guild Wars 2

The performance of the client is HORRID. The engine is not optimized and you seem to have no plan to optimize it, with answers like “buy a new CPU” everywhere.

My CPU plays EVERY other game on max in 1280×1024 at above 60FPS even in very crowded areas. One game, even as fun as GW2 is, will not make me shell out 300$-400$ for a new motherboard, CPU, and memory.

It’s absolutely unacceptable that a game that was in development for 8 years has no GPU-specific optimizations. It’s even worse that when nVidia releases a driver with notable optimizations for your game, you block theses optimizations.

My suggestion? Work on your game engine before your game goes to the gutter. I personally refuse to play GW2 because the low performance is insanely annoying, and destroys my playing experience. I cannot do ANY PvP because at 24FPS on average I am a sitting duck.

When the beta weekends were going on, ANet stated that the game would run well on a wide range of hardware, blah blah marketing BS. Please honor your word. I WANT to play this game, but I cannot play it and enjoy it at the moment, and I am certainly not buying new hardware for this one game. Just for the record, WoW: 110 FPS constant, BL2: 125FPS constant, Max Payne 3: well above 60FPS, that with each game running on maximum detail. GW2: cannot even break 30FPS in Lion’s Arch on low details.

The problem is your engine, stop blaming the hardware and get to work.

Can you post your hardware specs please?

Ignoring WoW altogether, I’m impressed you somehow have such a vast difference in performance between this and what I assume is Borderlands 2. Have you actually watched your CPU usage while playing to see if that’s the problem? I notice you shift to the GPU at random midway through this post…

Core2 Quad, 4GB DDR2 800MHz, 10KRPM HDD, GTX570 2GB (I had a HD5850 before that, essentially no difference since upgrade…).

The problem is that every other game out there actually uses the GPU for what it’s supposed to do, and GW2 does not, probably out of upper management ignorance/lazyness. Other games spend some time optimizing the engine to use the CUDA processor on NVidia cards, or ATI’s stream technology, etc, which results in most of the rendering being properly performed by the GPU, which is much faster and efficient than the general purpose CPU your computer has.

ANet instead decided to write all these time intensive algos for the CPU, probably thinking that by the time the game came out everyone would have 8 threads i7’s, and it wouldn’t matter, so they wouldn’t have to support two different versions of the same code for NVidia and ATI.

And when NVidia comes up with their own optimizations to offload some of the load to the GPU, ANet patches the client to block these optimizations (like they did in the last beta driver; NVidia claimed 20% increase in performance on the unpatched client). Some contacts at NVidia even claim they sent suggestions and a 100 pages document about optimizing the engine months ago, that ANet decided to shelf.

LameFox:

GW2: between 70%-100% CPU usage most of the time.
BL2: CPU usage rarely ever goes above 50%, and the same holds true for most other properly optimized modern games.

since i use the Intel® Turbo Boost Technology Monitor 2.6, i get better frame rates that without it, lol (GPU does not matter in this game ???)

@Dkatt: is there any proof for these claims? Especially on how the engine works? Or is it just hearsay.

Here’s one proof, straight from NVidia:

http://i.imgur.com/M4YgV.png

Also if you have any technical background related to these things, it’s not exactly hard to see.

GW2 being CPU limited isn’t big news, I’m also active at the Guru3D forums and have a technical background. But your post includes way more claims and details.

There is also this lengthy thread at gw2 guru:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70452-nvidia-drivers-30697/

The fact is, ANet knows what they have to do to make the game run better on pretty much every piece of hardware out there, but they refuse to do it for whatever reason, maybe thinking the game’s hype will carry them until everyone gets a new PC.

You have a major bottleneck with your RAM. 800mhz DDR2 is very outdated, considering cheap low end RAM these days is 1333mhz DDR3. The CPU should deal with the game fine, and a GTX 570 is more than enough juice, although again it’s bottlenecked by the CPU.

You have an very imbalanced system, heavily favouring the GPU there. If possible upgrade the mobo and ram. CPU too if you can.

I believe a sandy i3 processor will out do the core 2 quads despite a lower core count. You can pick those up for approximately £90 if the prices haven’t changed much over the last 3 months. As well as that, a half decent mobo will set you back £70-£80 (look at gigabyte kit). RAM prices are dirt cheap at the moment. I can find you 8gb of 1600mhz DDR3 for as little as £30-35.

I know that’s a £200 overhaul but you will notice the difference big time. For an extra £50 or so you can get an i5 ivy processor too.

Dkatt.3714:

There is also this lengthy thread at gw2 guru:

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/70452-nvidia-drivers-30697/

The fact is, ANet knows what they have to do to make the game run better on pretty much every piece of hardware out there, but they refuse to do it for whatever reason, maybe thinking the game’s hype will carry them until everyone gets a new PC.

I usually don’t take things said by <random internet guy claiming to be a former Nvidia chip designer with a friend at NV> very serious.

Katsu:

The point is, if I had problems on more than one game sure I would upgrade. This rig works PERFECTLY for everything else at the low resolution I play, with everything maxed out.

If one out of the 100 TV channels you get was grainy/choppy, would you change your TV thinking it would make a difference? You wouldn’t even think about it, you just stop watching that channel until the broadcaster fixes it.\

The fact is, I DID upgrade my system, back in beta and at launch I had 2GB DDR2 666 and a HD 5850. The upgrade did NO noticable difference in GW2 (maybe 5 FPS on average), but now I can enjoy every other game at ultra settings, up from medium-high before the upgrade. GW2 stays on crappy looking low.

For the record, RAM is not a bottleneck in terms of speed. RAM becomes a bottleneck really only when you don’t have enough to hold all the textures, no matter the speed, because then the engine has to load the textures from disk and the operating system swaps a lot of data in and out. I have no texture loading issues or stuttering linked to swapping. I have a constantly low FPS issue, which is directly linked to processing power, of CPU and or GPU. The purpose of a GPU is to handle all the complicated specialized 3d transform functions and floating point calculations, that a standard general purpose CPU is not tailored to handle. A game engine is not properly optimized when some of these complicated calculations are not properly directed at the processor that can handle it best.

Oh I understand your point. Sorry if I didn’t make it clear that whilst I agree with you, your system isn’t balanced. Might have came off sounding as if it is all your system. Although I do question why you have a GTX 570 for that resolution lol.

Question though, is it fine until a large fight (aka a world vs world zerg fest)? Because thats the only time my pc slows down really. And when you’re in those situations, have you checked the frame rate to be sure it’s that and not a internet ping issue?

To be honest, GW1 and GW2 have so far been pretty much the only ones I have had absolutely no graphics related problems / crashes for me. (And the list of games I have plaid is very long.)
Take BF3 for example, which works fine (in the broadest possible meaning of the word) for weeks, then starts crashing heavily until I notice that there is an update for my graphics drivers.

I have to agree with Dkatt.3714 1st post.
I do run every game and many other games, he says, just like he says. Just not GW2.
I mean… I am sure that this game is not from the future where every one has an i7 with over 30G RAM. And I sure am not spending over 400€ on a CPU/GPU RAM and Mother just to play ONE game.

Don’t sell the OP down the river because his system is kinda old.

I’m running an i7 2600K, 16GB ram, 2x GTX 580 SLI and a 256GB SSD with only GW2 on it. The game is still very buggy. I run vsync on so I’m locked at 60FPS max. I will stay at 60 most of the time and it will randomly spike down to the 30s whenever I make a quick turn or something. My system monitor never goes above 35% CPU usage and 20% memory usage. Also my GPU’s never go above 30ish % usage. The client definitely needs work.

I bought all this great hardware and the game thinks it’s too good to utilize any of it. lol GW2 get off your high horse and start using all the power I’ve provided you! =P

After reading Wreckdum.8367 I am starting to be sure that Anet has some real issues to solve here…

I can correlate the CPU vs GPU stuff. I built a new computer essentially just because I wanted to play GW2. Quad-core Core i5 3.4 GHz stock, turbo to 4.0 GHz out of the box, 8 MB DDR3, nVidia GFX 560.

I first played the game with nothing but the stock OC on the Core i5. On maximum settings and 1920×1080, I got about 35 frames per second in the Norn starting areas. As the processor was already overclocked, I went on to EVGA Precision GPU overclocking first. I increased my 3DMark 11 benchmark significantly with this, but saw a performance increase in GW2 of only about 5 FPS or so. I went pretty all-out, even upping the voltage on the GPU when I started getting artifacts, and still no truly noticeable performance gains.

Then, I overclocked the Core i5 further from 4.0 GHz to 4.3 GHz, and immediately I’m hitting the 60 FPS frame cap in just about any area except huge WvW zergs.

The CPU appears to definitely have been the limiting factor.

They coded this game to run on the CPU more than use the graphics memory. It sits there and chews the crap out of my quad core til my number 4 pushes past 100 percent and the game crashes on the next port. Memory leak! They try to blame it on a conflict w nvidia drivers … nope…. I can run Diablo 3 ALLLLLLLL day and browse like a fiend w/o a problem.

It’s an MMO. They’re all more CPU than GPU intensive because of the number of people playing it.

That said yes, Anet does appear to not have optimised this game very well, although i’m finding it playable still.

Interesting.

I’m in the process of building a new desktop rig (i7 3770K, 16GB DDR3 1600, nVidia GTX Geforce 680) and I wonder how it’ll run on there.

I’ve been running it on this laptop from like 2 years ago and everything is on low settings and it keeps causing irrecoverable black/blue screen errors when I go near certain areas (flowing water generally, or too much action on the screen, or a few other certain scenarios), and I’m running a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 on here. (Dual core 2.53 GHz, 4 GB RAM)

Granted, this laptop isn’t even close to top end gear, but it should be able to play it without these crashes with everything on low settings. (Keeps telling me to update the driver, but every time I tell it to update the driver it says it has the most up to date already on there.)

That is all kinda weird, seriously.

My system :

CPU i5 750 from 2009 working at 3.30Ghz, Ram 8Gb mix´d, due that its only running at 1000Mh and a 6870HD non OC.

Playing 24/7 at 2560 by 1440p at custom settings (2x changes) :

With that change, i gain´d +15fps. And if you do the same with the Reflection (only Sky), you get another 5fps, in conclusion -> everything at ultra/high, except for Shaders and Reflections (medium) and i get 60fps in most PvE zones.

40fps+ on average during Wv3, going down to 20fps when i got some tickets for the next Zerg-Band-Festival at Stonemist Castle.

Max:
http://imgur.com/c7x6J
Custom:
http://imgur.com/KgVLV

I’m only running a core i5 2550k with 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM and I can be in wvw with 50+ people on screen going nuts and I don’t see a single frame drop. Side note: I don’t overclock anything either.

The suspicious thing is that my laptop runs some old, but decent, hardware, dual core etc yet it has a lot of trouble even in low-end situations. The range of “can run without lag” is very strange with this game. Most games, if you lower the settings a ton, you usually see a huge spike in performance yet my laptop lags like no other in wv3 even with low settings and few people around. I haven’t run many tests on it, but I’m willing to put my money on the 4gb ram vs 16gb ram that are causing such disparity between my older laptop and this new machine.

@MilitiaMasterV – Due to my setup. I’m certain your new machine will run without any blips since it could eat mine for breakfast.