Guild Wars 2

The game300+ players in the same area with lots of detail and spells flashing. Lower your settings or spend money on more horsepower.

There’s tons of games sitting on developer’s shelves right now because the average joe doesn’t want to invest into a gaming machine and is content with gaming on laptops and walmart web surfers. is fine. Of course you are going to get lag when your machine has to process

Onisuo.8607:

The game300+ players in the same area with lots of detail and spells flashing. Lower your settings or spend money on more horsepower.

There’s tons of games sitting on developer’s shelves right now because the average joe doesn’t want to invest into a gaming machine and is content with gaming on laptops and walmart web surfers. is fine. Of course you are going to get lag when your machine has to process

has nothing to do with weak hardware, i thought by now everyone knew that but i guess those who don’t own a gaming rig don’t… GW2 isn’t a game poorly optimized, gw2 is a game that doesn’t know the word ‘optimization’ at all. In one year there’s zero improvements.

Stormcrow.7513:

+1 to everything there.
We were promised an update from the devs regarding a performance patch and so far I have seen 0 impact if it was included into the Teq patch.

Don’t make stuff up to promote your false opinion. We were never promised a specific update for performance. What we were promised was that they are constantly looking for ways to improve performance.

Maybe it’s your internet connection? My PC is less powerful than yours and I have no issues even in zergs and high pop events, but I’m paying through the nose for high speed internet.

Errant Venture.9371:

Stop playing on machines from the late 90s. A 3rd gen intel i5 and a GTX 640 GPU will run Tequatl on max settings without breaking a sweat. The problem isn’t the servers or even the engine. It’s YOUR machine.

Source: Running Teq with no lag on max settings on a Dell XPS 8500 with a 3rd Gen i5 processor and GTX640 GPU

No, it’s not the machine. I have a computer that’s from 2007 and it has been able to handle every game I’ve thrown at it so far at max settings. And I play a ton of graphic-heavy games.

Then I come to Guild Wars 2 and I can barely run it on medium settings. Items disappear until the game can load them, sound disappears out of nowhere, and half the time, I just disconnect out of Teq fights for no reason at all. I get the same results on my laptop with an i5, except worse.

Vol.5241:

Stormcrow.7513:

+1 to everything there.
We were promised an update from the devs regarding a performance patch and so far I have seen 0 impact if it was included into the Teq patch.

Don’t make stuff up to promote your false opinion. We were never promised a specific update for performance. What we were promised was that they are constantly looking for ways to improve performance.

Actually we were promised a specific update with at least some improvement, supposed to be live at about one of the current weeks.

Just got a new PC on Friday. Ran all kinds of events all weekend long with everything maxed. It was a whole new game. My old comp was a pretty high end system when I got it 5 years ago, but it was barely limping along in GW2. It took me forever to save for a new one, money is tight!

Poledo.3256:

Just got a new PC on Friday. Ran all kinds of events all weekend long with everything maxed. It was a whole new game. My old comp was a pretty high end system when I got it 5 years ago, but it was barely limping along in GW2. It took me forever to save for a new one, money is tight!

The high end of 3 years ago is low end now

marnick.4305:

Nuka Cola.8520:

Perfectly said. Its 2013 and they have no plans to upgrade to DX11 rofl. Milking gem store is more important than offering a smooth and fun experience for your fanbase. I wish the current team working on FF14 came for gw2, they’re doing absolutely everything possible to please their players and are already building a DX11 patch while anet doesn’t even dream about it.

What would DX11 bring to GW2? Graphics don’t make a game, gameplay does. And GW2 has the best gameplay of any MMO by a long shot.

It also has the worst aesthetics.

Take my sources for what they are (not the most reliable that is), but a friend of mine who had several opportunities to speak with devs had one of them told him that they had the engine written by someone whom they gave very precise instructions and specifications. This resulted in an engine optimized for what they had originally envisionned for the game, but not necessarily suited to be flexible and evolve over time. Thus why we see things as stupid as the zephyrites Aspect skills failing because of lag despite the fact that it is a targeted AoE, which, logically, shouldn’t hesitate about where to land you since you’ve gokitten targeted it. But apparently there are complications in the engine that doesn’t make this sort of “logical” things possible. Overall I feel like it relies way too much on physics, and that’s why we see the Aspect skill rubber-banding, because it’s probably recalculating physics all the time when, really, it shouldn’t if it was better optimized, or it could at least handle lag better.
So yeah, Anet are trying to push the boundaries of what the engine allows, and I’m sure they’re working on improving it, but I guess they’re somewhat stuck with something that wasn’t meant to be as flexible as they wish it was.

Galtrix.7369:

Errant Venture.9371:

Stop playing on machines from the late 90s. A 3rd gen intel i5 and a GTX 640 GPU will run Tequatl on max settings without breaking a sweat. The problem isn’t the servers or even the engine. It’s YOUR machine.

Source: Running Teq with no lag on max settings on a Dell XPS 8500 with a 3rd Gen i5 processor and GTX640 GPU

No, it’s not the machine. I have a computer that’s from 2007 and it has been able to handle every game I’ve thrown at it so far at max settings. And I play a ton of graphic-heavy games.

Then I come to Guild Wars 2 and I can barely run it on medium settings. Items disappear until the game can load them, sound disappears out of nowhere, and half the time, I just disconnect out of Teq fights for no reason at all. I get the same results on my laptop with an i5, except worse.

a Machine from 2007 is 6 YEARS out of date. That’s FOUR full generations of components. It’s practically a relic.

Remember people, a component generation is 18 months. Anything more than 3 years old is COMPLETELY OBSOLETE.

Speaking to no person in particular: If you complained about the culling problem, and fought to have culling removed: You are unable to post about how not having culling has lowered your FPS. This is a case of “can never make everyone happy”

Running a Phenom II 3.4Ghz Denlab Black Edition processor, 8 gigs of G.Skill ram with a Nvidia GTX 550ti (EVGA OC edition). Workhorse processor circa 2009 and a somewhat out of date video card. This machine runs GW2 like clockwork. Teq at max settings? No problem. Packs of invading WvW’ers? Not an issue. Hordes of hungry Quaggans? Easy. Know what makes this machine go mildly nutty? When Fire Elemental spawns. I get a half-second of video lag. Point is I think there’s more optimizing to be done, but I don’t think it’s half as bad as people are saying.

Deepcuts.9740:

Same here
Powerful rig, but when the zerg comes, bbye performance.
I got used to play with everything set to low now.
Why?
Most importantly, because map loads a LOT faster while having your settings on low.
Fewer effects on screen so I can actually see what is going on.

All the people saying “it is your computer that s u x”, please, stop using lowest settings and then come here to troll.

When I7 @ 4.4 Ghz @ max 45 celsius on load, 16 GB RAM and SSD is not enough, blame your computer. Right…

Kailin, why on earth would you change an i7 for AMD 8350?
AMD is known to cheat benchmarks.
In real life usage, AMD is no match for i7

Didn’t switch, just happened to get a deal on another pc so I have both. I mainly have the AMD for the kids to play on. Just wanted to try GW2 on a different machine.

biofrog.1568:

Errant Venture.9371:

kailin.4905:

This is at medium settings. The game auto detects at ultra and I turned it down medium with post processing off and shadows and reflections to low. It gives me about 5 fps more than the auto detect settings. On my AMD I have most everything on low and can’t even get the 20-25 fps I get on my i7. This is during bigger zerges. Normal gameplay areas I get 70-100 fps.

Interesting. I normally run around 80 FPS in normal gameplay and drop to 40-60 FPS in big zergs with everything at high (except shadows at medium + post-processing off).

I don’t believe you for one second.

Firstly, you are using a nvidia card on a 60-75Hz maximum monitor refresh. IF you are getting 80 FPS, then you are first up not using Adaptive V-Sync which is already the wrong thing to do. If you are running with vsync off and sustaining 80 FPS, then you should obviously tuen vsync on. Alternatively, if you are running in windowed mode this will instantly cut ~10-15% performance further indicating you will not sustain 60 FPS.

Next up, a couple months ago I moved from a Core i7-940 + GTX580 to a brand new Core i7-4770 + GTX780. The performance increase is just about where I expected it to be, and it still does not sustain 60 FPS in any large fight such as Tequatl.

1) Neither system auto-detects as Ultra in any setting.
2) Both systems test comparably in all other games with equal specification PC’s.
3) My new system still averages around 25 FPS on High for most of the Tequatl fight with high player numbers, with player count upped to Highest. Sure if I look at the ground/sky I get 60 FPS – this is not an indicator of performance.

If you turned post-processing and shadows off/down then obviously you aren’t running with the graphics set to high. So if you want to retain any viable belief in your systems performance, you need to submit a video preferably with FRAPS enabled and showing all detail settings used. Alternatively, keep the F11 settings window up so we can see current FPS.
Until then, in my opinion you are just trolling.

I think you got a quote and reply combined there and its leading to some confusion. . I’m the guy saying I get 20-25 in big events on my machine just like you . The person replying was saying he gets 40-60. I can get 70-100 in certain areas but like you said its in desolate areas in graphically un-intensive situations. Then again maybe you weren’t directing your comment at me, but I assure you i’m not lying about my 20-25fps performance in zerg’s.

For all those that say that they are having issues with performance. Unless they give all the details and give me the network connection they have and if they are wireless or wired. I just can’t take anything they say seriously.

Ok please for the love of god tell me why im getting 22 FPS on my machine during Teq?

1 x Case (AZZA Armour Gaming Case – Red))
1 x Processor (AMD FX-8320 CPU (8x 3.50GHz/8MB L3 Cache)))
1 x Motherboard (Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 — AMD 970))
1 x Memory (8 GB [4 GB X2] DDR3-1600 Memory Module – Corsair or Major Brand))
1 x Video Card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 – 2GB – EVGA Superclocked – Core: 1046MHz – Single Card))
1 x Case Lighting (Red))
1 x Power Supply (700 Watt – Standard))
1 x Processor Cooling (Liquid CPU Cooling System [AMD] – Standard 120mm Fan))
1 x Video Card Brand (Major Brand Powered by AMD or NVIDIA))
1 x Primary Hard Drive (HyperX 3K 120 GB 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive))
1 x Optical Drive ([12x Blu-Ray] LG BLU-RAY Reader, DVD±R/±RW Burner Combo Drive – Black – FREE Upgrade from DVD Combo Drive))
1 x Sound Card (3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard))
1 x Speaker System (None))
1 x Network Card (Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100)))

Hrithmus, 1 x Case (AZZA Armour Gaming Case – Red))
There is your problem. it is RED! Duhh

Horrid performance had always been at the top of my reasons of not playing more often, if at all.

GW2 survived two system upgrades on my machine, and somehow managed to seemingly lose performance rather than improve it. Every other AAA title, on the other hand, gained FPS and shiny special effects density just as expected.

Right now we’re at the point where machines that have no problem chewing through games that look ten times better can barely handle a game that should require ten times less.

Don’t even TRY to pretend the problem isn’t with the game itself.

Draco.2806:

Horrid performance had always been at the top of my reasons of not playing more often, if at all.

GW2 survived two system upgrades on my machine, and somehow managed to seemingly lose performance rather than improve it. Every other AAA title, on the other hand, gained FPS and shiny special effects density just as expected.

Right now we’re at the point where machines that have no problem chewing through games that look ten times better can barely handle a game that should require ten times less.

Don’t even TRY to pretend the problem isn’t with the game itself.

exactly. i really don’t understand when ppl don’t believe and tell others gw2 runs well on their BestBuy laptop. i have 10mbps up, wired connection on a gaming rig and in anything zerg involved its the kind of lags i have never seen in a game and i’ve played all high demanding titles such as Metro LL, Crysis 3 and so on… I remember when gta4 came out on pc it was atrociously optimized, well, gw2 is EVEN worst and that should tell you so much its not even funny.

Just for fun, I have played around with both guildies and real life friends computers who were running GW2 poorly. Some of the “lamers” who think they know everything were complaining that it was GW2’s fault, just like half the people in this thread.

The look on their face when the power settings, or ATI performance meter was set to low, is just priceless. Just from unparking CPU cores, making sure ATI drivers are updated (Or nvidia for that matter) and the like.

Well.. My own computer: ~30 FPS → ~50FPS (Core unparking)
Girlfriends computer: 20 FPS → 60 FPS (ATI settings)
Guildie computer: 21 FPS → 44 FPS (Updated her ATI driver, and this was by the way running a 2nd gen laptop-i3)
This is just a few examples, but since they’re numbers without proof, I’m not gonna keep going

But guys. Take a look at your computers. Specs are not everything. A crappy driver, a wrong setting or the like can ruin your performance. Don’t be ignorant and think you know everything, just because you bought a “gamer computer” and know what a CPU is. If you’re running some overclocked crap piece of overpriced hardware which runs GW2 at 10 FPS, it’s not on GW2’s end. The kitten game runs on my 3 year old laptop at 50 fps after changing somethings. A second gen i5-460M. Get your kitten together, and figure out where to put your efforts.

Oh. That reminds me of the tired old argument, how did it go?..

“It runs well on my PC therefore there is no problem.” (And its ugly cousin “If you don’t have a 3,000$ rig, you don’t deserve to play videogames.”)

Yes. This argument will do wonders to convince people who experience horrible performance on their machine, rather than yours. If it works for you and someone you know, there must be no problem whatsoever.

Nevermind that we’re talking about a game that has all the technology wonders of WoW, a game released in 2004 based on 2001 technology meant to run on 1998-level PCs.

/Thick sarcasm

Erratic performance between similar systems – or, in case of GW2, similar zones and similar events – is the very definition of poor optimization.

That’s basically what a poorly-optimized game is: something that demands much, much, much more power than what it seemingly needs. Or, in GW2’s case, much more power than what it says on the box.

Treeline.3865:

The kitten game runs on my 3 year old laptop at 50 fps after changing somethings. A second gen i5-460M.

For the record, I’ve played GW2 on a 450, 560, and an old 9800GT. Unless you turn up the shadows and reflections all the way up, it’ll run the same.

“The same” meaning the same 20 FPS in most cases.

Hell, Someone posted here earlier with similar results on a 9600 GT (“I can run it on max when turning down some settings!”). Other than the horrible shadow and reflection systems, the game barely needs anything in the graphics department, which is common knowledge among the players, and speaking of which…

You’d do well to follow your own advice and not act like you know everything and give out bogus advice. It’s just plain old insulting, and rude. Thanks.

Guy’s the more I read thought this the more I think the game was optimized around older lower grade hardware. Assuming no one is trolling and that’s a huge assumption on the internet. The stats that look to get the best performance seem to be people with mid grade systems that are 2-3 year’s old. That would make since if they did that but they should have still optimized the game for new computers as the year went along.

Vol.5241:

Stormcrow.7513:

+1 to everything there.
We were promised an update from the devs regarding a performance patch and so far I have seen 0 impact if it was included into the Teq patch.

Don’t make stuff up to promote your false opinion. We were never promised a specific update for performance. What we were promised was that they are constantly looking for ways to improve performance.

Search the forums and ye shall find.

As per:
BillFreist
Gameplay Programmer
In addition to Colin’s response:
As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.
Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.
As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.
-Bill

The game uses 3-4 heavy threads. Of those 3-4 threads there is one main thread that can be bogged down.
The ideal PC for GW2 is a 6ghz Quad Core CPU. There have been numerous posts on the tech support forum regarding this matter.
Most posters have commented that “you needz better hardwarez”.
There is currently NO hardware on the planet(aside from some liquid nitrogen systems but that would be impractical) that can run GW2 at 60fps during massive zergs.
You can have a 4Ghz 1200 core CPU and it wouldn’t matter. GW2 requires raw clocks from a single thread in order to run well during zergs.

i7, 16 gb ram, and a gtx 680. I get like 20 fps in zergs, also I’m not even maxing the game out. Funny part is I can go play Rome 2 maxed and get a steady 50 fps in huge battles.

Errant Venture.9371:

Stop playing on machines from the late 90s. A 3rd gen intel i5 and a GTX 640 GPU will run Tequatl on max settings without breaking a sweat. The problem isn’t the servers or even the engine. It’s YOUR machine.

Source: Running Teq with no lag on max settings on a Dell XPS 8500 with a 3rd Gen i5 processor and GTX640 GPU

That is a very ignorant statement

i7 3770k @ 4.6 GHz watercooled, 16gb 2133 ram, GTX 275.

Everything high except reflections, shadows, and shaders. They are on medium.

Never dip below 60 even in huge zergs. Realistically I stay 70-80.

Sounds like you guys have some unstable overclocks. Try running prime95 for 24 hours and verifying that you haven’t toasted your CPU or that it is getting enough voltage.

If you aren’t running at least 1.31v around 4.5 ghz, you are doing it wrong. Autoset will not work either. An ivy bridge I7 or I5 will NOT budge in zergs. Period. This is provided that you are overclocked correctly.

And update your GFX drivers if you aren’t current.

And don’t overclock on a cheap motherboard. Forgot to mention that.

derekshreds.5394:

And update your GFX drivers if you aren’t current.

really dude? you think some1 with a 1k+ dollars pc doesn’t know about updating drivers? Its the engine problem, not drivers or amd/nvidia/intel problems, its their outdated engine that can’t handle anything and took them 1 years to even remove culling. It has nothing to do with motherboard either. I have a p8p67pro (~200$ back when it was released in 2011), run everything perfectly but gw2. Anet optimized their game worst than the S.T.A.L.K.E.R team in Kiev with absolutely no budget, talk about a LOL.

derekshreds.5394:

i7 3770k @ 4.6 GHz watercooled, 16gb 2133 ram, GTX 275.

Everything high except reflections, shadows, and shaders. They are on medium.

Never dip below 60 even in huge zergs. Realistically I stay 70-80.

Sounds like you guys have some unstable overclocks. Try running prime95 for 24 hours and verifying that you haven’t toasted your CPU or that it is getting enough voltage.

If you aren’t running at least 1.31v around 4.5 ghz, you are doing it wrong. Autoset will not work either. An ivy bridge I7 or I5 will NOT budge in zergs. Period. This is provided that you are overclocked correctly.

System is very very stable. I have seen ivys run lower than 1.31v stable as well although I didn’t get a magic chip
Change your culling settings to highest/highest and see how that goes for ya
GPU doesn’t really matter all that much it is the CPU threads.

Question – has anyone noticed an increase in fps during heavy load when switching from wifi to a hard line connection?

I play on an Asus G75 with i7 3610m CPU and GTX660m and have 60+ fps in most places except for zerg, which in that case will dip to ~20 fps. I will try a wired connection tonight but last time I checked my bandwidth wireless bandwidth stretched into the 50mbps area.

Any thoughts or comments on that?

SplendidDust of AncientSuns.8453:

Question – has anyone noticed an increase in fps during heavy load when switching from wifi to a hard line connection?

I play on an Asus G75 with i7 3610m CPU and GTX660m and have 60+ fps in most places except for zerg, which in that case will dip to ~20 fps. I will try a wired connection tonight but last time I checked my bandwidth wireless bandwidth stretched into the 50mbps area.

Any thoughts or comments on that?

That is too be expected. Wired connections will ALWAYS be better then wireless.

I run culling on highest and do not have a reduction in performance. Like I said, my I7 @ 4.6 ghz does not lag, therefore nobody running 4.4 or 4.5 should lag either, by logic. I used to run a pentium g2120 and that would lag appropriately in zergs. Even my laptop I7 920xm didn’t bog down in WvW or big event zergs, and that thing was a 1st gen I7.

And if anyone wants me to test an AMD card, I will have a 7950 in a few days when fedex arrives. That will clear up any AMD vs nVidia disputes for performance, as I currently run a GTX 275.

anzenketh.3759:

SplendidDust of AncientSuns.8453:

Question – has anyone noticed an increase in fps during heavy load when switching from wifi to a hard line connection?

I play on an Asus G75 with i7 3610m CPU and GTX660m and have 60+ fps in most places except for zerg, which in that case will dip to ~20 fps. I will try a wired connection tonight but last time I checked my bandwidth wireless bandwidth stretched into the 50mbps area.

Any thoughts or comments on that?

That is too be expected. Wired connections will ALWAYS be better then wireless.

True, but the real test – does it make a difference in THIS game, and more specifically the zergs.

I’ll share my findings later.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Perfectly said. Its 2013 and they have no plans to upgrade to DX11 rofl. Milking gem store is more important than offering a smooth and fun experience for your fanbase. I wish the current team working on FF14 came for gw2, they’re doing absolutely everything possible to please their players and are already building a DX11 patch while anet doesn’t even dream about it.

Hmmm…FF14…remind me…isn’t that the game that released so bad that they had to go completely back to the drawing bored, stop being a subscription game for a year, and pretty much disappointed every person who played it?

Oh, you mean they launched, charged people monthly fees, then took a break with all that money to fix the game?

Some games don’t have that luxury.

Vol.5241:

Stormcrow.7513:

+1 to everything there.
We were promised an update from the devs regarding a performance patch and so far I have seen 0 impact if it was included into the Teq patch.

Don’t make stuff up to promote your false opinion. We were never promised a specific update for performance. What we were promised was that they are constantly looking for ways to improve performance.

Correct and there has been many improvements in the last year, some more obvious than others. My company notebook barely runs GW2, I can feel the smallest optimization on that machine and there have been some. The team is working on it, maybe they should communicate on it but it’s obvious to everyone who pays attention.

Nuka Cola.8520:

There’s tons of games sitting on developer’s shelves right now because the average joe doesn’t want to invest into a gaming machine and is content with gaming on laptops and walmart web surfers. is fine. Of course you are going to get lag when your machine has to process

has nothing to do with weak hardware, i thought by now everyone knew that but i guess those who don’t own a gaming rig don’t… GW2 isn’t a game poorly optimized, gw2 is a game that doesn’t know the word ‘optimization’ at all. In one year there’s zero improvements.[/quote]

To those that actually pay attention to the game, how it runs, on minimal hardware, it’s pretty obvious that optimization has been done over the year. Your post isn’t so much a lie as it is pure and unadulterated ignorance.

Draco.2806:

Erratic performance between similar systems – or, in case of GW2, similar zones and similar events – is the very definition of poor optimization.

That’s basically what a poorly-optimized game is: something that demands much, much, much more power than what it seemingly needs. Or, in GW2’s case, much more power than what it says on the box.

Treeline.3865:

The kitten game runs on my 3 year old laptop at 50 fps after changing somethings. A second gen i5-460M.

For the record, I’ve played GW2 on a 450, 560, and an old 9800GT. Unless you turn up the shadows and reflections all the way up, it’ll run the same.

“The same” meaning the same 20 FPS in most cases.

Hell, Someone posted here earlier with similar results on a 9600 GT (“I can run it on max when turning down some settings!”). Other than the horrible shadow and reflection systems, the game barely needs anything in the graphics department, which is common knowledge among the players, and speaking of which…

You’d do well to follow your own advice and not act like you know everything and give out bogus advice. It’s just plain old insulting, and rude. Thanks.

As a software engineer (well in half a year) I’m very sorry to insult you with my useless advice. I have not yet seen a computer with a decent CPU and GPU that was unable to run GW2. With the exception of trying to help someone running Intel HD 3000 graphics (laptop) I have not yet seen a newer computer being unable of achieving 30 FPS in a zerg – No this might not always be on the best graphics, but many of them were not the best computers either. Yet I see people complaining that their über clocked stuff gets 10 FPS. That’s not poor optimization. That’s something restricting the hardware from performing. Poor optimization does not make your over 9000GTXüber card or your 5ghz clocked to 200ghz run like a toaster.
It’s not that I disagree the game can use more optimization, I would love the game to run smoother on my laptop – Being 3 years old it doesn’t get much higher than 40 FPS in zergs either, nearing 30 at the lowest.

The “erratic performance” between similar systems you talk about – Sure I’ve seen it. It’s called different drivers, some pre-installed hardware-gimping software, this “super cool optimizer app making my cpu up to 400%* faster”, unintended core parking, kitten running in the background etc etc. I have yet to see a case of a mid-range system released within the last few years that doesn’t run GW2.

marnick.4305:

Vol.5241:

Stormcrow.7513:

+1 to everything there.
We were promised an update from the devs regarding a performance patch and so far I have seen 0 impact if it was included into the Teq patch.

Don’t make stuff up to promote your false opinion. We were never promised a specific update for performance. What we were promised was that they are constantly looking for ways to improve performance.

Correct and there has been many improvements in the last year, some more obvious than others. My company notebook barely runs GW2, I can feel the smallest optimization on that machine and there have been some. The team is working on it, maybe they should communicate on it but it’s obvious to everyone who pays attention.

Nuka Cola.8520:

There’s tons of games sitting on developer’s shelves right now because the average joe doesn’t want to invest into a gaming machine and is content with gaming on laptops and walmart web surfers. is fine. Of course you are going to get lag when your machine has to process

has nothing to do with weak hardware, i thought by now everyone knew that but i guess those who don’t own a gaming rig don’t… GW2 isn’t a game poorly optimized, gw2 is a game that doesn’t know the word ‘optimization’ at all. In one year there’s zero improvements.

To those that actually pay attention to the game, how it runs, on minimal hardware, it’s pretty obvious that optimization has been done over the year. Your post isn’t so much a lie as it is pure and unadulterated ignorance.[/quote]sooooo did we gain one fps yet?

Treeline.3865:

As a software engineer (well in half a year) I’m very sorry to insult you with my useless advice.

Your ego is showing.

Either way your “advice” was absolutely bogus. I was just trying to find a polite way to tell you that everyone knows it’s bogus.

You’re basically insulting everyone here by saying poor performance is attributable to rookie mistakes, when everyone knows full-well that the GPU side of things (and by extension, graphics settings) have zero effect on performance overall. Everyone knows the issue is game logic (CPU-dependant) and you’re telling your tales about how you helped your friend by disabling power savings for their AMD card. It’s nonsense.

Again, we have reports from people running pre-2xx generation nVidia cards that can easily “max” the graphics without issue.

There’s always “experts” like you in these threads. Everyone’s heard it: “It runs fine for me, so you must be doing something wrong, and I’m a genius computerist for building my rig right.”

Well it’s garbage, and it’s annoying.

derekshreds.5394:

And update your GFX drivers if you aren’t current.

Please don’t say things like that.

Both nVidia and AMD are notorious for botching things up between driver releases. The situation has improved somewhat in the recent years, but not long ago, “updating” your drivers could mean a loss of good 30 FPS in some games.

Stormcrow.7513:

You can have a 4Ghz 1200 core CPU and it wouldn’t matter. GW2 requires raw clocks from a single thread in order to run well during zergs.

Correct.

It’s probably the amount of actors within the zone/instance that drags down performance more than anything else (and why culling settings work wonders to alleviate the problem). Because of the poor culling, you don’t even have to see any of them to see the dip in performance either. I wouldn’t be too surprised if GW2 tried to keep rendering everything in the entire zone at once.

So, yes, CPU issue.

Nuka Cola.8520:

sooooo did we gain one fps yet?

I run a fairly modest rig, other than the new 560 for a GPU, and I can tell you judging performance increases or decreases is practically impossible.

How GW2 performs seems to depend on the harvest, precipitation, phases of the moon, will of gods, time of day, and amount of ecto on the trading post. It’s completely random.

Or, more realistically, it depends heavily on the amount of players within the zone and the zone itself. (Wayfarer Foothills? No problem. Diessa Plateau? Might as well not bother.)

Well, for me. I build my Desktop PC couple years ago, by todays standards it’s pretty old. I have been able to play every game I have on max settings (e.g. Crysis 1, 2, 3; Far Cry 3; Lineage 2; GW1 etc.) and have not had a single problem that made me wonder “Hmm, what’s my FPS here”. Yes some are a bit older games.

GW2 however was the first game that really stressed my Desktop, and give me close to unplayable frame rates that it just turned into a slide-show. Overclocking my CPU (from 3.0Ghz stock to 3.6Ghz) helped really A LOT.

Funny is, that changing graphical settings in the options menu doesn’t help anything, the only setting that gives me a slight boost in FPS is the “Shader Option” when I set that to Low in comparison to high, I win like 5 FPS on average. Rest of the options have no effect, at all.

Now I also got 2 SSD’s recently and installed them in a RAID0, and I only installed GW2 onto it, nothing else. This did help loading times a lot, specifically the loading of textures and players when entering towns like Lions Arch. However the loading times in general for this game are extremely long.

Now I’m sure my CPU is my systems main bottleneck, along with all my other out-dated motherboard and RAM. But my GFX card is hardly being used in GW2, which is a shame.

Current Spec:
E8400 @ 3.6 Ghz
4 GB DDR2 RAM @ 4-4-4-12
Nvidia GTX 260 (First Gen)
Asus P5Q Pro Motherboard
640GB WD HDD
2x SSD 32GB (RAID0)

On a side-note: Does anyone know whether it would be beneficial for GW2 to install Windows on the RAID0 SSD along with GW2 next time I reinstall everything? Would there be any performance boosts (just GW2 related) seeing my system would also benefit from the speed SSD brings with it?

Furesy.6935:

Well, for me. I build my Desktop PC couple years ago, by todays standards it’s pretty old. I have been able to play every game I have on max settings (e.g. Crysis 1, 2, 3; Far Cry 3; Lineage 2; GW1 etc.) and have not had a single problem that made me wonder “Hmm, what’s my FPS here”.

GW2 however was the first game that really stressed my Desktop, and give me close to unplayable frame rates that it just turned into a slide-show … Funny is, that changing graphical settings in the options menu doesn’t help anything

Pretty much the same here. I wouldn’t say “slide-show” (other than in zergs), but definitely well outside the comfort zone. I see practically no difference between all-maxed and all-lowest settings. How many players/mobs there are and what zone you’re in is what seems to matter.

As for RAID and SSD, they will improve loading times quite noticeably (as many posters will attest), but have pretty much no impact on performance. If you have more than 2Gb DDR2 RAM, it won’t come into the picture either. And if you keep your shadows and reflections down (plus shaders, arguably, although these shouldn’t matter on x60 cards), GPU won’t matter much as well…

There’s a problem with GW2’s file system, as well. Indexing an entire 15Gb file every time you want to look up the tiniest of assets is extremely counter-productive when it comes to reading from disk; that’s why SSD has such a huge impact here in particular. Most modern games have the decency to keep their data in smaller chunks.

I’m no software programmer, but I have been a PC gamer for over a decade and have done my fair share of building, tweaking, and optimizing. Still on two different good PC’s I’ve been unable to get the expected performance from GW2. I have several friends who are hardcore PC gamers, one of which who works in the gaming industry. On multiple occasions I have had them helping me try to find my bottleneck or help me get a better play experience in GW2. Every time it has resulted in them throwing up there arms in disgust and ranting multiple phrases that would just be turned to the word “kitten” on this forum. Now I’m not on here to compare rig or to get berated because I don’t have a pc that came out last week. What I will say is that for a game that by its very nature is aimed to be more casual it does not make sense to me that this level of pc optimization knowledge is required to play it. Most of the alleged target audience put in the game, hit auto detect, and want to have a good play experience. If they can’t they may turn things down a bit. If that don’t work they go play something that will work better. In my case I buy a lot of games. I’m a family of 4 gamers with 3 newer PC’s and have bought most every AAA title this year. Everything plays excellent on all 3 computers except GW2. (in all fairness I’ve only tested on 2 of them because the other one is the exact same) Specs and tech aside that to me is enough to feel that there is an issue. I don’t think my performance is awful…I just don’t feel this game performs as it should for what it is. I also know that there are many more in the same boat as me and it makes me question the idea of making more and more large group open world content that does not play well with the given game engine.

in reply to Fursey’s comment: I have the same experience were the fps difference between lowest setting and everything maxed is usually about 5fps. Maybe 10 tops… I’ve unparked cores and the whole lot with very minimal improvement.

@ Draco
Unfortunately it is against the EULA to decompress the .dat file as well
@Furesy
There will be noticeable load time increases with kitten or Raid array. I won’t go back to a standard platter HDD after using kitten

I think the problem most are referring to is how the game poorly optimized to split the load across multiple cores. That’s why new Intel Processors do so well here. Its also why the 4th Gen Core i5 performs just as well as a 4th Gen Core i7, because the game isn’t optimized to rake advantage of the HT. If you have a hex core or eight core processor you’re just plain screwed in a zerg. The engine isn’t built to handle newer processor technology. Almost everything takes place within a single core, which is soooooo 15 years ago.

I guess, by their logic, bigger is better. The more the merrier. Quantity over quality.

Errant Venture.9371:

Im Mudbone.1437:

What I don’t understand is WHY ANET hasn’t made the graphical part of the game GPU based over CPU, kinda counter productive IMO.

They bought the engine architecture from another company. Most MMO producers don’t actually write their own engine architecture anymore.

Wildstar did/does/is.