Guild Wars 2

Admittedly, I’m not a hardware guy. I’m using about a 4 year old GeForce 8600 GT with dual monitor support. My comp is about 3 years old with AMD Phenom 9550 Quad Core (2.2 G), Win 7 Ultimate, 6 Gig RAM. I’ve noticed a few things that lead me to believe that I’m having performance issues but want additional input. First, I’m playing a big, fat norn guardian. Here’s what I see…

• Often, specifically after an engagement in PVP with another player, I find myself running very very slowly… not crippled… but less than normal. I don’t see any conditions on myself. Then, all of a sudden, I’m running normal again.
• Thieves often attack me and I cannot see them. I am often struck 4 or 5 times and I cannot actually see them. I don’t know if this is a skill or if I’m going blind.
• Everyone seems to get 2 skills off for my one… and I’m always beaten to interrupts, knock downs, etc. It always seems like I am responding second.
• As a guardian, slant towards bunker build, I get pounded… I mean, I get 2 hit left and right. This point could be more that I suuuuuuck and not so much my card.

Constructive feedback is welcome. Recommendations on better cards and other hardware is also welcome.

Your first problem has nothing to do with performance. The game marks you “in combat” for a short period of time after engagement and as a result you run slower.

Second problem: thieves have skills that grant them invisibility. You can try out characters in sPvP at Heart of Mists to get familiar with their mechanics. Keep one of your character slots free for this kind of testing.

There’s two kinds of performance. You can help some issues by upgrading your computer components. Always remember that the performance you see is determined by the slowest bottleneck.

The other kind of performance is the one that depends on how well the game is coded, how well the servers and network can handle load. It might be that the server is physically far away from your location, which gives delay in actions you see on your screen (also called latency or lag).

If we are talking bout the same 8600 GT card, this one only has 256 MB (graphical) memory. The minimum requiremend is 500 MB (but thats a minimum). So I think you need to upgrade your graphics card. The other components are ok, but also far from optimum. So depending on your budget, for 50 euro/USD you can get a new graphiccard that can replace your old one with results that give you a fair change of winning. However, if your budget has room for it, you might consider tackling it all at once and have an optimum gaming experience (btw Curse.com has a sweepstake with a nice graphic card as a giveaway).

Optimum would be:
8GB ram or above
quadcore CPU 3 gHz or higher (the last 2-3 years I really prefer Intel above AMD)
VGA-card with 2GB RAM
and off course better mainboard and a powersupply that can handle it all.

mercury ranique.2170:

Optimum would be:
throw away your old junk and buy new

That´s great, what a novel idea.

Or he could just look his motherboard up, determine what best Phenom II(ignore the crappy AMD FX processors) he can upgrade to(prefer quadcores, higher clock) and get a new energy efficient GFX card.
I would recommend either the GForce GTX 660ti or the ATI HD7750/Gforce GTX650 if your power supply unit is 350W and you don´t want to upgrade that.

Buying a 128GB SSD drive to install Win7 and GW2 on would boost his overall performance much more than a new 800$ rig(without SSD).