Guild Wars 2

Recently updated my GeForce 660 to a GeForce 960. Updated drivers.

My FPS has dropped to 10 in Rata Sum.

Help!

Delete your local.dat file. If it helps great .. else post a picture like this :

Hatebeast.5806:

Recently updated my GeForce 660 to a GeForce 960.

That wasn’t much of an upgrade at all. Discounting DX12 capabilities(which wont help in Gw2), your 660 is actually stronger in some areas.

They both have 2GB of vRAM but the 660 travels over a 192-bit bus compared to the 128-bit of the 960. Giving the 660 a higher Memory Bandwidth than the 960(144GB/s compared to 112GB/s)

The 660 has 80 Texture Mapping Units compared to the 960s 64TMUs. Giving the 660 a higher Texture Fill Rate( 78 Gigatexels a second compared to 72)

The 960 does have more Render Output Units than the 660, 32 vs 24, giving the 960 superior Pixel Fill Rates( 36 gigapixels per second compared to 19).

At the end of the day..Id consider this a sidegrade as far as Gw2 is concerned.

Slight upgrade for other,future, gaming needs.

Downgrade your drivers and it should be fixed.

MrFayth.3546:

That wasn’t much of an upgrade at all. Discounting DX12 capabilities(which wont help in Gw2), your 660 is actually stronger in some areas.

What? A 960 is a solid upgrade over a 660. It’s like 50% more powerful…

I wouldn’t call it 50% more powerful, the hardware just isn’t there.

It doesn’t even offer 50% better performance in most cases(only scoring around 10-15FPS less than the 960 in GTAV as shown here and here) and that’s including Nvidia’s (heavily documented) alleged kepler driver gimping(shown here , here- and here. Among many more)

MrFayth.3546:

I wouldn’t call it 50% more powerful, the hardware just isn’t there.

It doesn’t even offer 50% better performance in most cases(only scoring around 10-15FPS less than the 960 in GTAV as shown here

Using the 1080P benchmark we see that the 960 is 38% faster then the 660. Using the 1600P benchmark the difference is even bigger at 54%. 15 FPS is a lot when you’re only get 40 FPS to start with.

MrFayth.3546:

and here)

Again, at 1200P (1920×1200. Do people really still use 4:3?) we see a 43% performance difference.

Using anandtech’s 660 benchmarks and these 960 benchmarks (because anandtech doesn’t have them for whatever reason…) we see that there is a (55%) performance increase in Battlefield 4 performance (1080P/Ultra) and a 48.5% increase in Thief performance.

I really cba to keep calculating more of these, but the overall trend shows a ~40-50% performance increase going to a 960 from a 660. Calling it a “sidegrade” or “hardly an upgrade” is far from the truth; that’s a solid bump in performance.

MrFayth.3546:

That wasn’t much of an upgrade at all. Discounting DX12 capabilities(which wont help in Gw2), your 660 is actually stronger in some areas.

They both have 2GB of vRAM but the 660 travels over a 192-bit bus compared to the 128-bit of the 960. Giving the 660 a higher Memory Bandwidth than the 960(144GB/s compared to 112GB/s)

The 660 has 80 Texture Mapping Units compared to the 960s 64TMUs. Giving the 660 a higher Texture Fill Rate( 78 Gigatexels a second compared to 72)

The 960 does have more Render Output Units than the 660, 32 vs 24, giving the 960 superior Pixel Fill Rates( 36 gigapixels per second compared to 19).

At the end of the day..Id consider this a sidegrade as far as Gw2 is concerned.

Slight upgrade for other,future, gaming needs.

960 is physically more powerful than 660.

Maxwell comes with advanced compression algorithm than allows to nearly match 192 bit performance at same speed. But 960 vram runs faster and can overclock much more. And there’s still another point, 960 has 8 more ROPS than 660, so the conclusion is the 960 can use the vram more and better.

TMU of 960 are at stock, which pretty much all models of 960 run higher than that. And the 960 can overclock much higher. You end up having more texture fill rate with the 960.

You don’t count CUDA cores, where the 960 has 66 more, and neither SMX where the 960 has 8 compared to the 5 of the 660.

Then there’s tessellation performance, where the 960 blows the 660.

Fermi.2409:

Downgrade your drivers and it should be fixed.

Thank you. Any suggestions as to which version?

I’ll just point out that none of those benchmarks are for Directx 9 games. Newer games using 10 and higher will benefit from the newer hardware features in that card. It’s also entirely possible that newer hardware and driver combinations just aren’t optimized as well for Directx 9 games. So maybe an older driver will work better for GW2 (but not so much for brand new games). But those are only guesses on my part.

Just to add a bit here, I recently went from a 660 to an EVGA 970 FTW. While I’m pleased with the card (and it’s DX12 capabilities for future games), I was surprised at how little the upgrade affected frame rates in GW2. An apples to apples comparison…all GW2 graphics settings maxed, including supersample, with the 660 I was getting around 35 FPS in Divinity’s Reach. With the 970 I got about a 10 FPS bump, averaging around 45 FPS. While not disappointed at all, I was sorta expecting more.

This is all anecdotal…I have not formally benchmarked the new card yet…haven’t had time…but my results thus far demonstrate the complexity of factors affecting frame rates in different games. As ever, YMMV.

Re-seat your graphics card and make sure it’s in the correct slot (typically the slot closest to the CPU).

AnClar.1304:

Just to add a bit here, I recently went from a 660 to an EVGA 970 FTW. While I’m pleased with the card (and it’s DX12 capabilities for future games), I was surprised at how little the upgrade affected frame rates in GW2. An apples to apples comparison…all GW2 graphics settings maxed, including supersample, with the 660 I was getting around 35 FPS in Divinity’s Reach. With the 970 I got about a 10 FPS bump, averaging around 45 FPS. While not disappointed at all, I was sorta expecting more.

It’s because your CPU is the limiting component there, not your GPU.

Fermi.2409:

Downgrade your drivers and it should be fixed.

Thank you. Any suggestions as to which version?

Not off the top of my head, but in a topic somewhere around here you should be able to find the version that worked for someone else. They posted it a few days ago iirc

Any suggestions?

Hatebeast.5806:

Any suggestions?

Not sure what is possible with that CPU .. is 2,1 GHz the max speed ?
Oh .. i just see there stands @3.07 GHz .. so your CPU doesn’t run at maximum speed
and i would check if you have problems with overheating.

Else try to delete / rename you local.dat file

local.dat file renamed. No change.

GPU-Z says my GPU Load is 15 percent.

I already said your CPU runs only at 2.1 instead of 3.0 GHz .. that is mostly
the problem so check if it is overheating.

Naw, that’s not it. The core speed fluctuates between 1.8 and 3.07, changes every second. Same with my other machine that runs the game great.

This cpu ran the game fine before I switched out the video card.

The only thing left to try is going back to the driver version (344.75) before I updated. I do not know where to find old driver versions, though.