Guild Wars 2

on quad core processors? or just 2 cores?

i’d be surprised if it uses more than 1, really…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FPS-GPU-CPU-Performance-issues-FAQ/first#post588114 Q7/Q8 have some good info.

It’s using all 6 of my cores for the 50 or so threads it spawns at around 50%, so yes, it uses multiple cores.

It uses all 4 of my cores in my Quad-Core. There are gadgets/apps/sidebar tools you can use to monitor your CPU core usage, if you want to check yours.

Lil Puppy.5216:

It’s using all 6 of my cores for the 50 or so threads it spawns at around 50%, so yes, it uses multiple cores.

Typical misconception here.

Your computer distributes the load evenly but only once core can run one thread at a time. So if you look at the task manager you are not really seeing what is happening. Only 3 cores are doing work at a single time – that is why your CPU is only 50% utilized and therefore horrible for GW2. A tricore CPU with better clock speeds would do a much better job and be cheaper.

The main GW2 thread takes a lot of CPU power – in zergs not even the fastest OCed CPUs can not keep up with it to draw more than 30 FPS at high settings.

Intel has better single core speeds and that is why AMD CPUs fare so much worse in this game. Anything beyond 4 cores is a complete waste for this game. What matters is clock speed preferably in excess of 4GHz.
Here is a good CPU ranking list for GW2:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

A modern OS will distribute work across as many cores as there are in you system. The question really should be does the game generate enough work to keep 4 cores totally busy. The answer to that is often no, two to three cores worth of work spread over the number of cores you have but it can peak at times over three.

It depends on the performance of the CPU, the video card, the game settings and even hard drive speed and memory amount to determine the overall CPU the game needs.

Not entirely right Behellagh. That only happens when the program is coded to take advantage of it. If a program is only coded to run on one or two threads, the most your OS can split it across is one or two cores. The OS can dynamically adjust so that the most intensive processes have a core or two to themselves, but that’s about the limit.

Well on my hex core i7 I seem to use 7 to 8 threads (of 12 possible)… thats about it. load on cpu isn’t much higher then 40-45% either… (while also running TS, browser)

GPU isn’t maxed out either. (running at 60FPS capped, mostly because of heat considerations. playing 3-6 hours raises temperature here by 3-5 celsius on the whole floor… Good in the winter bad in the summer….)

Aidan Savage.2078:

Not entirely right Behellagh. That only happens when the program is coded to take advantage of it. If a program is only coded to run on one or two threads, the most your OS can split it across is one or two cores. The OS can dynamically adjust so that the most intensive processes have a core or two to themselves, but that’s about the limit.

I admit it’s an oversimplification. But I didn’t want to complicate the explanation by bringing in the concept of threads. But since this game has lots of threads but an unbalanced work load across those threads, the game rarely needs the power beyond three cores. Since someone else explained the asymmetric nature of the workload across threads including the number and the use of Process Explorer to watch the workload across threads, I didn’t bother to reiterate that.

And there is rarely a direct mapping of threads to cores by the software itself. That like many other aspects of modern software is left up to the OS to handle. So yes, on one hand software is coded to take advantage of multiple cores. On the other that doesn’t mean that software will scale linearly to the number of cores you have or that only a few cores will show a lot of activity instead of all of them showing a somewhat balance share.