Guild Wars 2

Hello Gw2 community , greetings ! As we all know that Guild Wars 2 has been a game that uses an engine that uses only ONE CORE in our PC no matter how many cores do we have. I have seen multiple videos about players having 50~60FPS in areas like LA , SW , Black Citadel or even World Boss Events but their processor isn’t as high-end as we think it is. I am currently using AMD Radeon HD 7850 as my display card and Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz 3.40 GHZ as my Processor with a single socket of 8GB RAM and I noticed that people with lower spec than mine performing better in gw2.

So I was wondering if it is possible to reduce the work of 2 other Cores in order to increase the work of the front 2 core for better performance for my Guild Wars 2 ?

Some issues that may be bottle necking your overall performance:

• Instead to 1 slot 8GB RAM, 2×4GB RAM would perform better and even 3×2GB RAM would be better if your MoBo supports triple channel.
• You can’t overclock 1 single core, actually you can’t overclock at all since your i7 is a locked version, the CPU with the letter “K” can be overclocked, for example, I have an i5 3570k @ 4.1 GHz, even though your i7 is better compared to the stock version of the i5, I can overclock and then outperform the i7.

@MirandaWL, the game does use more than two cores. Do you see the game using more than 25% of your CPU? Then it’s using more than one core. I routinely see the game use between 50-75% CPU usage on my quad core depending where I am and what I’m doing.

The myth of a single core comes from the two main threads the game uses, neither thread can exceed the performance of a single core. There for the performance of a single core is the limiting factor, not how many you have or the overall performance seen on multithreaded benchmarks like Cinebench. People have misunderstood the statement that single core performance being the limiting factor and turned it into the game uses a single core.

Using a single stick of memory is a minor performance drag.

@Belzebu – no socket 1150 CPU can do triple channel. That’s a feature dictated by the CPU since the memory controller is baked in. Socket 2011 CPUs use triple channel.

Behellagh.1468:

@Belzebu – no socket 1150 CPU can do triple channel. That’s a feature dictated by the CPU since the memory controller is baked in. Socket 2011 CPUs use triple channel.

I remembered that a few i7 CPU supported triple channel, couldn’t remember which ones so I wrote to cover all the possibilities , thanks to clarify.

Behellagh.1468:

@MirandaWL, the game does use more than two cores. Do you see the game using more than 25% of your CPU? Then it’s using more than one core. I routinely see the game use between 50-75% CPU usage on my quad core depending where I am and what I’m doing.

The myth of a single core comes from the two main threads the game uses, neither thread can exceed the performance of a single core. There for the performance of a single core is the limiting factor, not how many you have or the overall performance seen on multithreaded benchmarks like Cinebench. People have misunderstood the statement that single core performance being the limiting factor and turned it into the game uses a single core.

Using a single stick of memory is a minor performance drag.

@Belzebu – no socket 1150 CPU can do triple channel. That’s a feature dictated by the CPU since the memory controller is baked in. Socket 2011 CPUs use triple channel.

So is there anything I can do to get the frame rate up to 60fps at almost anywhere ? ( other than lowering the settings in the game)

Without changing components of your PC? No, there are no options.
You can’t overclock you current CPU, so to get better performance you would need to buy a new one.
To use the dual channel you would need to buy another 8GB RAM stick, but still it would be a very small improvement.
AMD 7850 is a good enough video and even if you overclocked that (I don’t recommend at all) the FPS gain would be small, if any at all.

The key part of your request is “almost anywhere?”. Not sure if you aren’t hitting 60 fps or your complaint is not always hitting 60fps. A faster video card will help in places where players don’t crowd, like roaming the wilderness, but where the framerate plunges, in boss events and WvW zergs, a better video card isn’t going to help.

The biggest issue with the game is that it uses the CPU alot for the work the GPU should be doing. I built a new PC last month, spec in my sig, my old CPU seemed to lose a core, and the game would struggle to go over 17fps. Now I get 60 fps everywhere, granted this is because I’ve limited fps to 60 as I was getting tearing. The most fps I got where around 117fps while just running around the world mapping. With my current set up I was using my old 9800GT 1GB and got between 30-40 fps on average, It did drop to 27-30fps during the SW boss fight. But once I got the GTX 960, I’ve not noticed a performance drop at all.

H81M-E34 seems an odd choice with an i5-4690K.

Behellagh.1468:

H81M-E34 seems an odd choice with an i5-4690K.

Why? It has overclock function. Also I wasn’t planning on buying a new case, so this was the best board that wasn’t asking stupid.money. Also at the time the i5 4690K was £10 cheaper than a i5 4690.

I had recently done some reading around on fps issues in MMOs and made up a small list of things that could help out in fps.
Please note, below mentioned fix-ups was done by me based on several comments i dug up from the other MMOs.
Used to have terrible fps 10-15 average and got sick of it. With the below steps, I was able to get 75 fps (Character at stand still in LA), 40-45 fps (Character/Camera in motion in LA), 30-35 fps at World Bosses on high settings. I haven’t tried WvW yet as I’m taking a break from that section of the game.

System Specs : Core i7 3770k @ 3.5Ghz, H100i CPU cooler, 32gb RAM, Nvidia 670GTX, 512GB SSD (Game installed on SSD) Desktop is on 24/7 and is yet to be shutdown.

1. Un-parked my CPU cores. (People say its not safe to do this. I thought it couldn’t harm the CPU. Took a risk and have yet to see any problems.)
2. Overclocked my CPU to 4.5 GHz (Mobo had pre-setup OC values for each 0.5GHz increase. Please google on your CPU for safe levels of OC. Do not overdo it.)
3. Change Nvidia Global settings "Ambient Occlusion " – Disabled, “Power management mode” – Prefer Maximum Performance, “Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization” – On
These same settings are applicable for Nvidia Program Settings also.
4. In-game : Disable “Vertical Sync”, “Frame limiter” – Unlimited. You may also reduce your graphics detail settings to Medium/Low if you don’t really care about the detailed graphics.
5. Clean you graphics and CPU fans. (If you have dust on it, clean it now! Make sure your PC can ventilate the hot air)

Optionals : (Have not tried these yet)
1. Run the game on Windows XP compatibility setting. (Some people claimed this worked for them, some said it didn’t have any change)
2. Overclock graphics card (Not really required as the game is CPU dependent, but who knows?)
3. Buy a better CPU (Just for GW2? Yea right!)

• Un-parking and OC’in, try them at your own risk. If your not an expert, please google before you go ahead on these 2 steps. There is a lot of information on them.

Don’t do all the above together at one go and run the game. Load the game after each step to see if it makes a difference. You may/may not require all the steps to be done to get a better fps.

Good luck.

All that unparking the cores do is telling the OS not to try and conserve power. Going into the OS’s Power Options and selecting High Performance essentially does the same thing, prevent the OS from conserving power by stepping the frequency and voltage down to save power and instead always run them at maximum clocks.

True its the same thing. However, I did try changing the settings at the Power Options at first before un-parking to check the performance and can confirm that i had better fps increase when i actually un-parked them. Windows is so screwed up.