Guild Wars 2

Hello GW2 community!

So, I have what I BELIEVE to be a graphics card that is on its way down the tubes (severe framerate loss in spurts, computer hard powers off when in A Light in the Darkness story mission and when fighting underwater, usage of GPU was at 99% the entire time, CPU quad core was at about 50%). Yes, all the drivers were updated, and haven’t had any new updates in months. It’s an ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. So I guess my question is twofold. First, does that sound like a graphics card issue to you, and second, what reasonably-priced graphics card would you recommend for a replacement?

The HD 4800 series is quite old so I wouldn’t be surprise at all that it is dying.
I don’t know what is your budget for a new card, but if you like the AMD cards got for R9 370 or better, and from the Nvidea go for GTX 960 or better.

Yeah, that’s an old card. Probably on it’s way out.

I have am MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2GB. Runs the game on full effortlessly.fps drop around to 30 ish in WvW 3 way blobs and world bosses.

you can try to clean it up too, maybe is getting dusty; i have a radeon hd 6950 that worked flawlessly to me but after a good time (like 2 years without maitenance) i started to get fps drops and high temperature (84 degrees)

i opened the machine and checked and the videocard cooler was full of dust balls and very dirty on the small spaces, after cleaning it it started to work perfectly again

I had a 4850 that died pretty much the same way about 4 years ago.

I agree with the above, try cleaning it really well first, the shutdowns could be a heat issue.

I’d definitely recommend cleaning it first.

My old computer had a pair of HD 4890’s and when they died (quite spectacularly, it looked like there was static snow all over my games) I found out I couldn’t just buy an upgrade because the motherboard and processor weren’t compatible with anything newer.

Fortunately I had the money to upgrade them too, but then I had to get new RAM, and replacing the mother board and processor means basically rebuilding the entire computer. In the long run it was probably a good move, I’d have had to upgrade sooner or later anyway, but it was a lot more hassle than simply cleaning the graphics card – which was my first attempt.

In answer to your second question however I upgraded to the AMD Radeon R9 series. Specifically the 280×. All I can say really is that it works and even I noticed a big improvement in graphics and fps (and normally it takes a lot for me to notice new graphics). That was also almost 2 years ago now and I haven’t had to worry about my PC not being compatible with new games since the upgrade.