Guild Wars 2

As the community is painfully aware, the preformance of this game is far below expectations, and many of us get far less FPS than we should in pretty much every scenario.

That in mind, I took to the Nvidia forums to ask for some offical answers on why they have never released specific updates or enhancements to Guild Wars 2. (I check the notes every week for the new drivers to see if they gave any improvement to guild wars 2)

Shamelessly hoping that if they are giving updates every other week to “Batman Arkham Asylum” That one of these times, they’d give some love to a New AAA MMORPG like Guild Wars 2. As there has not yet been a single Nvidia update that specifically had performance hikes for Guild Wars 2, and this was disappointing to me, especially considering how it’s well known that the performance of this game is lacking severely.

After about a week I did get an official response from Nvidia, but in a private message by Josh@Nvidia.

It reads as follows:

Josh@Nvidia
Not really much to add on the thread, since it is mostly just your views on performance in the game. I have not seen any similar reports or complaints in regards to GW2. If the thread blows up though with other people reporting the same it might be something to look into.

You heard him, Blow it up.

There you have it, Nvidia is oblivious to the performance problems this game has, and needs to hear it first hand from our players before they’re going to even look at the game.

With that, I ask for your help, to post on the Nvidia forums about the games performance, and urge them to give Guild Wars 2 some love. Pass the word, tell your friends, tell your guild, tell reddit, if we want Nvidia to care, we need to post about it.

The thread on the Nvidia forums is here: https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/525297/pc-games/lackluster-no-guild-wars-2-support-/

I feel this is really important for the health of the game, the beta forums and post launch forums were riddled with FPS and performance complaints, many people went out of their way to buy new PC’s or graphics cards, just for this games launch.

Now, I’m not saying it’s unplayable, or the FPS is horrible. What I am saying, is that the requirements to play this game on max settings for example, vastly exceed what they should, and that my laptop, runs this game on max settings (minus shadows) almost as well as my Dual GTX 460’s in SLI overclocked by 30%, and that’s a problem.

Thanks for your time everyone, and I hope to see a lot of posts for the cause.

Take Care,

-Steb

The FPS issues are more due to CPU issues from optimization. I don’t think drivers will help much.

Comp specs:
i7-3280 3.6Ghz
Nvidia GTX 670 4Gb
16Gb Corsair DDR3 RAM
SSD
Asus P7X79 Pro Mobo

I was getting decent fps, capped at 60, would drop to 30 in really big WvW(max graphics). My card was bad so while it was RMA’d, I put in an old GTS 450 with max graphics I was only gettin 5-10 less fps on average. These 2 cards are leagues apart, yet barely much difference. It’s the CPU bottle necking GW2, not the GPU/Video drivers.

Edit: My 670 stays at about 40-60% usage.

My laptop and PC are leagues apart in both CPU and GPU, as it uses mobile versions, and they still get near the same performance. Which leads me to believe it may be a bit of both, I’ve been tracking my usage pretty much all day today on my cards during guild wars 2. They love to hover around the 50% usage zone, and sometimes climb up to the 70-90% mark, but only for a few second and start dropping back down to 50 again. Even while getting some pretty hefty performance hits, I don’t really seem to get anything higher than 50% usage. In heart of the mists for example, it’s pretty bad because of all of the holiday stuff. I sit at about 35-40 FPS there without shadows, and it still is only hanging out at about 50% usage.

I’m fairly confident, if week after week, they can find ways to make performance improve in games like Batman Arkham Asylum, they can find ways to improve performance in guild wars 2 on their end. I’m not saying it’s all their fault, I’m saying their doing nothing to help the problem, or even look into it.

I have a friend running a newer Dell with a Pentium III 3.7 but “only” a HD 7570 (fairly stock model now).

He’s playing stutter free on above average settings, which i think lends towards the CPU>GPU argument.

I have a much older processor with an HD 6850 and my game slideshows at times.

Pentium III’s are like ancient history, and terrible in terms of performance, Dell has a terrible tendency to put old parts in new computers. The 7570 is carrying that computer. If your running something older, that’s why your performance is so low, on top of the older graphics card.

Oh, I’m sorry i mixed up my PC parts… doh!

i meant Pentium 3rd gen i7 (the 3770 came out in my brain as 3.7)…

My ultimate point being my video card is better than his, but my processor is slower. He seems to have better results.

Steb, I’m assuming you are the same person who’s thread I read on the forums (now Ge-Force instead of Nvidia or something).

I agree with you 100%. Isn’t this game CPU based though? That will be out of Nvidia’s hands. Although that said Nvidia have had ambient occlusion updates for GW2 but every time = vanishing hills so the QA = bit rubbish. But again it brings us back to cpu bound.

It would be nice to know what the deal is from an Anet insider, if it’s because the game is CPU bound.

I think if Nvidia could help they would but atm it doesn’t seem like they can help. I was in LA the other day and my brother laughed at my low fps, not because he’s mean but because he’s seen other games (better graphically) running on my comp. and was a bit baffled.

Is it hard to change a game from CPU intensive to GPU? Or add an option to choose?

Annoying thing is the game isn’t even fully utilising my processors if it is CPU bound. I open task manager and it seems that my resources are being ignored or bottlenecked by something? But only in this game.

Oh and for the record, for a couple of days a while ago my processor fan would go bananas when I played GW2, as soon as I exited GW2 it went away (limited to 60 fps so not like Dead Island). This leads me to believe that the way the processor is being used is just wrong and needs an update. Never bsod, never reset but just my fan going bananas and only with GW2. Still using same fan since then and no other problems so they must have patched it.

I just hope this is helpful to Anet in some way.

It’s not Nvidia’s problem…

Zeldain.5710:

It’s not Nvidia’s problem…

Pretty much this. The game is poorly optimized to use graphics cards. If your game is slow or taking awhile to render things, the only thing you can really do is get a better CPU.

Eh it’s not the Nvidia problem…I run the game with 50-100 fps and doing just fine but sometimes it lags a lot. GW2 is just badly optimized and only thing you can really do is get a really good computer

nofo and CharrGirl, i have a goo computer (goo computers ftw. I meant good btw), do I really need to buy a better one just to play a graphically inferior game to the ones I can run at ultra?

Thats just wrong.

This may sound like a nit pick, and it probably is, but they did release specific drivers for GW2. Read the patch notes for 306.02.

“The new NVIDIA GeForce 306.02 beta drivers are now available to download. Recommended for players of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Darksiders 2, Guild Wars 2, and MechWarrior Online, the GeForce 306.02 beta drivers add realistic ambient occlusion shadowing to each of the listed games, in addition to adding NVIDIA Control Panel MSAA and CSAA anti-aliasing support to Darksiders 2.”

I’m not sure what issues you are seeing or having to be honest and I also didn’t read the thread. It is of my opinion that if Nvidia could do something to improve it they would have. 3 of us playing in my house are on i7’s with 1 being stock and the two others OC’d the South side of 4 Ghz all with Nvidia cards. 1 is a 670, 1 is a 580, and 1 a SLI using 2×460′s. Performance is the same across all comps running windows 7 64 bit. Only difference between the systems is the Intel chip set. 1 is 67 series which uses a Crucial SSD and the other 2 are using the z68 set with a SSD has Cache and traditional HD for storage.

All of us are running with max settings but honestly we have also used Auto, minimum, max, etc. Nothing ever really seems to change other than the beauty of the game. In fact oddly enough the slowest of the bunch in feel is the SSD based compture which also has the 580 in it (which also happens to be the stock CPU).

So to me and those in my house the computers North of 4 Ghz seem to feel better compared to the stock CPU regardless of what video card is in there. If you have two monitors fire up performance monitor and you will see. I honestly think it is the game engine. It has some issues around rendering and culling. Also don’t use the ambient occulsion the driver mentions. I’ve had nothing but issues with it whereas ramdom textures will not appear which makes you seem to be in space

Short side of this. GW2 is CPU and not GPU.

GW2 is definitely badly optimized. I just upgraded to a GTX 670 recently from my old card and I could say that I couldn’t tell a difference. My i7 920 is already overclocked at 3.8-3.9. Anet shouldve already addressed this or fixed the issue already.

Crapgame. I don’t use ambient occlusion myself but even that GW2 is CPU bound it’s not utilising all my processors.

I think They’ve tried to cater for loads of cpu’s and something went wrong. I’ve heard Guildies with lesser PC components than me running this game maxed without issues. At least thats what they claimed.

If nothing else, this can draw more attention to the problem, whatever it may be. Neither my Processor, nor my Video card, ever run even close to full load, and I still get drops to 30 FPS or lower from time to time, place to place, meanwhile my chips are doing nothing about it. That’s a problem, weather it be poor optimization, poor performance on the driver end, or poor usage on either or both parts, their is clearly an issue.

Crapgame, I did know about those, but as said, they were basically failed updates, so I feel those don’t really count, though they do warrant mention I guess if we must. I’m specifically speaking raw performance enhancements however.

Crapgame.6519:

I’m not sure what issues you are seeing or having to be honest and I also didn’t read the thread. It is of my opinion that if Nvidia could do something to improve it they would have. 3 of us playing in my house are on i7’s with 1 being stock and the two others OC’d the South side of 4 Ghz all with Nvidia cards. 1 is a 670, 1 is a 580, and 1 a SLI using 2×460′s. Performance is the same across all comps running windows 7 64 bit. Only difference between the systems is the Intel chip set. 1 is 67 series which uses a Crucial SSD and the other 2 are using the z68 set with a SSD has Cache and traditional HD for storage.

All of us are running with max settings but honestly we have also used Auto, minimum, max, etc. Nothing ever really seems to change other than the beauty of the game. In fact oddly enough the slowest of the bunch in feel is the SSD based compture which also has the 580 in it (which also happens to be the stock CPU).

So to me and those in my house the computers North of 4 Ghz seem to feel better compared to the stock CPU regardless of what video card is in there. If you have two monitors fire up performance monitor and you will see. I honestly think it is the game engine. It has some issues around rendering and culling. Also don’t use the ambient occulsion the driver mentions. I’ve had nothing but issues with it whereas ramdom textures will not appear which makes you seem to be in space

Short side of this. GW2 is CPU and not GPU.

That has been my experience as well. I was annoyed with poor performance, started messing with settings, and ended up just switching from native render sampling to supersampling…because none of the graphics settings had much effect on my FPS either way.

By the way, I’m running an i7@4.0 GHz with an overclocked GTX570.

Shox.4936:

GW2 is definitely badly optimized. I just upgraded to a GTX 670 recently from my old card and I could say that I couldn’t tell a difference. My i7 920 is already overclocked at 3.8-3.9. Anet shouldve already addressed this or fixed the issue already.

I upgraded from an old card so bad I was getting driver crashes from just having Firefox open to a new gtx 660 and the game didn’t really improve much at all aside from getting much less zerg induced lag in wvw and large fights where there are so many particle effects flying around I can’t even see the target.

The major thing that did change is now I have to turn off water reflections because it was causing me to experience some glitch where the environment objects and terrain would become transparent if my camera touched the ground plane or came close to it. But, that could be any number of things really.

“Neither my Processor, nor my Video card, ever run even close to full load”

Glad it’s not just me!

There is already a history with all of this, this has been discussed, they have talked about it specifically. There also has been Nvidia updates for GW2. They have then said, the rest of it at this time is on Anet, the issues aren’t on their side… CPU bound.

Just a side note in case anyone has already done so, but I also run GW2 in Linux. Both Ubuntu 12x and Mint under the ‘wine’ wrapper. It didn’t perform any worse if truth be told. I swap between the two at boot and honestly didn’t notice anything different nor in graphic quality.

I don’t have a top of the line system but it does well. I know the CPU is fine and memory because it folds like crazy. Both CPU and GPU without issues.

Off topic, but I ran across a guild (I think it was on Eredon Terrace) which allegedly included or was comprised of Nvidia employees (guild name was Team Nvidia, or something like that).

wookalar.8952:

The FPS issues are more due to CPU issues from optimization. I don’t think drivers will help much.

This. MMOs hit the CPU hard. At least look into that before deciding it must be some sort of GPU issue.

For anyone with a quadcore, have you tried setting GW2 to run only on cores 1-3 (ie disable it from running on core 0)?

khefka.2804:

While nvidia has always had the rep of having better drivers than AMD, I feel that the roles are reversed now. I went from an 8800gt to a 7850, and where before gw2 would black screen and tf2 would error out a lot they both run flawless now.

You sure you hadn’t just fried the 8800gt? Also, 8800gt sounds like a rather old card, even if the x800s were the higher end of the series. 7850 sounds like a newer AMD, though admittedly I know little about AMD cards.

I think less effort should go into fixing this engine and more effort devoted to finalizing the DX11 engine.

Paul.4081:

nofo and CharrGirl, i have a goo computer (goo computers ftw. I meant good btw), do I really need to buy a better one just to play a graphically inferior game to the ones I can run at ultra?

Thats just wrong.

I’m not saying its your fault or anything bro, im saying there is little Nvidia can do about it. Its the game engine being poorly optimised for GPU is the problem.

If you want to light up anybodies board then go to http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/
as they are solely responsible for GW2´s performance problems IMHO.
Read up on why.

I´d be happy if this game would actually use my resources, but since my upgrade to a 4 core PhenomII it runs worse than on my old dual core PhII, because it doesn´t even clock it at maximum (no it´s NOT a frikken bottleneck).

Bubbles.1047:

finalizing the DX11 engine.

Finalizing?!
The haven´t even started on Dx10/11!
And I pray to god they doen´t actually consider this DirectX (“DxDRM”) abomination inside Win8.

khefka.2804:

While nvidia has always had the rep of having better drivers than AMD, I feel that the roles are reversed now. I went from an 8800gt to a 7850, and where before gw2 would black screen and tf2 would error out a lot they both run flawless now.

I’m sorry, but I have to call this out – unless I’m mistaking the card you went from and the card you went to.

http://www.gpureview.com/show_cards.php?card1=544&card2=678

You’re saying “I changed my graphics card from an October 2007 released card to a card released in March 2012 – and as a result, I think nVidia have poorer drivers”? I think you’re comparing a propeller driven biplane with an FA-18 fighter jet!

Ummm… I’d expect a major improvement! I have my old GTX275 in a box of spare parts here, which I upgraded to a GTX570 a while back. In a box under that box is my old, twice replaced 8800GTX – I used that card in a machine made specifically to run Oblivion, some 5 years ago.

I don’t think you can make a quality-of-driver call based on cards from different manufacturers released 5 years apart!

I’m running dual nVidia cards and the game runs perfectly. Only occasionally do I get framerate drops in LA. Everywhere else is smooth sailing.

nofo.8469:

Zeldain.5710:

It’s not Nvidia’s problem…

Pretty much this. The game is poorly optimized to use graphics cards. If your game is slow or taking awhile to render things, the only thing you can really do is get a better CPU.

Actually a SSD helps loading in objects and players faster. But the average FPS in certain places is lacking and it’s something ANet should look into.

Paul.4081:

“Neither my Processor, nor my Video card, ever run even close to full load”

Glad it’s not just me!

Granted I run an AMD card, but same here, neither of mine run max load, in fact my CPU seems to be taking a nap at times when I play, barely even showing much load at all, and I still get crap fps on just medium settings.

System Model: M68MT-S2P
Processor: AMD Athlon™ II X4 640 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
Memory: 4096MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 4094MB RAM
Card name: ATI Radeon HD 5570
My ram barely gets over 30% too, so honestly I don’t know why my fps is so poor. and yes I’ve done all the proper driver updates.

I have an i7920@4ghz and two 4890s. I expected this game to run like crap being that I’m on 4 year old hardware but Guild Wars 2 runs surprisingly well. I’m running everything maxed 1080p on high/ultra but no super-sampling. I get around 40-90 fps pretty much everywhere except Lions Arch and giant zergs in wvw. In those two places I get 20-30 fps. I’m not sure if I would still be getting this performance on two comparable Nvidia cards but my senses tell me I wouldn’t. I think this game is optimized towards AMD? Because it’s honestly the only modern game I can completely max out.

I get respectable performance in PVE (except loins arch) but WvW the game runs terrible.
We can’t look to Nvidia for a remedy. The games engine like others have pointed out is CPU intensive, throw in some dodgy network code and you get what we have now. I’m hoping for improvement but not holding my breath. They can even fix the AI of Necromancers minions.

I get 40 to 60 fps everywhere except post-wintersday LA, all the clutters slows me down.

alot of people have stated that if you want 30fps min you need to have a 3rd gen intel OCed to around 4.5 or higher, if i were you guys i wouldn’t expect a change to the coding anytime soon

I think nvidia can release some better performance drivers for gw2 though,i mean how many times did they do this ? Once perhaps ? How many times do they keep releasing drivers for other games stating it will give you XX% more fps yadayadayada,ive only seen this on one of their drivers for gw2,they havent even tried optimizing it for gw2 any further at all.SLI works fine most of the cases,but still not optimal for one..

Caedmon.6798:

I think nvidia can release some better performance drivers for gw2 though,i mean how many times did they do this ? Once perhaps ? How many times do they keep releasing drivers for other games stating it will give you XX% more fps yadayadayada,ive only seen this on one of their drivers for gw2,they havent even tried optimizing it for gw2 any further at all.SLI works fine most of the cases,but still not optimal for one..

Exactly my point. Trust me, we all are just foaming at the mouth to get better performance in Batman Arkham Asylum, I mean, if we didn’t get our bi-weekly 8% boost to this fantastic title, we’d all just lose our kitten. Better not try to pry them away from REAL projects like that for our no name game Guild Wars 2.

Hence what this is all about, It may not be directly Nvidia’s fault, but they’ve done nothing to help the problem.

Mechanix.5719:

alot of people have stated that if you want 30fps min you need to have a 3rd gen intel OCed to around 4.5 or higher, if i were you guys i wouldn’t expect a change to the coding anytime soon

We have had an update recently on this. They are working feverishly on performance/culling, there is a group, it’s a major redo and in their words these guys are “Rock Stars” who are doing this. There is no eta, but it’s being addressed, they don’t know what else to say to us above that.

Steb.2571:

Caedmon.6798:

I think nvidia can release some better performance drivers for gw2 though,i mean how many times did they do this ? Once perhaps ? How many times do they keep releasing drivers for other games stating it will give you XX% more fps yadayadayada,ive only seen this on one of their drivers for gw2,they havent even tried optimizing it for gw2 any further at all.SLI works fine most of the cases,but still not optimal for one..

Exactly my point. Trust me, we all are just foaming at the mouth to get better performance in Batman Arkham Asylum, I mean, if we didn’t get our bi-weekly 8% boost to this fantastic title, we’d all just lose our kitten. Better not try to pry them away from REAL projects like that for our no name game Guild Wars 2.

Hence what this is all about, It may not be directly Nvidia’s fault, but they’ve done nothing to help the problem.

But that is it they have done something. They have (Nvidia) discussed it publically, they have released an updated drivers right around release. They then said there isn’t nothing more for them to do that it’s on Anets side at this time and it seemed Anet agreed. Other games have other situations around them.

Now my soap box part of it… I never understood why the gpu company is responsible for releasing new drivers for a released game to run better? Think about it. Lets say the version today is version 10 of your driver software, there have been 1000’s of games released for all versions 10 and below, most run great. Now you have a gaming company working on a new game, why are they not optimizing for version 10? What is this reliance on an unknown version 11? Why would there be a need to. I just never understood this strange chicken/egg thing. The devs have in their hands mature driver software, there are 1000’s of examples of success, why are they writing things for something that doesn’t exist and not for things that do exist?

Most video cards are not fully utilized in Guild Wars 2. My GTX 670 is quite literally twiddling thier thumbs. My CPU is working like hell though.

Calae.1738:

Most video cards are not fully utilized in Guild Wars 2. My GTX 670 is quite literally twiddling thier thumbs. My CPU is working like hell though.

Because the game is CPU bound and not GPU. The game isn’t sending more data to the GPU then it can handle, hence it’s not being worked 100%. In this case the GPU is totally optimized to a point it doesn’t even need to work hard.

You can have the best specs in the world and still get bad performance. Terribad game engine.

Changes to graphic drivers won’t take this game very far, as most say and know, we are limited by our cpu. The only problem is the amount of cpu power required to play on max with frames above 30 constantly, well exceeds practical assumptions based on the age of the engine.

Nayru.4537:

You can have the best specs in the world and still get bad performance. Terribad game engine.

You could also get good performance to. The thing is, is those with great specs, why aren’t they getting the output they should? I can’t answer for 1000’s of configs… I have very good specs, but not the best, I also have solid performance.

gw2 is as well uptimized as crysis 2 (laughably bad for those who don’t know) the difference is that crysis 2 runs at dx11 with MUCH superior graphics and gw2 with an old a** DX9 and still has same kind of performance lol. No one at anet optimized this thing before release that’s for sure.

Hi

I play GW2 in 3D. I have each setting max apart from normal sampling, reflection off ( personal preference) and low shadows @ 1080

My game runs @ 60 FPS pretty much all the time… UNLESS I am in high population zones. It’s the same story for WoW.

;With all due respect you cant compare mmorpg with games like bat man AC Athere is so much going on in mmorpgs and all these separate things take up CPU time. All the separate entities are unpredictable unlike npcs in games like AC3.
I
I think GW2 is highly optimized and nvidia’s drivers are fine.

PS I game on i5 2500, GTX 670 and 8 Gb RAM OCed of course.

Horrorscope.7632:

Mechanix.5719:

alot of people have stated that if you want 30fps min you need to have a 3rd gen intel OCed to around 4.5 or higher, if i were you guys i wouldn’t expect a change to the coding anytime soon

We have had an update recently on this. They are working feverishly on performance/culling, there is a group, it’s a major redo and in their words these guys are “Rock Stars” who are doing this. There is no eta, but it’s being addressed, they don’t know what else to say to us above that.

the OP is on about why he is getting low FPS with his rig when he shouldn’t be im letting him know, Performance/Culling are two different things i can imagine the culling to be fixed since it will stop alot of thief cry threads but i wouldn’t hold your breath for the coding to get a serious redo any time soon

Ansultares.1567:

For anyone with a quadcore, have you tried setting GW2 to run only on cores 1-3 (ie disable it from running on core 0)?

What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?

I tried it and noticed no changes in performance whatsoever, neither positive or negative.

If you want good fps, you have to buy decent Desktop PC.

Laptops were never designet for games. Yes some laptops can handle them very well but those are laptops for 1600 euros and higher.

You cant expect to have medium to max setings on some avarage laptop. Go out and try Tera, Swtor, Rift on your laptop and thell me if Guild wars 2 is badly optimalized, because its not.

Kacigarka.5176:

If you want good fps, you have to buy decent Desktop PC.

Laptops were never designet for games. Yes some laptops can handle them very well but those are laptops for 1600 euros and higher.

You cant expect to have medium to max setings on some avarage laptop. Go out and try Tera, Swtor, Rift on your laptop and thell me if Guild wars 2 is badly optimalized, because its not.

…lol. Yes it is.

You are right about laptops generally being bad for gaming but saying this game is optimized for graphics card use?

No.

Kacigarka.5176:

If you want good fps, you have to buy decent Desktop PC.

Laptops were never designet for games. Yes some laptops can handle them very well but those are laptops for 1600 euros and higher.

You cant expect to have medium to max setings on some avarage laptop. Go out and try Tera, Swtor, Rift on your laptop and thell me if Guild wars 2 is badly optimalized, because its not.

I have two on sale $750 laptops that run GW fine on High (haven’t tried WvWvW on them I typically play on a desktop), they run every other game even better that I’ve thrown at’em. Both i7’s one with a radeon, the other a nvidia product graphic card.