Guild Wars 2

Someone else suffers from dropping FPS on WvW?, I have an I7 4790, GTX 1070, 8GB, when I’m playing Pve and PvP I have no problem, I can put all the graphics in Maximo that is above 60 FPS without problems, but when I enter WvW the difference is gigantic, especially when it is close to the fights, when there are fights, you can give as dead, I need to put everything in the minimum to have an acceptable FPS rate of FPS above 30FPS, without speaking on the internet, The ping is very high.

For the lag, Check you internet bandwidth and your router. Zerg fight seem to use tons of bandwidth which sometimes regular router (that came with internet package) can’t handle. Go buy something like NetGear R7000 and connect on 5GHz channel or LAN cord

VPN Service also help. And I often swap to 4G LTE connection when fiber optic gone haywire

Since i don’t see how high graphic to be any help in wvw. I just keep it low (not lowest)

Ps. Upgrade your CPU to newer generation should be some help too. People said GW2 use more of CPU than GPU.

It’s the massive heap of data (visual character models AND actions) coming from an enemy zerg as it approaches that chokes out your rig. For me, living out in the woods as I do, internet connection isn’t cutting edge. You have the option to limit the amount of visual fluff by selectimg Default Character Models down near the bottom of the general settings tab. This opens up more bandwidth for actions to be communicated at the critical opening moments of a big fight. Otherwise, the server is also trying to send you 80 different oh so fancy character models.

if possible you want a 4+ GHZ cpu chip everything else does not matter.

i am also told to avoid AMD chip <- i never own one so i cant say if this true or not but i had guildie complain about horrible FPS with there amd chips.

Turn down character model limits.

There is nothing else you can really do. It’s an issue with the game engine itself. All those boons and crap just overwhelm what the game can handle. Ping is also not computer related.

You wouldn’t really have anything to gain from upgrading right now, honestly. The best choice for this game would be the i5 7600k, but it is hard to recommend that with R5 Ryzen alternatives, and I would tell people to get the 1600/1600x from scratch due to the fact that will help more for other games in the future unless they played only Gw2 for eternity.

However, since you already have an i7-4790, there is little to be gained from upgrading without wasting a whole heap of money. CPUs simply have not improved that much over the years.

All you can really do is get an overclockable (k) one, but that requires a new motherboard, and if you want the 7600k, entirely new ram at which point you’re building a new computer. A lot of effort for what may amount to 10 fps in a single game for 400 bucks. And you’d also go down to an i5 and lose things. If you want the i7, that’s $100 more.

I’d wait a year or two down the line for stronger chips. There’s just nothing in the market for you.

tl;dr Performance in Gw2 plateaus really fast because single core performance is mostly all it cares about and CPU makers have not really improved that for a long time. Thus, you essentially reach it by having a quad core and graphics card from the past few years , at which point only overclocking sees a bit more benefit. If you have a complete potato, then upgrading will help. If you don’t, then upgrades see marginal performance and then you get halted by game engine limitations. That’s just how games based on old technologies are— they just can’t use new hardware to its fullest.

tl;dr tl;dr Save your money.

Taobella.6597:

if possible you want a 4+ GHZ cpu chip everything else does not matter.

i am also told to avoid AMD chip <- i never own one so i cant say if this true or not but i had guildie complain about horrible FPS with there amd chips.

Ryzen has similar IPC as Intel. Either way, the CPU difference become rather negligable because they will all drop to 20-25 as the engine chokes (ie with 50 peeps around using particle effects).

If you are looking at flexible and future gaming, Intel is actually a mediocre buy and the i3/i5 has been made completely obsolete by Ryzen. The i7 is still sort of kind of worth it, just barely.

In terms of the OP though, a new CPU will do nothing. A 1080Ti for a noticable fps increase on average, maybe… but again, when the engine chokes it will still probably drop <25 fps on a quad SLI rig.

Kappell.1923:

Someone else suffers from dropping FPS on WvW?, I have an I7 4790, GTX 1070, 8GB, when I’m playing Pve and PvP I have no problem, I can put all the graphics in Maximo that is above 60 FPS without problems, but when I enter WvW the difference is gigantic, especially when it is close to the fights, when there are fights, you can give as dead, I need to put everything in the minimum to have an acceptable FPS rate of FPS above 30FPS, without speaking on the internet, The ping is very high.

Gw2 is cpu intensive and also it doesn’t use all available cores, a lot of data are pretty much queued at the cpu side.
If you are running 1440p and lower, your gpu is just fine, it can easily run max graphics at all properly optimized games.

You might want to upgrade to a better CPU but you already have the one of top single core performance CPUs so…..your next option will be to overclock it.

There isn’t really much other than that since you already tried reducing the graphics which is a correct decision.

Gw2 is generally poorly optimized, the performance issue is clearly obvious for large scale activities.

Edit: While I did say you don’t have to upgrade your cpu, you can still upgrade your cpu for a 30% performance increase (10-15% per generation, you are 3 gen behind). You will get about 10 fps increase.

I have Acer XC600, Intel HD inside. When disk activity goes up, FPS drops to 4 or lower, and can happen that frame freezes for seconds. I have tried to disable all Windows background processes because they did run at 100% disk activity and freezed Tomb Raider Underworld. Still some mysterious disk activity remains: like disk defragmenter while I was recording music to disk.

GW2 uses disk actively and at 100% speed. I have asked that GW2 could use 50% speed for disk load. Maybe some disk driver can slow down the speed? Dunno.

I have all minimum, and I use standard models. Runs 10-20 FPS with 1900×1080 display. I appreciate view detail over FPS.

There is no ideal machine when they are still using an well outdated engine!
Using DX9 means that almost everyone’s GPU is not being used efficiently.
It also only uses the one core on your CPU.
So an ideal machine would be one from 10 years ago!

DevilishLyx.2340:

It also only uses the one core on your CPU.
So an ideal machine would be one from 10 years ago!

Well that make no sense since a single core on a 4.2ghz i7 7700K or 3.6ghz Ryzen 1800X is probably a fair bit stronger than a 2.5ghz Core 2 Duo.

Well, it does use more than one core, just one thread does most of the heavy lifting. Otherwise you’d see dual cores beating quad cores but that just doesn’t happen.

I can say that AMD CPUs work just fine. My rig is certainly not latest/greatest and parts are pretty old. I have almost no lag problems in WvW with large mobs. Sure things slow down a little, but I have not ‘lagged out’ in years.

One thing not mentioned here is installing GW2 on an SSD drive. (I still don’t trust them for my boot drive, but all my games are installed on one.)

Win 7 64 bit (16G Ram)
AMD FX-8300 (8 core) 3.3 Ghz
GeForce GTX 670
ASUS RT-AC68U (router)

Your PC seems good enough. Your CPU also seems about the same lvl as mine (i7 3770k), and i use GTX1080 for GPU.

I play in ultra-HD with almost everything on max. The biggest thing in zerg fights is to have LOD Effects turned on. I’m able to maintain around 30 FPS in zerg fights. Here are my settings: http://i.imgur.com/hLj2BsZ.jpg
Pretty sure you would get lower performance if you switched to AMD 1800×. You want to have high single core perfromance. Quad core CPU’s seems to be the optimal thing for GW2, cause when you go above quad core you are losing out on single core performance atm.

Timelord.8190:

. Quad core CPU’s seems to be the optimal thing for GW2, cause when you go above quad core you losing out on single core performance atm.

Agreed.
Wife’s 3.6Ghz quad runs circles around my 4.1Ghz 8—core

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

One thing not mentioned here is installing GW2 on an SSD drive. (I still don’t trust them for my boot drive, but all my games are installed on one.)

You’re afraid it’s going to be too fast? :p

I’ve used my Samsung 830 Pro for like 5 years now (boot + main gaming drive) and another Plextor SSD as secondary data drive. Techpowerup endurance tested the Samsung 850 Pro which Samsung guarantee 150 TB data written on… It finally died some week ago at 9100 TB, lol.

Every drive gonna die sooner or later but I honestly dont see an issue if your main drive is a decent quality one.

Taobella.6597:

if possible you want a 4+ GHZ cpu chip everything else does not matter.

That is the most important thing, gw2 is cpu heavy :|

I personally had no issues on the previous generation of AMD. Had to unpark the cpu cores and I did have it overclocked to 4.7 GHz on a six core though. Running an overclocked i7-6700k atm and the difference is negligible between the two. So don’t let fanboys in either camp persuade you either way.

Note that clockspeed (ghz) is not everything. It’s only good for comparing CPUs of the same kind. It’s like comparing apples and oranges otherwise.

Dawdler.8521:

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

One thing not mentioned here is installing GW2 on an SSD drive. (I still don’t trust them for my boot drive, but all my games are installed on one.)

You’re afraid it’s going to be too fast? :p

I’ve used my Samsung 830 Pro for like 5 years now (boot + main gaming drive) and another Plextor SSD as secondary data drive. Techpowerup endurance tested the Samsung 850 Pro which Samsung guarantee 150 TB data written on… It finally died some week ago at 9100 TB, lol.

Every drive gonna die sooner or later but I honestly dont see an issue if your main drive is a decent quality one.

Back when SSDs came out, the writes would kill the drive over time. (They were also so puny, like 32 GB or something which was so little) Newer SSDs are much more sturdy than that and it is likely that the rest of the computer will die first.

But in any case, it’s not a good idea to preserve something by…. not using it.

Granted, I only have programs on the SSD…. so even if it dies, it’s not really that big of a loss.

I have almost the same rig as Kappell, I can recommend following settings for wvw on 2440p resolution:
Everything on High except:
Reflections – Land and sky only (less load on cpu when near water)
Shadows – Low (helps a lot, again less load on CPU in big fights)
Character model limit – High (Highest slows a lot down on 3x server blob fights)
Character model quality – Low (again massive improve in FPS for large fights)
Effect LOD must be ticked

The following setting depends your preference but I have
Vertical Sync – OFF
and Frame limiter to 63 FPS
That way if nothing is happening its limited to 63FPS and PC is silent.. when it drops below, the CPU is cool enough to allow longer Turbo so the FPS drops are not so often happening..
Happy fighting!

You guys are making me want to go shopping lol.

What’s better i7 or ryzen?

Intel i9
/Forum Space and stuff

phokus.8934:

Intel i9
/Forum Space and stuff

For what, the amazing multithread performance that GW2 use to the max?

And even if you simply wanted cores… why? A 16c threadripper will be around half the cost of eqvivalent i9. They may not be as fast no, but we’re talking 80% performance at 50% price. And that’s before even thinking about mobo.

It actually become more complicated when comparing ye average quad core i7 (ie 7700K) because it’s roughly the cost of a Ryzen (1700X, IMO the 1800X is overpriced for the little extra performance it gives) and again, yes it might have 80% performance on average in single/low threaded gaming but it also have a potential for 80% higher performance in multi/high threaded work loads.

Regardless, it really depend on your current CPU. Neither the 7700K or 1700X is miracles compares to a decent quality earlier Intel i5 and especially i7. I am personally on an i5 3570K and it’s sort of borderline whether it’s truly worth it now or if I should another year. If I really wanted to upgrade – which then again I do, lol – I would pick the 1700X. Because I’m not that hassled by the minor performance niggles in gaming, I look at the CPU on the whole and I consider it a simply better choice for the future. If you are already on say an i7 4XXX higher, forget about it IMO. Get a new cooler and have some fun overclocking instead (worst case scenario, you’ll be forced to get a new CPU when you break the old lol). Wait until the next generation.

As a sidenote, keep in mind that Ryzen has improved a fair bit since release and the performance outliers (such as the horrendous display in Tomb Raider) has been fixed. Hell I barely even think that 80% performance thing is relevant anymore, if you removed things like Tomb Raider Ryzen on average matched or outperformed the 7700K.

But still.

/Hardware rant over lol

Sidenote to Archonwing: Yes that’s true… but for really write heavy things like Nvidia Shadowplay I use a ramdisk (4gb out of the 16gb I have for 6m or something record time) instead, as an example to offload the primary SSD, while the movies are saved on the secondary SSD when hitting record. Modern SSDs are considerably improved over the first generation. Back then I also opted for another choice – a HDD/SSD hybrid – due to doubts. Not anymore though.

Jayne.9251:

You guys are making me want to go shopping lol.

What’s better i7 or ryzen?

i7 for single core performance (for gaming)
ryzen for multicore applications (value wise)

SkyShroud.2865:

Jayne.9251:

You guys are making me want to go shopping lol.

What’s better i7 or ryzen?

i7 for single core performance (for gaming)
ryzen for multicore applications (value wise)

By pure coincidence, I saw that Sweclockers reviewed the 7900X and included a test using a single core at 2.8ghz. In Battlefield 1 720p , 154 fps avg for 7700K vs 148 fps avg for 1700X. In Witcher 3 720p, 131 fps avg for 7700K vs 118 fps avg for 1700X.

Pretty much describe the IPC. The difference will usually drop lower in “normal” scenarios at regular clocks and all cores. Witcher 3 1080p Ultra was 117 fps vs 111 fps.

So that’s the big question, is that gaming advantage really worth it?

And of course the i9 at $1000 matches the 7700K in gaming so not worth it lol. Great multithread performance though. Quite the leap over 6950X.

Unfortunately, a lot of games are still using outdated technology (programming) that heavily dependent on single core performance. BF1 is one of the newer titles that attempt to take advantage of multicores as much as possible (optimized programming) but if you compare it to titles that doesn’t do that (threw all kind of junks into the cpu), amd has a huge disadvantage there. Gamer wise, you will always want a system that can play all kind of games.

Dawdler.8521:

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

One thing not mentioned here is installing GW2 on an SSD drive. (I still don’t trust them for my boot drive, but all my games are installed on one.)

You’re afraid it’s going to be too fast? :p

I’ve used my Samsung 830 Pro for like 5 years now (boot + main gaming drive) and another Plextor SSD as secondary data drive. Techpowerup endurance tested the Samsung 850 Pro which Samsung guarantee 150 TB data written on… It finally died some week ago at 9100 TB, lol.

Every drive gonna die sooner or later but I honestly dont see an issue if your main drive is a decent quality one.

I was warned by friends in the industry to not trust my OS on an SSD drive. The problem is that when they die, they do it suddenly and drastically where as traditional hard drives seem to fail slowly over time. I do have a friend who raided there SSDs to solve this problem, but that seems a bit overkill to me, I will just stick with vanilla hard drives for my OS for now.

It’s not like you can’t get a new copy of windows <,<

You can just reinstall windows on a new SSD then. I only keep programs and Windows, so I don’t really lose anything but time.

It makes no sense to buy an SSD and not use it. Everything dies. If anything, SSDs are probably actually sturdier than their constantly spinning HDD counterparts which are known to fail. Hell, I remember buying a HDD at Frys and they flat out told me 1/4 of their drives are bad. That was back then though.

I hate you all, I totally want a Ryzen now

Don’t mind me, I’m just going to put my credit card in a glass of water and put it in the freezer. Sniff.

ArchonWing.9480:

You can just reinstall windows on a new SSD then. I only keep programs and Windows, so I don’t really lose anything but time.

It makes no sense to buy an SSD and not use it. Everything dies. If anything, SSDs are probably actually sturdier than their constantly spinning HDD counterparts which are known to fail. Hell, I remember buying a HDD at Frys and they flat out told me 1/4 of their drives are bad. That was back then though.

It’s not gotten better with spinnys, they’re on the way out and they know it.
But SSD DO have issues with rewriting, here’s a good video explaining people’s reservations about relying on them. https://youtu.be/-XZNr7mS0iw

ArchonWing.9480:

You can just reinstall windows on a new SSD then. I only keep programs and Windows, so I don’t really lose anything but time.

It makes no sense to buy an SSD and not use it. Everything dies. If anything, SSDs are probably actually sturdier than their constantly spinning HDD counterparts which are known to fail. Hell, I remember buying a HDD at Frys and they flat out told me 1/4 of their drives are bad. That was back then though.

I may not be the average user, but NO, I cannot just slap a copy of windows on a drive. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff to install and configure. I am an application developer and I work from home as well. Losing my main drive would set me back probably a week or two, and even then I may not get everything installed and configured that I have now.

You didn’t say it was a working machine, now did you?

Well, you defintely shouldn’t rely on anything, but there are so many other things that will bust first. Important data should be held on multiple sources.

The ‘data’ isn’t really what I am worried the most about. That is backed up to another machine and to the cloud, it’s the time and frustration of getting it all setup again. Norton supposedly is backing up my install image to another drive, but I don’t really trust that either.

I have been using computers for decades and other than one of my first ones where I literally shook the case WHILE it was running, I have never had a hard drive fail (knock, knock, knock). My drives spin 24/7 for years on end.

The OS is constantly writing information to the drive and moving it around so I only trust an SSD for things like games which is mostly static data.

I am running my work VM (Virtual machine) on an SSD, but that is only 100G that I back up a few times a year. If that fails, I get paid to repair/rebuild it, but probably a few month old backup wouldn’t be to big a hassle to update as all of our code is in a library I can download from.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

ArchonWing.9480:

You can just reinstall windows on a new SSD then. I only keep programs and Windows, so I don’t really lose anything but time.

It makes no sense to buy an SSD and not use it. Everything dies. If anything, SSDs are probably actually sturdier than their constantly spinning HDD counterparts which are known to fail. Hell, I remember buying a HDD at Frys and they flat out told me 1/4 of their drives are bad. That was back then though.

I may not be the average user, but NO, I cannot just slap a copy of windows on a drive. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff to install and configure. I am an application developer and I work from home as well. Losing my main drive would set me back probably a week or two, and even then I may not get everything installed and configured that I have now.

Just do a ghost backup of your drive then…

But hey you can do whatever you want. The topic was the ideal machine for GW2 (well, WvW) and in this particular area the answer is clear – SSD.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

The ‘data’ isn’t really what I am worried the most about. That is backed up to another machine and to the cloud, it’s the time and frustration of getting it all setup again. Norton supposedly is backing up my install image to another drive, but I don’t really trust that either.

I have been using computers for decades and other than one of my first ones where I literally shook the case WHILE it was running, I have never had a hard drive fail (knock, knock, knock). My drives spin 24/7 for years on end.

The OS is constantly writing information to the drive and moving it around so I only trust an SSD for things like games which is mostly static data.

I am running my work VM (Virtual machine) on an SSD, but that is only 100G that I back up a few times a year. If that fails, I get paid to repair/rebuild it, but probably a few month old backup wouldn’t be to big a hassle to update as all of our code is in a library I can download from.

Use raid then if you are worrying about this and that =,=
Regardless, this is off topic.

GW2 is mostly CPU bottlenecked game. 3-thread CPU bottlenecked game.

So, to achieve the best performance, you need a CPU with highest possible gaming IPC. There are 2 out there that dominate.

1. I7-5775C. This is not a popular CPU, but is actually the best gaming CPU out there. Its thanks to its 128MB L4 cache that removes RAM latency issues.

2. I7-6700K/7700K. These can match 5775C but they are memory bottlenecked, so you have to pair them with 3+Ghz memory modules to squish what they have to offer.

Also remember, you can set the details as high as you want, but never set shadows to maximum, as there is a bug in the engine and that causes massive FPS drop. As it comes to GPU, this is ancient DX9 engine game, so it matters little. Still, Nvidia cards do significantly better in this game than AMD. You do not have to over-invest, unless you play at 4K it will not matter if you play on GTX970 or 1080TI as most of the time the game is CPU bottlenecked.

Ideal for this game? Your GPU is fine. Not sure if you have an SSD, but they are nice to have. CPU- i7 7700k. Get a good cooler, fastest RAM you can afford, and overclock the kitten out of it. A fair amount of them will hit 5.0 GHz. If money isn’t an issue, silicon lottery sells pre binned chips that are guaranteed to over clock well for a premium price. They can even delid them for you to lower temperatures for even more over clocking headroom. Speaking from experience, an overclocked 7700k will absolutely perform better than a non K series chip from previous generations in WvW, but there isn’t a consumer CPU on the planet that won’t bog down to the low 30s in fps during a 3 way SMC battle.

I did a lot of research, thanks for the feedback in this thread.

I wound up settling for an i7 7700K, with 1080 and 40G ram. The ryzen benchmarks on everything I read still couldn’t compete with the i7, specifically for this type of gaming software that doesn’t take advantage of multiple cores. The AMD processor does look good as an office workhorse though.

I get it in a week. It’s going to be a loooong week. I’m anxious to see if the graphics and the processor make any discernible difference in WvW.

Jayne.9251:

I did a lot of research, thanks for the feedback in this thread.

I wound up settling for an i7 7700K, with 1080 and 40G ram. The ryzen benchmarks on everything I read still couldn’t compete with the i7, specifically for this type of gaming software that doesn’t take advantage of multiple cores. The AMD processor does look good as an office workhorse though.

I get it in a week. It’s going to be a loooong week. I’m anxious to see if the graphics and the processor make any discernible difference in WvW.

Bit overkill on the RAM to be honest.

Unless you’re doing rendering on the side, in which case, carry on.

i7 7700k was a good choice. I always want to like AMD, but even for mid-tier specs for gaming it’s tough to recommend them.

I’m thinking with N Korea shooting off random missiles, that everyone should say heck the credit rating and buy the best machine they can get lol.

*Cue REM…..