Guild Wars 2

i have a video card hd 4650
and a cpu of intel E2220 dual core 2.40ghz

now i have about 25 fps in uncrowded places in medium-high graphics
and 28 fps in the lowest graphics avilable in uncrowded places
( the diffrence is little and weird )
imporving my cpu for like i3 should improve my fps ? or i should improve my videocard
cuz he isn’t so good either, the weird thing is if i do everything on high the diffrence of fps isn’t too high. ( i’m on subsample not supersample in supersample the fps is about 8 )

so anyway my main question is just improving my cpu should improve my fps in atleast 5-10 ?

The game is not the greatest of ports, you’ll need to upgrade both your CPU and GPU to get decent performance.

I wouldn’t look at anything less than a Sandy dual core (ideally, quad, but this depends on your funds) and something like a GTX 460 or 6850 (these are pretty cheap now).

Basically, looking at your current specs, you’d need a completely new PC.

JellyRabbit.2978:

i have a video card hd 4650
and a cpu of intel E2220 dual core 2.40ghz

now i have about 25 fps in uncrowded places in medium-high graphics
and 28 fps in the lowest graphics avilable in uncrowded places
( the diffrence is little and weird )
imporving my cpu for like i3 should improve my fps ? or i should improve my videocard
cuz he isn’t so good either, the weird thing is if i do everything on high the diffrence of fps isn’t too high. ( i’m on subsample not supersample in supersample the fps is about 8 )

so anyway my main question is just improving my cpu should improve my fps in atleast 5-10 ?

If i were you bro….scrap it, start again. About 500-600 quid (dont know what that equates to in dollars and kittens but whatev) will get you a decent PC that can max GW2 at a steady 55-60 fps…happy days.

If you havent got the money, upgrade the GPU first as you will probs have to replace the MoBo as well if you changed out the CPU.

You can’t just shove an i3 into whatever socket that E2220 is in, and you’re not really gonna find a video card more powerful than that HD 4650 that won’t bottleneck due to your slow CPU. It’s time to get a new computer.

But i don’t have the money right now is there anything else to just get my fps to 35 ? ( gpu is video card right ? )
so maybe buying the hd 6670 will do something?

Whilst getting a new PC is a good idea, have a good play with the graphics settings until then. If I put my settings on the highest preset, the framerate is a bit too low to be playable. With some tweaks on specific things, it looks pretty much exactly the same but the framerate is playable. I would post exactly what I’ve changed to achieve this but I’m not at my main PC right now.

Slightly related question: How much difference would a PC upgrade make to WvW? That’s the only thing my PC struggles on high settings at the moment, I’m upgrading to something much better soon but should I expect there to be a big improvement or is lag in WvW network related and unavoidable due to the sheer amount of players.

JellyRabbit.2978:

But i don’t have the money right now is there anything else to just get my fps to 35 ? ( gpu is video card right ? )
so maybe buying the hd 6670 will do something?

How much RAM are you rocking? GW2 can use a lot of memory (I’ve seen it over 1.5GB), so if you’ve got something like 2GB of RAM, upping to 4GB could help a bit.

Really though, other than setting everything to minimum, there’s not a lot you can do (that would make a significant difference) without upgrading your hardware.

Don’t upgrade your GPU without upgrading the CPU, like others have pointed out, you’ll still be bottlenecked by the CPU (same goes for upgrading the CPU without upgrading GPU).

Wyvers.9237:

Whilst getting a new PC is a good idea, have a good play with the graphics settings until then. If I put my settings on the highest preset, the framerate is a bit too low to be playable. With some tweaks on specific things, it looks pretty much exactly the same but the framerate is playable. I would post exactly what I’ve changed to achieve this but I’m not at my main PC right now.

Slightly related question: How much difference would a PC upgrade make to WvW? That’s the only thing my PC struggles on high settings at the moment, I’m upgrading to something much better soon but should I expect there to be a big improvement or is lag in WvW network related and unavoidable due to the sheer amount of players.

It can vary so much that its hard to out-upgrade it. Even some of the most awesome comps will still chugg if there are 100 players standing infront of you spamming partical effects…plus network can impact the fps a tad. If your going to have a big W3 session, maybe turn your graphics down a little beforehand in order to have the best gameplay.

Aye, I’ve been turning them down beforehand, but since my settings are pretty specific it’s annoying to take a screenshot of my settings so I can set them back afterwards, since as far as I’m aware there’s no way of saving your settings as a preset that you can switch back to later.

Thanks for your feedback, I wasn’t expecting flawless FPS with 100 people in front of you but as long as it’s playable I don’t mind.

I wouldn’t upgrade just now. If you look at the Tech Support forums there are dozens, if not hundreds, of topics like this about people with all kinds of system specs having completely different results. So you can upgrade your system and end up with worst performance.

Some Anet staff said they are already looking into the performance issue and untill they say they’re not doing any further optimization I’m not buying any upgrade.

Play with the graphics settings.

Each change takes effect immediately and there’s an FPS display in the options window so you can see immediately the effect each change has.

I’d strongly advise against a partial upgrade (e.g. more RAM) as with such an outdated system the RAM would almost certainly be of no use if/when you do do a full rebuild (for the same reason that someone earlier stated that you can’t just drop an i3 into a different socket motherboard)

Do you have anti-aliasing turned on? Turn it off, turn shadows off.

Bottom line is you are going to have to sacrifice image quality for performance.

My suggestion would be to look on Craigslist for a cheap used mid-range card since you cant afford an entire new rig.
Your card will be bottlenecked but you will still see an increase in performance. At least I did anyway.
I have an AMD dual Core 2.8 and was running an ATI 5570. I bought a 550 Ti Card for $50 bucks and I can run everything maxed out in pop zones at 40+ fps now.

noobdestroyer.4271:

Do you have anti-aliasing turned on? Turn it off, turn shadows off.

I think disabling shadows alone increased my FPS by 10.

My system’s getting on a bit now but with careful tweaking (usually things like shadows, reflections, vegetation, etc) I can get FPS between 50 & 60 without sacrificing things like character / world textures and view distance.

I have an i3 3.3Ghz and my frame rates are pretty good, over double what you are saying. Core speed is most important. You want at least a 3Ghz or more.

Core speed is notable only when comparing processors within the same family. You might have meant that and are referring to the i3/Sandy or Ivy Bridge.

human eye doesn’t notice anything over 28 fps so your good to go :P

Oh boy here we go again with that silly argument…

Go to best buy, look at a 60 hz tv, then go to a 120 hz tv. You will notice a difference.

28fps is ridiculously easy to debunk. If you have a 60hz+ monitor, just look at videos or gifs side by side that show animations at 30 and 60 fps.

Also, a game is not a live-action movie. A game has hard-edged animation. Live movies capture natural motion blurring on the film – they’re not just totally still photographs patched together.

Human eyes simply do not work on an “fps” system. There are some really awesome optical illusions out there because of how our eyes work. Our eyes basically notice change, and the bigger the change, the more it’s noticed. That’s why “stuttering” in SLI setups is very annoying to people – and why you don’t perceive a hard-edged animation as being as “smooth” as something with natural motion blur.

There are sites that will also show you the effects of motion blur out there – they’ll show you the same animation with and without it.

It doesn’t do justice to our organic eyeballs to try to beat them into an fps mold.

JellyRabbit.2978:

But i don’t have the money right now is there anything else to just get my fps to 35 ? ( gpu is video card right ? )
so maybe buying the hd 6670 will do something?

Hi JellyRabbit,

I would recommend you to use Game Booster 3 by IOBit. I started using that and it worked perfectly for me. Basically the program helps terminating unnecessary processes when you play your game.

But still, your specs are the most important of all. This program only helps you reducing the background processes to save you more resources for your game to perform.

Just started using GameBooster as well. Great program. Wish I had known about it sooner.

Now that I have upgraded to a halfway decent video card, I am going to upgrade my Dual Core AMD to a Quad, something like the Phenom ii X965. Then I will have a system I am truly happy with.

note:
TL;DR so if this is was already said, apologies, but good info :P
_ _ _ _

Thing to remember is that this game is CPU bound. Your Graphics card will always be important, but you will notice that this game will put a lot more load on your CPU than most games typically would. (general statement.. don’t jump down my throat)

That being said, I would recommend upgrading both as they are going to impact performance the most for this game. If you don’t have the money for that right now, you can try some tweaks such as un-parking your cores, ending processes/services that are not needed. Running something like resource mon will tell you a lot of where your resources are going to. Heck ive even seen some people go old school and end “explorer.exe” to free up some resources.

EDIT: I don’t know if this is still viable.. but when the game first came out people were reporting that running the EXE in compat. mode for XP helped them (I haven’t confirmed it as I didn’t have that issue)