Guild Wars 2

Can it run GW2 smoothly? Even WVW without hitting low setting and below 35 fps?

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Invest in a good cpu. (doesn’t need to be the newest gen)

my 3yr old com

core i7 3770k
with amd r9 290

very smooth even in zerg with a QHD display.

Going to second what Ragion said.
Even with a i7 6700k overclocked to 4400ghz and 2x SLI GTX 1080 GPU

Playing on max settings at 1440p resolution I still rarely get above 60fps, only in low pop open world areas or staring at a wall in LA. Mostly it’s 20-60fps.

If I drop the resolution to 1080p and graphical settings to mid range, I can reliably maintain 60+ FPS but that’s not the point. The game just has a sucks optimised graphics engine. Runs practically the same on high end modern day machine as my 4 year old one with roughly 1/16th the power)

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

GW2 relies heavily on a single core performance. get an i7 processor. AMD’s slow 10-core CPU is no use.

I have a 6700k and a R9 390 and very rarely go under 60 FPS, I have the 60 FPS limiter on. I play with all settings on max, except for the model details. I don’t care what skins people use in big blobs, I wouldn’t be able to see them anyway with all the particle effects, so I reduce that setting and the game runs smoothly above 60 FPS without an issue.

When I see my characters alone or in small 5-man or 10-man content I see the game at maximum quality, the settings only takes effect in big blob fights by making distant players use “default skins”. It works wonderfully.

As for your machine, you can play with the models detail setting as it’s the worst offender for FPS drops. You can set it to lowest and it won’t affect your gameplay.

Btw: none of my cores on the I7-6700K ever reach 30% usage when playing GW2 on any situation.

Easy answer.

Yes you can.

I run GW2 on multiple PC’s of various ages. Way worse than you have.
They run fine. Just need different settings but in general. They all run fine even in big blobs of people. Dont worry too much about it.

Easily, but an i5 won’t shine at WvW and world events, but then again, you’d need almost a nuclear power plant processor to deal with that

Behellagh.1468:

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

Yea because of the number of objects the game is CPU intense, but i find it hard to believe that that is the reason why fps still drops below 30 on the lowest settings when running specs years better than gw2’s minimum. If its not the GPU and its not the CPU then it can only be one other thing

Footage recorded with an old Q6600 (way old than the i5 you are saying ^^) and a HD 4670
Smooth and I used fraps that lowered my FPS as well.
I get solid framerates even with recording.

It will be fine. Lower the settings and dont expect to run ultra high settings, GW2 is CPU heavy but your i5 will be all right.

The problem of GW2s (non-)optimization stems from its engine. As many know it’s a modfied GW1 engine developed 5 years ago hence has very poor (no) multi – thread support that many modern rigs get their performance from. On top of that many devs who worked on the GW2 engine originally don’t even work at ArenaNet anymore making effective performance upgrades through patches nigh impossible.

My specs are actually Lower than yours and the game runs between 60-30 fps at medium settings. You should be just fine.

Ragion.2831:

Behellagh.1468:

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

Yea because of the number of objects the game is CPU intense, but i find it hard to believe that that is the reason why fps still drops below 30 on the lowest settings when running specs years better than gw2’s minimum. If its not the GPU and its not the CPU then it can only be one other thing

When you are in a mob of players, the thread that manages that takes longer per frame than the thread that handles talking to the GPU.

Getting good performance in Gw2 it is not so about putting as much raw performance as you can, but more about getting the right settings and tricks.
Of course you need some raw power, but once you’re set onto a Haswell i5 at 4GHz and a GTX 960/R9 380, you will get better performance from optimizing other things:

In terms of hardware:
-Fast RAM, 2400MHz cl10 for Haswell and +3000MHz for Skylake/Haswell-E/Broadwell-E.
- Gpu must work at pcie 3.0 x16. Gw2 is very sensible with pcie bandwidth.
- In case of Skylake, set FCLK to 1GHz.

As for software:
- W10 is preferable.
- Disable Reflections.
- Shadows disabled or to “Lowest”.
- Character model limit to “Low”.
- Enable “Effect LOD”.
- Disable “High res character textures”.

I have no problems with my set up. I’ve not encountered any noticeable frame drops with everything on highest settings. But then I don’t really WvW, so don’t know who that would work out. But full world boss maps I have not encountered any problems. also my spec’s are in my sig.

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Ridiculously Good.

Is there a processor GW2 can’t run on?

Sure graphic quality will vary but you’ll still get gameplay, compare this to here-today-gone-tomorrow sandpit AAA games.

For a MMO you want as many people as possible being able to join in, as other players are the key element of MMO games.

All MMO games are essentially two threaded – there is very little that can be done about this unless you allow peeps with superior PCs to gain advantages over other (lesser) peeps.

Ragion.2831:

Behellagh.1468:

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

Yea because of the number of objects the game is CPU intense, but i find it hard to believe that that is the reason why fps still drops below 30 on the lowest settings when running specs years better than gw2’s minimum. If its not the GPU and its not the CPU then it can only be one other thing

In a MMO there is a fair high limit on the number of toons you can have in a single zone.

All toons can interact with each other.

Clearly if the toons are all spread out the interaction is low, and correspondingly the loading is low. If the toons all stand on the same spot the interaction is huge and so is the loading. This characteristic is exponential. Hardware variation is linear.

You will always get frame drops in MMO type games because they have to be chiefly two threaded and maintaining inactions is more important than framerate.

In sandpit AAA games the number of toons possible per sandpit is kept very low and the minimum specs kept high to avoid any graphical compromises no matter the number of inactions possible with low cap pops.