Guild Wars 2

Topic title (truncated):
Found improvement for mouse smoothing/lag + small performance boost.

I’ve been researching a bit about some of the performance issues people are having, and it seems that when HPET is enabled in the bios, it almost always impacts gaming performance negatively. Usually it’s jitters and mouse yuckiness.

The setting is usually under the Power Management section of your bios, and you should set it to Disabled. HPET stands for “High Precision Event Timers.” Whatever it was intended to optimize, it de-optimized performance.

There was an instant and very noticeable decrease in mouse lag/smoothing effect in-game. It’s still there, but only at about 10% of what it was before. The game feels MUCH more responsive.

Also, I have a particular vista that I always stand at in Lions Arch for FPS testing. It’s particularly hard on my computer (I’m suffering from that low CPU/GPU utilization bug/issue that so many people are in GW2), and my average framerates there jumped from 20-21FPS to 23-25FPS. It’s not a HUGE jump, but it’s a jump nonetheless.

Hopefully this helps some of you out!

I’d be careful advising people to mess with BIOS settings. Mess something up there, and you can REALLY mess up your system. Not worth a small FPS increase.

The reason you have a laggy mouse in GW2 is because the engine is based on the GW1 engine. It’s a heavily modified version of the same software. Mouse behavior is tied to performance, FPS, the lower your FPS the more mouse lag you will have. That’s also why it’s such a big deal to fix. Don’t look for it to get better any time soon.

Darani.8356:

I’d be careful advising people to mess with BIOS settings. Mess something up there, and you can REALLY mess up your system. Not worth a small FPS increase.

Hardly. If you mess something up, you can put it back. This is not some outlandish suggestion. Google it. Suggestions to disable HPET are all over the place.

Oxe.6142:

The reason you have a laggy mouse in GW2 is because the engine is based on the GW1 engine. It’s a heavily modified version of the same software. Mouse behavior is tied to performance, FPS, the lower your FPS the more mouse lag you will have. That’s also why it’s such a big deal to fix. Don’t look for it to get better any time soon.

Yet disabling HPET significantly decreased the amount of mouse lag, so it’s not a 1:1 tie to framerate.

Just ended up disabling HPET on my system earlier for unrelated reasons, but it did help improve performance.

The method for me to disable HPET was:
- Disable ACPI SRAT Tables in BIOS
- Reduce ACPI level from 3.0 to 1.0 in BIOS
- Run “bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock” in Command Prompt in Windows

Some BIOS’s and UEFI machines have nicely named HPET options for toggling, but as in my situation, this isn’t always the case (I basically played around with various settings until I found those two settings to disable HPET).

I uploaded a few Timing, related programs earlier for other people to test HPET, DPC, and Timing accuracy: http://puu.sh/18avL
https://www.virustotal.com/file/b565599b47ef1898d9f3957b5ee438c58a35e3d41b247ac0c50c229f34138358/analysis/1348483600/

HPET2: Tests if your using HPET or CPU clock
dpclat: Tests DPC latency levels
WinTimingTest: Tests timing accuracy

Thanks for the info, and glad to have some backup on this one. I’m going to try that console command as well, since all I did was disable the setting in the bios.

Oxe.6142:

Mouse behavior is tied to performance, FPS, the lower your FPS the more mouse lag you will have.

That’s how every single game in the existence of games have all worked, which is why 60+ FPS is so vitally important in certain kind of games such as twitch shooters. The reason you get mouse lag when your FPS gets low is because your computer requires more time to render each and every frame. And because it uses more time to render frames it also display those frames much slower than if you have higher FPS.

But an other problem is that GW2 has mouse smoothing, what this does is smooth out movement a few frames, if you have a very limited number of frames this smoothing will last longer. We need an option to completely turn off mouse smoothing, this should significantly improve responsiveness, even on low en computers.

In my world 20 FPS is just not playable. In shooters I can not play with anything below 60 FPS, makes it horrible! In RPGs I prefer 50+, 40 is ok, 30 is the bare minimum.

Edit: Oh and also, turn off Vsync if you have it on, it adds enormous amounts of input lag to any game, and if input lag is already an issue then it is even more important to get it off.

There are some pretty big general performance problems with the game. I just hope they can address them before all of us suffering with them pull our hair out.

@Litego: You’re correct about 20FPS. This is technically playable, but barely.

Litego.4953:

Oxe.6142:

Mouse behavior is tied to performance, FPS, the lower your FPS the more mouse lag you will have.

That’s how every single game in the existence of games have all worked, which is why 60+ FPS is so vitally important in certain kind of games such as twitch shooters. The reason you get mouse lag when your FPS gets low is because your computer requires more time to render each and every frame. And because it uses more time to render frames it also display those frames much slower than if you have higher FPS.

But an other problem is that GW2 has mouse smoothing, what this does is smooth out movement a few frames, if you have a very limited number of frames this smoothing will last longer. We need an option to completely turn off mouse smoothing, this should significantly improve responsiveness, even on low en computers.

In my world 20 FPS is just not playable. In shooters I can not play with anything below 60 FPS, makes it horrible! In RPGs I prefer 50+, 40 is ok, 30 is the bare minimum.

Edit: Oh and also, turn off Vsync if you have it on, it adds enormous amounts of input lag to any game, and if input lag is already an issue then it is even more important to get it off.

Low quality games have issues with mouse lag. There is a simple fix called “hardware cursor” but the GW1 engine may not have that feature built into it. It hasn’t been an issue in software for years, except for software using outdated code, like this one does. I’d agree with the rest of what you said tho.