Guild Wars 2

The issue is the engine itself and the use of Umbra occlusion. GW2 uses a modified GW1 engine that utilizes 3 heavy threads. GW2 cannot handle large scale events with a large amount of people. Compound that with Umbra occlusion technology not working as advertised and you have a significant problem.
I don’t think that there is really anything except minor tweaks unless they figure out how to occlude the world sea reflections underground or rewrite the engine.

The game runs fine on any cheap gaming rig. Now if you’re talking a computer with no quality gaming parts… this is an age old problem. You have to be careful what you buy because there are plenty of lame companies that will sell you a junk parts computer because they just don’t care.

Your best bet is to go to hardware websites and check in the forums what kind of parts someone would build a cheap gaming rig with right now.

WVW is big part of the game, and it needs some serious optimization.

Pure Heart.1456:

For all the FPS hungry people out there, I would suggest going out and mowing a few lawns on weekends, save up your money and buy a decent graphics card—Nvidia GTX580 or higher.

TurtleofPower.5641:

The game runs fine on any cheap gaming rig. Now if you’re talking a computer with no quality gaming parts… this is an age old problem. You have to be careful what you buy because there are plenty of lame companies that will sell you a junk parts computer because they just don’t care.

Your best bet is to go to hardware websites and check in the forums what kind of parts someone would build a cheap gaming rig with right now.

ITT: people who know nothing about GW2 performance issues and/or dont bother reading the thread.

I m sad there was nothing said on performance improvements in the road map nor have we even gotten a response in over 2 months of a moderator promising us one.

I read all four pages of this, and I just kept seeing “get a Mac” over and over again…

Pure Heart.1456:

For all the FPS hungry people out there, I would suggest going out and mowing a few lawns on weekends, save up your money and buy a decent graphics card—Nvidia GTX580 or higher.

That’s funny because i have 570 overclocked way passed the stock 580 performance and i still get poor fps. But here’s better, i have a friend who has two 680’s playing in SLi and guess how much fps he’s getting in wvw? 20 lol exactly like me. I know its been said that anet optimized the game couple of times but its certainly not noticeable… Why do i lose 20fps by turning reflection on? Maybe losing 5fps would make sense but 20 is just funny and extremely poorly optimized. This game isn’t even tessallated/DX11 and runs so poorly, what a shame.

i have a 1600 dollar self built rig and i can get down to 15 fps in some wvw fights, also areas with certaint effects significantly reduce my fps, like the zone where you fight the shatterer,even when the zergs/dragon isn’t their, or mystic forge in lions arch (not as bad), some places with similair “effects” in shatterer area, but in orr.

With
i5 3570k
8gb vengence 1600mhz
7950 oc’ed to 1200mhz clockspeed

Is there really nothing that arenanet has to announce on this yet?

Caveth.3268:

Is there really nothing that arenanet has to announce on this yet?

I too think it’s time they stop dodging this bullet and let us know if they plan on bringing optimizations out of the years 1990’s and into the 2000’s.

Just a suggestion for you people: Make new threads, and make them specific. Optimization can mean a hundred different things, and you are all talking about different things. Make a topic for each of them – That will most likely increase the quality of your discussions and reduce the OMG I HAVE DIS SICK OC’D CPU, IDK WHAT IT DOES BUT ITS AWESOME, BUT WHY IS GW2 SO BAD crap to a minimum. Track down the issues and make the topics: “Support for DX10/11”, “Bad performance: Reflections”, or whatever your specific concern is.

Toning down particle effects is in the works. I’m hoping the game will run a little smoother after that. Updating my ATI drivers. and going from a 20mbps to 30mbps connection has boosted my performance, and made the game run smoother for me.

This game is terribly optimized, I hope Anet is continuing to work on the performance.

Blissified.8369:

i have a 1600 dollar self built rig and i can get down to 15 fps in some wvw fights, also areas with certaint effects significantly reduce my fps, like the zone where you fight the shatterer,even when the zergs/dragon isn’t their, or mystic forge in lions arch (not as bad), some places with similair “effects” in shatterer area, but in orr.

With
i5 3570k
8gb vengence 1600mhz
7950 oc’ed to 1200mhz clockspeed

aren’t you frying dat dere gpu?

The game is optimized, as optimized as it will ever be.
The engine is old and wasn’t designed with this use in mind. It wasn’t designed with performance in mind either.

Even when Anet claims they made the engine, reality is they probably didn’t build it from scratch. They bought licenses, used parts from here and there, acquired some rights, mixed in some middleware and put together a game engine.

The problem here is that all of these parts were inherently created with maintainability, re-usability and abstraction in mind, NOT performance. To get great performance you need to get low and get dirty. Very low-level near to the hardware.

Ask John Carmack how to get good performance, that guy knows one thing or two.

The flaws in the engine weight heavily on the CPU. Upgrading your GPU, will do little to benefit you in highly populated areas(Dragon events, cities and WvW) which is where the game suffers most, though it probably will make the rest of the game smoother, specially nowadays that most areas are near empty.

Current top of the line CPUs cannot keep up with the crazy loads the game demands. They would if the game divided that load into multiple cores, but that’s not the case.
Future CPUs likely will not be able to keep up with the game either because 1- They appear to be shifting away from focusing on performance to power efficiency and 2- CPU makers have chosen to increase the number of cores rather than the performance of each.

TMLSS: The game is a slideshow and you are screwed.

I’ve got a radeon hd 7870. Its not the best card in the world but its certainly upper end.

I get 45 frames max. Want to know why? Its because I have an amd fx 8350 in a game that is heavily cpu dependant yet at the same time uses little to none of multithreading. I can run games like battlefield or crysis at 100 frames maxed out. Yet here I get 5 frames in big fights.

Honestly with the way this game utilizes hardware my computer may as well be 300 dollars rather than the 700 I put in

This game uses old engine, so it cannot be optimized more, cause it’s optimized already. Why Anet decided to use GW1 engine as a base, I have no idea. But all you see now is very optimized graphics of old engine. Old engine is the reason you never see mounts here, and the reason WvW is lagging like hell. The problem is not in your machines, it’s in game. That’s why you cannot compare GW2 with other new MMOs, it’s irrelevant. At the same time you can play GW2 with very crappy GPU, so old engine has some priorities too.

I run everything fine on low settings whenever I’m doing temples, dragons or WvW. My eyes adjust and don’t even notice the poor graphics quality after 5 minutes. You can’t compare an MMO’s graphics and rendering capability with an FPS, an FPS game doesn’t need to track the data of hundreds of skills, conditions, boons, combo finishers and hundreds of players in bottlenecked areas with no multi-core support.

What Ryan and Ikcen said.
“Upgrading” from my PhenomII 965(comparable to fx 8xxx) to an i5 3570K pretty much doubled my performance into stable 60FPS and 30+ @LA & WvW.

Planed to upgrade from my trusty HD7750 too, but I´m kinda happy with things now.
And basically I´m afraid to rock the boat, lest this diva-client decides it doesn´t like my hardware anymore.

Elthurien.8356:

I run everything fine on low settings whenever I’m doing temples, dragons or WvW. My eyes adjust and don’t even notice the poor graphics quality after 5 minutes. You can’t compare an MMO’s graphics and rendering capability with an FPS, an FPS game doesn’t need to track the data of hundreds of skills, conditions, boons, combo finishers and hundreds of players in bottlenecked areas with no multi-core support.

Man, sry for this, I know I’m rude, but you are idiot -

My eyes adjust and don’t even notice the poor graphics quality after 5 minutes

- and after 2 years you will need to ajust dioptre.

Second – FPS is frame per second or first-person shooter – both are not related with the game platform, so you are writing nonsense. By the way tracking data is not related with your PC, but with servers and internet connection. So, lagging in WvW is caused from two things. One is the old engine, which hardly handle a lot of visual effects at the same time, other is servers – number and location. Like I said, the problem is not in your computer.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Chopps.5047:

I run everything on high with 1920 by 1200 resolution and I get between 45 and 60 FPS. I am running a pretty solid system for those stats: i5 2500k and a foot long radeon board (I think it’s the hd 6770 but I’d have to double check to be sure and I’m currently afk).

and you’re saying 45fps is the minimum you’re achieving with a below mid range gpu when others with a 680 play at 15fps in wvw zergs?

Ya, sorry, let me be more clear. I actually have the HD6970 so it’s not below mid range, as far as I know, it’s pretty good. It’s a couple years old but I knew it would get me through to 2014 so whatever. Also, I was talking general play. In wvw, I run settings on low. The issues with wvw latency are well known and the best solution I’ve found is to just run on low settings besides things like character count. Turning off ally/enemy nameplates helps a lot too. Also: relax, you’ll live longer.

Optimization of game code is the thing I’m most looking forward to, along with bugfixes. Nothing takes away enjoyment of the game like laggy, buggy, bulky and choppy gameplay.

I do hope Arenanet does announce something on this some point soon – though I’m losing hope on that issue since they haven’t commented on this thread yet…

I ran this on windows and also on mac with the beta client. Windows 7 64 bit running under boot camp on a 2011 imac with medium settings – 30 FPS. Mac OSX Snow Leopard 64 bit with medium settings – 40 FPS. I submitted a ticket about this to let them know the differences but never heard back. The only issue is on the mac beta client, cannot set WvW character limit to very high or highest, whichever it is. Other than that, flawless.

This thread just makes me sad… I never dip below 30 fps in anywhere, and I have max settings. I’ve been in the middle of Stonemist with 3 zergs of 50+ each clashing and I still get 30+ fps. I’ve got a i7 3770 and GTX 670, so if you’re on a comparable level and having fps issues, its probably not the game…

As for people who aren’t able to afford such hardware, I know that sucks, but games just require more power every few years, and so you gotta keep up or settle for lag. We can’t keep living in the past though.

Xenon.4537:

This thread just makes me sad… I never dip below 30 fps in anywhere, and I have max settings. I’ve been in the middle of Stonemist with 3 zergs of 50+ each clashing and I still get 30+ fps. I’ve got a i7 3770 and GTX 670, so if you’re on a comparable level and having fps issues, its probably not the game…

As for people who aren’t able to afford such hardware, I know that sucks, but games just require more power every few years, and so you gotta keep up or settle for lag. We can’t keep living in the past though.

That’s impossible or you don’t monitor your fps. Or maybe you’re in lower tier and you zergs consist of 6v6… As i previously said (and tones of people on this thread) i played the game on SLi’d 680’s with an overclocked 2700k@4.5 and in zergs (T2 fort aspenwood and not even T1) fps was constantly dropping below 20 (lower i noticed was 14 fps) so i dunno what you’re talking about. Same thing on dragons, fps will reach 17-22 and stay at it until the boss is dead.

TurtleofPower.5641:

The game runs fine on any cheap gaming rig. Now if you’re talking a computer with no quality gaming parts… this is an age old problem. You have to be careful what you buy because there are plenty of lame companies that will sell you a junk parts computer because they just don’t care.

Your best bet is to go to hardware websites and check in the forums what kind of parts someone would build a cheap gaming rig with right now.

Please this isn’t the problem at all, its more like people who actually buy top ends parts and know their stuff notice their not getting the right ammount of performance they should be.

These people complainng arn’t people buying their parts from bestbuy, its people like me who built 1500 rigs which shouldn’t have framerate drops in big zergs.

A TON of misiniformation here, people claiming their game runs fine probably don’t even notice their fps drops and are probably used to slow downs, because they seem not know what their talking about.

The game has serious performance issues period. I’ve never seen anything like this. Ever. It’s an MMO which we were told would be “ready when it’s ready” yet high end machines are getting shoddy frame rates just by standing around in Lion’s Arch with 40 odd other people. That is not good enough. The game leans too heavily on the CPU and arguably is too heavy in general for what it’s supposed to be, they may have overreached aesthetically. It’s an MMO, not the latest shiny single player first person shooter.

Tadayoshi.2815:

Pure Heart.1456:

For all the FPS hungry people out there, I would suggest going out and mowing a few lawns on weekends, save up your money and buy a decent graphics card—Nvidia GTX580 or higher.

That’s not the issue. Did you even read the thread ?

How is this not at least part of the issue?

Better hardware will solve performance issues—it’s that simple.
I realise that some people simply can not afford better hardware.

However, while it’s good practice to write optimized code/software, it is increasingly becoming less important, as powerful hardware is becoming available to a larger proportion of people.

In the optimization process, cost effectiveness and prospective profit plays a large part as well; How much profit can developers hope to receive via purchases in the gem store from people who are not even able to afford the average level of hardware necessary to run the game at reasonable settings?

Notwithstanding, developers do have an obligation to provide software that works at a satisfactory level, particularly on higher end hardware.

With this game it seems CPU clock speed is the thing more than how many cores you have. Big WvW fights though, probably will bog down anyones machine. Turn of Post Processing, and things that will help some.

I guess there isn’t any news on anything about optimizations… Not even a comment from arenanet.

kelman.9451:

With this game it seems CPU clock speed is the thing more than how many cores you have. Big WvW fights though, probably will bog down anyones machine. Turn of Post Processing, and things that will help some.

That’s not helping at all. I have a 2500k running at 4.3ghz, i hate post processing effect so its always off since game was launched and 10-20fps is all you’ll be getting in zergs.

Xenon.4537:

This thread just makes me sad… I never dip below 30 fps in anywhere, and I have max settings. I’ve been in the middle of Stonemist with 3 zergs of 50+ each clashing and I still get 30+ fps. I’ve got a i7 3770 and GTX 670, so if you’re on a comparable level and having fps issues, its probably not the game…

As for people who aren’t able to afford such hardware, I know that sucks, but games just require more power every few years, and so you gotta keep up or settle for lag. We can’t keep living in the past though.

Complete and utter ignorance akittens best.

kelman.9451:

With this game it seems CPU clock speed is the thing more than how many cores you have. Big WvW fights though, probably will bog down anyones machine. Turn of Post Processing, and things that will help some.

Post processing does absolutely nothing when you are limited by CPU power.
The biggest factors that help improve performance in this case are shadows and reflections.

ITT: People who don’t know anything about computers.

1 year next month and nothing done about this, go figure.

MMOs are based on CPU not GPU

Charak.9761:

MMOs are based on CPU not GPU

If this is true then why does my SLI work in GW1 but not here, that is one of the HIGHEST of priority optimizations that need to be done.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Charak.9761:

MMOs are based on CPU not GPU

If this is true then why does my SLI work in GW1 but not here, that is one of the HIGHEST of priority optimizations that need to be done.

SLI is a mechanic used by multi-card setups to segregate graphic processing load towards the cards evenly. That being said, I think there’s an issue when post-processing happens on all models, regardless of distance. There’s also maps with a lot of dynamic objects that add to the lagfest, as well as occlusion code being laggy or not that efficient at best.

With GW2, a good optimization on the player’s end would be improving/changing data drives, as latency in data load from disk hits kitten GW2 with the number of objects loaded on screen at the same time.

Nuka Cola.8520:

kelman.9451:

With this game it seems CPU clock speed is the thing more than how many cores you have. Big WvW fights though, probably will bog down anyones machine. Turn of Post Processing, and things that will help some.

That’s not helping at all. I have a 2500k running at 4.3ghz, i hate post processing effect so its always off since game was launched and 10-20fps is all you’ll be getting in zergs.

Reduce the number of programs opened that access your data drive, as a greater amount of people in zergs increases the amount of particles and objects generated in game. For every person in the zerg, performance hit increases around exponentially, I think. Haven’t done the math to verify this.

For solutions, I really don’t have an idea how ANet will ultimately reduce lag in WvW without sacrificing too much visual fidelity.

From a player’s standpoint, what would be the best option in terms of trying to reduce overall lag in terms of PC component upgrades? With a less than optimized game, would the best upgrade solution be a newer GPU or CPU? A majority of people posting seem to think that this game relies heavily on the CPU, though there are some that believe the GPU has more say within the performance department. Is there anyway to test such theories?

Adminir.8140:

From a player’s standpoint, what would be the best option in terms of trying to reduce overall lag in terms of PC component upgrades? With a less than optimized game, would the best upgrade solution be a newer GPU or CPU? A majority of people posting seem to think that this game relies heavily on the CPU, though there are some that believe the GPU has more say within the performance department. Is there anyway to test such theories?

These arent theories. Nvidia themselves stated the game is heavily CPU bound and you can see it for yourself if you monitor your CPU/GPU usage – not with task manager that is.
People who say buy a new GPU as a general advice for this game are clueless.
Unless you have a really bad graphics card and a very good CPU the game will benefit a lot more from a CPU upgrade.

GW2 would run best with a hypothetical tricore CPU clocked at 5 or 6 GHz. The best real option is an i5 xxxxk OCed beyond 4GHz. i7s are a waste for this game.

Adminir.8140:

From a player’s standpoint, what would be the best option in terms of trying to reduce overall lag in terms of PC component upgrades? With a less than optimized game, would the best upgrade solution be a newer GPU or CPU? A majority of people posting seem to think that this game relies heavily on the CPU, though there are some that believe the GPU has more say within the performance department. Is there anyway to test such theories?

It’s a combination of both. The GPU processes client visual information while the CPU processes client technical information. You’d be best off getting a powerful one of both.

Crossfire (AMD’s SLI) did work for me in GW2. The game still lagged in heavily populated areas like Lion’s Arch and WvW, but it did seem to be about twice as fast in render-heavy areas that didn’t require much CPU. I also had all the settings turned up to max. The GW2 engine is pretty light in GPU terms for a modern game, although it does look quite nice, so kudos for that. I say ‘had’ etc because I sold my second card, because in general Crossfire/SLI isn’t worth the money, you rarely get anything near a 2x speedup, and in some cases it actually makes things crash and/or act strangely.

Excelsior!

Credit to That_Shaman, from the .DAT:

Game optimization

109841_0003 Character Quality:
109841_0004 Character Limit:
109841_0005 Limit detail of particle effects.
109841_0006 Effect LOD

Happy?

Not all MMO’s are CPU bound. This one is, though and that’s why a lot of people have performance drags on GW2 since it doesn’t utilize GPU’s nearly as much as it should. I kind of remember FPS being better at launch than it is now, though lol. These types of things take a great deal of work to overhaul and correct and they did release an update a few cycles ago that dealt with optimizations and said more would be coming at a later date..So it’s just a matter of time I think.

Shanna.4762:

Not all MMO’s are CPU bound. This one is, though and that’s why a lot of people have performance drags on GW2 since it doesn’t utilize GPU’s nearly as much as it should. I kind of remember FPS being better at launch than it is now, though lol. These types of things take a great deal of work to overhaul and correct and they did release an update a few cycles ago that dealt with optimizations and said more would be coming at a later date..So it’s just a matter of time I think.

The main problem here isn’t “most people” but EVERYONE has fps problems. You cannot have smooth fps in zergs/large events, its impossible

While GW2 is CPU bound it is also CPU limited. The client does not use multithreading or use more than 3 heavy threads during operation. Thus, the game is limited as a previous poster mentioned to a tri-core CPU with 5-6ghz being the sweet spot. Anet’s implementation of an engine with high CPU draw with no room for ever advancing beyond 2007 standards is apparent in the design. The game’s predominantly relies on high amounts of users on the same map which of course the engine and servers cannot handle. Using an old API does not help but is not the main factor.
Try doing a T1 WvW zerg and toss all the settings down to their lowest. You will not see much of a difference in FPS at all. This is due to the server on Anet’s side not being able to handle the information it is sending and receiving.
TL,DR= It is both the client and serverside causing issues atm. Since client is apparently out of the question we, as a group can only hope that the issues be rectified serverside.

Stormcrow.7513:

While GW2 is CPU bound it is also CPU limited. The client does not use multithreading or use more than 3 heavy threads during operation. Thus, the game is limited as a previous poster mentioned to a tri-core CPU with 5-6ghz being the sweet spot. Anet’s implementation of an engine with high CPU draw with no room for ever advancing beyond 2007 standards is apparent in the design. The game’s predominantly relies on high amounts of users on the same map which of course the engine and servers cannot handle. Using an old API does not help but is not the main factor.
Try doing a T1 WvW zerg and toss all the settings down to their lowest. You will not see much of a difference in FPS at all. This is due to the server on Anet’s side not being able to handle the information it is sending and receiving.
TL,DR= It is both the client and serverside causing issues atm. Since client is apparently out of the question we, as a group can only hope that the issues be rectified serverside.

They are using the same outdated servers that GW1 is on and I heard word that they also moved AION to those same servers.

Kain Francois.4328:

Credit to That_Shaman, from the .DAT:

Game optimization

109841_0003 Character Quality:
109841_0004 Character Limit:
109841_0005 Limit detail of particle effects.
109841_0006 Effect LOD

Happy?

I d be more happy if devs actually responded to this and told us themselves what exactly is in the works. No idea why it wasnt addressed in the roadmap.

Still i m not gonna hold my breath over this but it appears at least something is being worked on. Even if its just workarounds more options are always good.

Im Mudbone.1437:

Stormcrow.7513:

While GW2 is CPU bound it is also CPU limited. The client does not use multithreading or use more than 3 heavy threads during operation. Thus, the game is limited as a previous poster mentioned to a tri-core CPU with 5-6ghz being the sweet spot. Anet’s implementation of an engine with high CPU draw with no room for ever advancing beyond 2007 standards is apparent in the design. The game’s predominantly relies on high amounts of users on the same map which of course the engine and servers cannot handle. Using an old API does not help but is not the main factor.
Try doing a T1 WvW zerg and toss all the settings down to their lowest. You will not see much of a difference in FPS at all. This is due to the server on Anet’s side not being able to handle the information it is sending and receiving.
TL,DR= It is both the client and serverside causing issues atm. Since client is apparently out of the question we, as a group can only hope that the issues be rectified serverside.

They are using the same outdated servers that GW1 is on and I heard word that they also moved AION to those same servers.

That sounds a bit dodgy to me. I’m not calling you a liar, but claiming to have heard a rumor makes me question the credibility of the source.

DanteZero.9736:

Im Mudbone.1437:

Stormcrow.7513:

While GW2 is CPU bound it is also CPU limited. The client does not use multithreading or use more than 3 heavy threads during operation. Thus, the game is limited as a previous poster mentioned to a tri-core CPU with 5-6ghz being the sweet spot. Anet’s implementation of an engine with high CPU draw with no room for ever advancing beyond 2007 standards is apparent in the design. The game’s predominantly relies on high amounts of users on the same map which of course the engine and servers cannot handle. Using an old API does not help but is not the main factor.
Try doing a T1 WvW zerg and toss all the settings down to their lowest. You will not see much of a difference in FPS at all. This is due to the server on Anet’s side not being able to handle the information it is sending and receiving.
TL,DR= It is both the client and serverside causing issues atm. Since client is apparently out of the question we, as a group can only hope that the issues be rectified serverside.

They are using the same outdated servers that GW1 is on and I heard word that they also moved AION to those same servers.

That sounds a bit dodgy to me. I’m not calling you a liar, but claiming to have heard a rumor makes me question the credibility of the source.

Researching this for myself, I know what you mean by hearsay, will divulge my findings.

EDIT Preliminary findings/research has turned up nothing on this, so, until I find otherwise the shared server hearsay is just that and only a rumor so far.