Guild Wars 2

Pretty much as topic title says.

Both the instanced living story and open world Dry Top area seem poorly optimized.

When entering the area, down the cave into the Cavern of the Shining Lights, I get a pretty dramatic framerate drop. Specifically, when I look at the southern and eastern side of the cavern. If I look back up towards the entrance, the lag goes away.

Framerate goes from a steady 30-60 (depending on Vysnc setting) to about 6-15 fps. Sound begins distorting and popping, very static-y, which is something I’ve never experienced in other known problem areas like the Black Citadel.

I can’t even seem to pinpoint what causes the drop – Neither my CPU nor GPU seem to be under much strain. No drastic increase in CPU usage, no temperature increases, no memory usage increase.

Anyone else having issues? Apologies if there are other threads – search feature doesn’t seem to be working for me.

System specs:
Intel C2Q Q9650
Nvidia 9800 GT
8gb DDR3 1333
Windows 8.1 64 bit

Bump.

Another living story episode instance centered in this instance, still as terribly slow for me. Most would probably define 10 FPS as unplayable.

This room literally slows me down worse than a full on 3 realm WvW battle, or the busiest prime time megaserver world boss does by a significant margin.

I tried visiting the area on a friend’s system, a newer Quad i7 and a 660GTX, and it was slightly more manageable, but the performance hit was very noticeable, barely 20 FPS from a solid 60 on lowest settings.

Edit: I’ve also noticed that if I linger long enough in the area (like while doing the instances for achievements), my ingame sound quits altogether at some point.

When I leave GW2 at this point, the game crashes on exit, and I get an error report dialogue.