Guild Wars 2

I am having unexplained FPS issues—My specs:

i7 930 @ 3.8 GHz
Gigabyte GTX 670
12 GB DDR3 1600 Mhz (Corsair triple-channel)
Fiber Optic internet connection

The ONLY game I have had any issues with is GW2. I play BF3 on ULTRA and get 65-75 FPS on large conquest maps with 64 players, however, I only get 40-60 FPS (it dips) in GW2. I wouldn’t so much mind if it were a constant 40 or constant 60 it’s the dip from 60 to 40 that makes it annoying because it causes major stuttering for 2-3 seconds.

I have disabled CPU Parking and monitor my usage of both my CPU and GPU in-game. NEITHER is being used at 100%—my CPU never goes above 50% and my GPU never goes above 55% usage.

Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.

Its generaly a CPU thing ..not GPU.

My 560ti for example manages 45-60 fps (60 most the time) in Pve with resolution at 1920×1080 and settings set to max/ultra except sampling ..which is native.

if a 560ti can do that a 670 shouldnt have any issues ..UNLESS the cpu in the system is to slow, or a standard HDD is being used (which can cause stuttering).

My GW2 used to stutter a whole lot more than it does now when i had it on my raid 0 HDD’s ..soon as i moved it to my SSD, the stuttering dramticaly reduced. Whats left is likely down to the GPU maxing out in places and general issues regarding loading of server information ..which is affected by your connection.

One of them will be peaking at %100, probably one of your cpu cores. Task manager averages it out across all cores (including HT) so don’t look at that for CPu usage.

I’m not using Task Manager—I’m watching all cores with HWInfo64.

LogicalOne.8927:

I’m not using Task Manager—I’m watching all cores with HWInfo64.

One core will be peaking at 100%. Try allcpumeter .

Thank you—will do—I’ll report back in a little bit.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

Per-thread usage. One will be at a percent just under 100/#cores.

Good news:
nothing is wrong with your desktop, its powerful. Everyone with similar systems is having the same issues; its the game. People with lower end system are suffering even more. You have a core i7, it overclocks well, and will add a boost to compensated the game’s inefficiency.

Bad news:
gw2 is heavily dependent on single thread performance so you will continue to get low fps until developer can optimize; it if ever.

Ok—I ran it for a while—made sure to quickly turn and jump into new backgrounds and textures (the time when I get an FPS drop) and they still occurred and NONE of my cores went past 65% and my GPU was at 55%. Any ideas?

So if I OC further (I think I can get 4.1 GHz stable) it will make no difference, right?

*NOTE: I’d rather not OC further. Also, the only reason I asked is because I saw a few threads on GFAQ’s with people claiming they got 100+ FPS and their computers’ were not all that much better than mine (if at all).

Is your GW2 game and OS installed on a SSD ? the stuttering may be just slow access time to a standard HDD.

other than that, due to GW2 utilization of CPU’s ..all you can do is OC more.

Even monster CPU’s OC’d to proper high ends are having issues with GW2. (note cpu usuage will be lower the more threads u have available .as its the individual threads that get maxed out, which with GW2 is 2 to 3 main threads that get heavily used)

It seems people with AMD cards have much higher fps than those with NVidia cards?

Is there a setting in Nvidia control panel that I can tweak?

i.e. put multi-core to ON instead of AUTO?

Will a stable state drive truly make a difference? I have $30 credit at my local computer shop and was thinking of getting one anyway.

LogicalOne.8927:

Ok—I ran it for a while—made sure to quickly turn and jump into new backgrounds and textures (the time when I get an FPS drop) and they still occurred and NONE of my cores went past 65% and my GPU was at 55%. Any ideas?

You gotta look at the per-thread cpu usage. Task Manager or HWiNFO sorta average out the cores. Use ProcessExplorer and look at gw2.exe

Ok—I have read up on it and it seems that getting a SSD would help with the particular issues I am having in MMO and MOBA games. I will simply purchase one tomorrow.

I’ve used every program to monitor my CPU (specifically CORE) usage and it never hits 100%.

LogicalOne.8927:

I’ve used every program to monitor my CPU (specifically CORE) usage and it never hits 100%.

And it never will, explained more in detail here

Thanks, that was really informative. Based on the fact that my slowdowns tend to be when turning (thus loading new textures etc) is it possible that installing an SSD would make a noticeable difference?

no.
A game should load textures once, initially, into your graphics card memory.
It might do that noticably on the fly, meaning if you enter a new area you will get stuttering for a bit when you first turn around and thereby “explore” it, until all textures have been loaded, this is what happens.
A game will never dispose of loaded textures and requiring to reload them again except if the graphics card memory is insufficient to store all of them though.
My guess is that a graphics card with 512 MB should have enough memory for loading a zone mostly fine, unless you switch to highest texture quality.
An SSD is still MUCH slower than your RAM, and buying one just because gw2 doesn’t do initial texture loading well is a real waste. That said, an SSD in general is nice, so if you want to speed up your loading in general by a factor of 2-3 (most tests gave about this result) get one.
When AGP bus systems were on their peak, AGP could use additional system RAM if your graphics card RAM wasnt enough for textures. This system RAM is still much faster than any SSD could possibly ever be. Still it would result in really poor performance! So, no. An SSD is not a solution to texture loading problems other than during the inital first couple of seconds you entered a new zone.