I wasn’t entirely sure if it’s my eyes deceiving me of if GW2 is suffering from extreme stutter at the moment, so I tested it by recording my FPS with FRAPS and taking a good look at the numbers. Now, many have reported issues with camera sluggishness since the last patch, but this data shows they are probably not issues with the camera itself, but with rather extreme stuttering. For testing, I ran around Timberline Falls for a minute. The area was peaceful and there was nothing going on around me.
Here are my general FRAPS results:
Min FPS: 37
Max FPS: 61
Average FPS: 56
Doesn’t look too bad. GW2 isn’t great at maintaining a steady frame rate, but that’s nothing new. Here’s the interesting part: I measured frame times and got the attached graph.
This graph shows how long each frame stayed on screen. The x axis is the frame’s order number, while the y axis is its “frame time” that tells us how long it stayed on screen. As you can see, most frames stay on screen for around 15-30 ms, representing the 30-60 FPS range. The interesting part are the frames well above that range, with two of them being in the 120 ms area. In other words, many frames (~40) stayed on screen way longer than they should’ve That’s almost one stutter frame per second! They seem to occur only when you’re moving your character or the camera, with the biggest offenders being related to camera movements.
I’m not completely sure this was caused by the last patch, but I never noticed such stutter before, so I assume it was. Of course, this test is far from being scientifically accurate, but in my experience the game behaves similarly everywhere and TBH I can’t be bothered to do any more tests or graphs.
My specs are i7 2600K / GTX 760 4 Gb / 8 Gb RAM, if anyone’s interested.
