Guild Wars 2

Why is the game running so bad without using all the resources it has available?

I can drop to 40 FPS with around 40% CPU and GPU load, 50% RAM load, 25% VRAM load. So why am I running at 40 FPS? I don’t get it. The game has access to lots more power from my PC, and I’m running it at such a kittenty frame rate.

My specs are:
CPU: Intel i7-6700k
GPU: nVidia GTX 980
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Windows 8.1

Should depend on the area you’re in and what you’re doing. If you’re in towns or general PvE, you should be over 100 frames on average. I just built a PC with almost the same hardware (970, though), and even blob-surfing WvW do not dip below 35 on max.

Something’s not right if you’re capping 50% ram on the 32 bit client. Check your hardware and make sure all is good.

Use the 64-bit client as well if you haven’t downloaded it. I’d also recommend Win10 if you install classic shell as the OS itself runs better.

The game is extremely CPU-dependent as most MMO’s are. Your fps drops are actually likely caused by your CPU not being able to handle the processing. Unbelievably, the CPU is holding you back much more than you think, albeit there’s not much you can do about it. Also make sure you’re not using your iGPU instead of the 980. Update drivers accordingly.

Check to see if your RAM is actually running at higher than 1800-2300 mhz. You’ll only get better performance out of the 6700k with high-end OC’ed ram (3000+). Otherwise you might be getting bottlenecked there a little bit. I noticed huge gains moving to substantially faster ram on processor-based tasks.

Otherwise, just tone down the dials a bit and tweak accordingly.

what kind of hardrive?

DeceiverX.8361:

Should depend on the area you’re in and what you’re doing. If you’re in towns or general PvE, you should be over 100 frames on average.

I am over 100 FPS in those scenarios, that’s not the point. Point is I drop to 40 in other scenarios, and that should not be happening as I have no bottleneck.

Something’s not right if you’re capping 50% ram on the 32 bit client. Check your hardware and make sure all is good.

Use the 64-bit client as well if you haven’t downloaded it. I’d also recommend Win10 if you install classic shell as the OS itself runs better.

It’s not capping at 50% RAM usage, it’s just that I still have another 8GB to use, so it’s not a RAM bottleneck. The game itself was only using 3.3GB, and yes I am using the 64bit client. Windows 10 might help, but I still shouldn’t be having these issues on Windows 8.1.

The game is extremely CPU-dependent as most MMO’s are. Your fps drops are actually likely caused by your CPU not being able to handle the processing. Unbelievably, the CPU is holding you back much more than you think, albeit there’s not much you can do about it. Also make sure you’re not using your iGPU instead of the 980. Update drivers accordingly.

But as I mentioned, my CPU is only at 40% load, how can it be bottlenecking? The hardest working core was at 80% And yes I’m sure I’m not using the iGPU, and my drivers are up to date.

Check to see if your RAM is actually running at higher than 1800-2300 mhz. You’ll only get better performance out of the 6700k with high-end OC’ed ram (3000+). Otherwise you might be getting bottlenecked there a little bit. I noticed huge gains moving to substantially faster ram on processor-based tasks.

My RAM is running at 2400MHz, but they’re at fairly tight timings at CL12 to make up a little bit for the slower speed. Regardless, I’ve never heard RAM have any major impact on performance in any game, we’re talking around 1% here, at 40 FPS that’s not even bringing me to 41. I doubt it’s any different in GW2, and how did people manage before DDR4 then? As 2400MHz is already extremely fast on DDR3.

Otherwise, just tone down the dials a bit and tweak accordingly.

Changing graphics settings barely do anything. And I shouldn’t have to either. My whole point with this thread is that I can not see any bottlenecks in my system, yet the game is running really badly. And it confuses me, I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense to me that it is the RAM. Are you telling me that you had a 6700K with slow DDR4 RAM, and then upgraded only your RAM? And that helped on performance?

Part of the problem is the game itself. Your PC might be able to work harder, the client cannot, for various reasons.

Litego.4953:

DeceiverX.8361:

Should depend on the area you’re in and what you’re doing. If you’re in towns or general PvE, you should be over 100 frames on average.

I am over 100 FPS in those scenarios, that’s not the point. Point is I drop to 40 in other scenarios, and that should not be happening as I have no bottleneck.

Something’s not right if you’re capping 50% ram on the 32 bit client. Check your hardware and make sure all is good.

Use the 64-bit client as well if you haven’t downloaded it. I’d also recommend Win10 if you install classic shell as the OS itself runs better.

It’s not capping at 50% RAM usage, it’s just that I still have another 8GB to use, so it’s not a RAM bottleneck. The game itself was only using 3.3GB, and yes I am using the 64bit client. Windows 10 might help, but I still shouldn’t be having these issues on Windows 8.1.

The game is extremely CPU-dependent as most MMO’s are. Your fps drops are actually likely caused by your CPU not being able to handle the processing. Unbelievably, the CPU is holding you back much more than you think, albeit there’s not much you can do about it. Also make sure you’re not using your iGPU instead of the 980. Update drivers accordingly.

But as I mentioned, my CPU is only at 40% load, how can it be bottlenecking? The hardest working core was at 80% And yes I’m sure I’m not using the iGPU, and my drivers are up to date.

Check to see if your RAM is actually running at higher than 1800-2300 mhz. You’ll only get better performance out of the 6700k with high-end OC’ed ram (3000+). Otherwise you might be getting bottlenecked there a little bit. I noticed huge gains moving to substantially faster ram on processor-based tasks.

My RAM is running at 2400MHz, but they’re at fairly tight timings at CL12 to make up a little bit for the slower speed. Regardless, I’ve never heard RAM have any major impact on performance in any game, we’re talking around 1% here, at 40 FPS that’s not even bringing me to 41. I doubt it’s any different in GW2, and how did people manage before DDR4 then? As 2400MHz is already extremely fast on DDR3.

Otherwise, just tone down the dials a bit and tweak accordingly.

Changing graphics settings barely do anything. And I shouldn’t have to either. My whole point with this thread is that I can not see any bottlenecks in my system, yet the game is running really badly. And it confuses me, I just don’t get it. It doesn’t make any sense to me that it is the RAM. Are you telling me that you had a 6700K with slow DDR4 RAM, and then upgraded only your RAM? And that helped on performance?

I’ll just go in order because triply-nested quotes are irritating.

Applications are only allowed to use a certain amount of memory. I was asking you this because 32-bit applications physically cannot use more than 2GB of ram at a time.
Applications again will only store information deemed worth storing. Not all applications will max your memory out. That’s bad/risky design from a software development standpoint. Extra ram beyond 8GB these days is for allowing multiple application to run concurrently. I know little of Windows 8.1, but it’s possible there may be Win10 optimizations or optimizations within Win10 to improve upon these issues.

You’re bottlenecked on the fact your CPU isn’t running 10e*X times faster than it would need to be in order to achieve a noticeable difference. The performance hits are brought on by software limitations rather than hardware ones. Faster hardware can only help improve this so far. Thus, to overcome the shortcomings of software limitations of the game engine or programming algorithms in general, your CPU technically “isn’t fast enough.” Does that mean there is a hardware solution out there to make the game run seamlessly at 100+ frames? No. That’s just the reality of the matter. There was a game programmer who came on the boards to address this issue a while ago. You’re realistically not getting much better performance in high-density maps. At least not until there are some huge changes made to the engine and some programming paradigms within it. The game doesn’t support multiple cores because the engine was developed for DX9. Your processing capabilities on one core are severely inhibited from what they could be on multiple. Application and OS intervention can throttle CPU usage to prevent crashes or problems down the line.

In computer architecture, the bottleneck currently is RAM and hard drive access. HDD access is usually done upon things like loading screens to cache all possible things that will or could be visible to avoid the need to reference the hard drive. The GPU is just a math-box that runs extremely fast from bonkers pipelining capabilities. Higher speed ram will increase your performance, even if it’s not substantial, because in a system like yours, the only room for hardware to make a bigger difference is in the RAM. Otherwise your clock speeds pretty much do not matter as a fast clock with slow memory access is going to be just as slow as the memory access times. Do some research on the 6700K and performance measures with different RAM setups and you’ll see the difference depending on how deep you delve.

People managed because 40 frames is still a very solid number. I’ll tell you now that standard cinema films are recorded at 24 frames per second. If the game looks like crap, it’s because there’s variance in performance causing brief hanging rather than a smooth transition. This is again traced so software problems. Check background processes and prioritize GW2. Standard cinema film is 24 FPS. Long as you’re not overdoing the rendering, you shouldn’t have too many problems here.

I didn’t use lower DDR3/DDR4 on my new desktop, no. I did notice the increases when performing benchmark tests and tasks with high CPU usage with a lot of read/write tasks in programming. I haven’t done comprehensive tests playing GW2 because I don’t have any issues playing at 40 frames when in massive blob fights. I’ve also been playing less lately, and am currently away and thus do not have access to my desktop.

I believe shadows and reflections are done on the CPU for some reason. Try cutting them down and doing some testing.

Try limiting the FPS to 30-40 and see if anything changes. Lag’s usually more of a consistency problem than anything. Even down to 60 at max unless your monitor is a high-end one functioning over 60hz. Either way, at the highest, cut down the frames to whatever your monitor’s refresh rate is in hertz, +/- some for consistency.

Litego.4953:

Why is the game running so bad without using all the resources it has available?

I can drop to 40 FPS with around 40% CPU and GPU load, 50% RAM load, 25% VRAM load. So why am I running at 40 FPS? I don’t get it. The game has access to lots more power from my PC, and I’m running it at such a kittenty frame rate.

My specs are:
CPU: Intel i7-6700k
GPU: nVidia GTX 980
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Windows 8.1

1) 40 FPS is pretty good performance for massive events with lots of ppl running around (WvW, world bosses fights e.t.c.). You CPU is a bottleneck here. Yes, you’ve read it right Your world fastest gaming CPU is still a bottleneck in MMO games (tbh, it’s actually not the fastest CPU, Core i7-5775C is a bit faster in games due to L4 cache).

2) The game as well as any other app can’t use all the resources of your PC just because it doesn’t need all of them. Even if you have 24 GB extra free RAM it doesn’t mean that the game will consume it all. The game uses as much RAM as it needs.

3) Your CPU is 4 cores/8 threads. The game can’t use all 8 available threads. It usually uses 4 or 5. Windows automatically distributes various work between all available cores. Also it avoids keeping one core to be loaded near 100% while rest of the cores do nothing. Therefore, for multi-threaded application 80% single core load is quite fine.

DeceiverX.8361:

I’ll tell you now that standard cinema films are recorded at 24 frames per second.

You must be kidding mate. Cinema and PC game are COMPLETELY different things. Come on, just try to play the game at 24 FPS. You will see the difference.
Or just check this out: http://boallen.com/fps-compare-html5.html
Pretty noticeable difference.

Download GPU-z, then look at two things in the program. The first one is on the first tab. Look for the ‘Bus Interface’ and then click the ‘?’ button. Run the render test to stress your GPU, then look back at the ‘Bus Interface’ information. What does it say? Does it say “@ x16 3.0” or something else?

Next thing to look for is on the second tab. Run the stress test again then this time look at ‘PerfCap Reason’. If nothing GPU intensive is running, it would say “Util”, otherwise it would report something else.

define other scenarios, thanks.

I think the problem most people are going to run into is that GW2 isn’t really designed around multi-threaded processing. Effectively our multi-cored CPU’s are only being partially used (like only one core is being used at any given time). This causes your CPU to end up being a bottle neck, even if your CPU is only being 20, 30, 40% utilized at most at any given time.

I noticed that, even with my older desktop that was only using a single 780 and a sandy bridge (I think it was a 2600k) that the graphics settings hardly made a difference on my overall fps as I monitored it in different areas and scenarios (compared to those same areas and similar scenarios on lower graphics settings). Although, my newer desktop does see some areas hitting 200+fps and then have areas that are less graphically intense only hitting around 60-80fps. The latter areas are generally areas crowded with other players, etc. that I believe are more cpu intensive (and again, gw2 doesn’t take full advantage of most cpu’s).

Its the software’s fault, not really your hardware’s unfortunately. The software is often more important than the hardware when it comes to performance.

Maybe arena net will pull a magic trick here and add dx12 support or something eventually (FFXIV added dx11 support with their recent expansion, because reasons… so it shouldn’t be impossible for anet to optimize things at some point…).

If gw2 took full advantage of current gen hardware; I could probably lock in a rock solid 150fps in most situations in game, rather than the wildly different performance I see from area to area currently.

PS VR support plox

Yeah, I don’t think there is a CPU on the market that can run this game without framerate drops. At least not at my resolution, 2560×1440. 4.4ghz i7-5930k, gtx 980 (soon to be x2 sli), 16GB 2666mhz ddr4, 512GB PCIE SSD. I could push the OC further to squeeze out more frames, but I just don’t have the time to stability test it right now and 4.4 has been the easiest stable point.

upgrading to w10 did improve my performance, maybe it could help you.

Sollith.3502:

I think the problem most people are going to run into is that GW2 isn’t really designed around multi-threaded processing. Effectively our multi-cored CPU’s are only being partially used (like only one core is being used at any given time). This causes your CPU to end up being a bottle neck, even if your CPU is only being 20, 30, 40% utilized at most at any given time.

GW2 has quite fine multi-thread support. Here is my CPU utilization graph attached. Just staing near bank in LA. Maxed quality settings, no VSync, no Frame limiter (since we want max utilization).

Sollith.3502:

Maybe arena net will pull a magic trick here and add dx12 support or something eventually (FFXIV added dx11 support with their recent expansion, because reasons… so it shouldn’t be impossible for anet to optimize things at some point…).

This most likely will never happen. GW2 uses pretty old “updated” DX9 based GW1 engine. It’s only outstanding design makes the game look cool nowadays. Porting things to DX12 requires tons of work for graphics programmers. Moreover, as other MMOs, GW2 is always limited by like “logical” pipeline (meaning CPU part of work) not “graphics”. Sure DX11 and DX12 can offer better CPU usage optimizations but I doubt that real difference worth such time and money investment.

I’m getting this too. Some areas of the game are simply broken. The ogre lane in TD simply does not work for me. When I go in by FPS isntantly drops from 40 or so to 10 and the audio bugs out. Some areas of VB are similar. I’ve also noticed that sometimes my FPS in maps that are usually good like AB are sometimes just horrible (not large group fights either). I haven’t changed anything about my computer, so what’s happening?

specs:
7870
8350
8gb RAM
1tb WD blue ezex
Win 7
1080p

I feel like it might be an optimization issue because i should be able to run this game just fine.

Game just runs like crap, all there really is to it.

Predator.1398:

Sollith.3502:

I think the problem most people are going to run into is that GW2 isn’t really designed around multi-threaded processing. Effectively our multi-cored CPU’s are only being partially used (like only one core is being used at any given time). This causes your CPU to end up being a bottle neck, even if your CPU is only being 20, 30, 40% utilized at most at any given time.

GW2 has quite fine multi-thread support. Here is my CPU utilization graph attached. Just staing near bank in LA. Maxed quality settings, no VSync, no Frame limiter (since we want max utilization).

Sollith.3502:

Maybe arena net will pull a magic trick here and add dx12 support or something eventually (FFXIV added dx11 support with their recent expansion, because reasons… so it shouldn’t be impossible for anet to optimize things at some point…).

This most likely will never happen. GW2 uses pretty old “updated” DX9 based GW1 engine. It’s only outstanding design makes the game look cool nowadays. Porting things to DX12 requires tons of work for graphics programmers. Moreover, as other MMOs, GW2 is always limited by like “logical” pipeline (meaning CPU part of work) not “graphics”. Sure DX11 and DX12 can offer better CPU usage optimizations but I doubt that real difference worth such time and money investment.

yep, sometimes I wonder so many of anet’s multithreaded problems stem from very early decisions to the combat system. Sometimes, I wonder how the condition system works internally.

vespers.1759:

I’m getting this too. Some areas of the game are simply broken. The ogre lane in TD simply does not work for me. When I go in by FPS isntantly drops from 40 or so to 10 and the audio bugs out. Some areas of VB are similar. I’ve also noticed that sometimes my FPS in maps that are usually good like AB are sometimes just horrible (not large group fights either). I haven’t changed anything about my computer, so what’s happening?

specs:
7870
8350
8gb RAM
1tb WD blue ezex
Win 7
1080p

I feel like it might be an optimization issue because i should be able to run this game just fine.

GW2 requires pretty beefy single threaded performance to run well, which is something your FX-8350 lacks. Getting huge dips on AMD-based systems is pretty much par for the course (for any system, really). I agree you should be able to run the game much better, but that’s just not how it is.

I’m not sure about having issues in random parts of maps, though are you wandering close to large events, even if you aren’t personally participating in them?

well…the game is still limited to a fixed number of cores, with a lot of CPU managed code, graphics load is minor tbh… especially noticable in crowded area’s where cpu load stays the same and gpu load drops… as the cpu keeps runnig maxed the fps drops and the gpu’s have lower load…. I have a hex core cpu and I have so much cpu, memory and gpu computing and storage space left i could run a second instance…