Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

I was just wondering if any of you could assist me in understanding why my FPS is where it currently is. I play on maxed settings and typically get between 40-50 FPS in non-stressed zones.

However, when I move into a zone that has even remotely taxing environmental or graphical displays, my FPS drops to 20-30 and can even go as low as 10-15 in highly populated WvW or DE’s. This is especially prevalent in areas with a lot of water.

This normally wouldn’t concern me all that much, as playing on maxed settings should put quite a strain on a computer. However, I recently purchased a new computer that I thought would be able to play just about any game on the market with completely maxed settings, without sacrificing any FPS.

Here are the specs:
Alienware Aurora-R4
Alienware Aurora X79 with ALX Chassis
Intel Core i7-3960X (Six Core Extreme, 15MB Cache) Overclocked up to 4.2Ghz
32GB Quad Channel DDR3 at 1600MHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 690
512GB SSD 6Gb/s MAIN + 1TB 7200RPM Storage
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit, English, w/Media

Please avoid commenting on the fact that I purchased an Alienware. I am aware of the stereotype and would prefer if the focus was on the issue, rather than the brand I chose. I’m not all that tech savvy, didn’t have the expertise to build my own rig, and had the money available.

That being said, any help would be much appreciated. Thank you all for your consideration and time.

Oh and the Overclock is factory settings, I have not manually Overclocked.

My best bet is update all your drivers. The latest nVidia driver is 602.#Beta. I could be wrong, but thats what mine is.
Also check the nVidia control panel. (Control Panel > nVidia Control Panel) and check the ‘Manage 3D settings’. There could be something there that might be causing your low framerates. This happened to me with GW2.

The first thing that comes to my mind is that there might be something that’s forcing your video card to run at a much lower clock speed than normal. Just based on specs, I would expect you to be able to get at least twice the framerate you report.

Some likely candidates would be media players that are configured to use “hardware accelleration” since they adjust the GPU clock down to audio/video playback speeds not gaming speeds. (they adjust my GPU clock from 900 MHz down to 400 MHz) So if you might want to look into something like that. Things like streaming videos from youtube load a video player that can do this if hardware accelleration is enabled.

There might also be some issues with what driver version you are using. Some people have reported getting better performance with the newer nVidia drivers. You might want to look through the “Tech Support” forum. There are a lot of low framerate threads (mostly whining and complaining and finger-pointing, to be honest) and some of them have good information in them. It’s also possible that you might find some useful info on the Alienware forums, if other owners are having similar issues to yours, or if their tech staff is keeping up to date on the latest games. (might be a stretch, but depends on how good their customer service is…)

When I have the game client running, I am not running any other programs. I make sure I have no browsers open and the only things running in the background wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary.

I hope I’m not misunderstanding what it is you have said. I will take a look at the Alienware forums and see if I can dig up anything over there. Thanks for your response.

Arcain.9106:

My best bet is update all your drivers. The latest nVidia driver is 602.#Beta. I could be wrong, but thats what mine is.
Also check the nVidia control panel. (Control Panel > nVidia Control Panel) and check the ‘Manage 3D settings’. There could be something there that might be causing your low framerates. This happened to me with GW2.

I plan to update to that driver when I get home, but would you mind elaborating on what might be causing low fps in the 3D settings?

Really anything in the 3D setting could effect FPS but only slightly. Given your graphics card the settings in the control panel shouldn’t impact FPS.
For me it was Ambient Occlusion, however I have a nVidia GT240 so it’s not as powerful as yours and yet I run at 35fps normally and 20fps in WvW and graphic intense situations.