Guild Wars 2

I have not found relevant information how good CF works in GW2 with latest driver using 7770. (12.11beta) I am currently using 12.10 with I think good results.

In old 7770 CF benchmarks some games reached almost double performance reaching almost 7950 performance. I already have a 7770 and would be a fairly cheap upgrade to get one more, as i have a good P67 CF motherboard.

Question is:
Anyone having 7770 CF and getting good results with it using latest drivers and GW2?

Currently have an i3-2100 (4GB RAM) with 50-60 fps during questing (vsync on), going down to 25-40-ish in cities and WvW. So i do not think Gw2 is so badly optimised as some think. (I have rift, AoC also – where going form 1 type of 3.2ghz dual core intel cpu to another type with more cache doubled my fps (E2180-15fps-E8500- 30fps, 4ghz oc 37 fps))
But its strange in WvW gameplay is not smooth, even if fraps shows mostly 30+ fps.
Can it be a latency issue? How can i see my latency in game? Can it be other players around me having latency issues making them appear here and there, so gameplay ,spell effects seem choppy?

On the other hand i find a bit strange people with a lot better processor and VGA cards having worse or same fps as me.
Of course I have reflections turned off as i figured it out myself its cutting fps in half, but FXAA on, all on high including high res textures, except depth of field and blur off (as i hate blur with passion).

I am just using 1680×1050 resolution.

i would make another move to E3-1230v2, glad i did, so should you.

I was not aware that such cpu exists , but seems a server version of an i7-3770k 200mhz lower clocked, without igp , and a bit cheaper and not overclockable
However sounds very interesting, unfortunately out of my budget for now (I live in Eastern Europe)
Do you have some numbers what your previous cpu was and how much fps you gained?
Otherwise if i would be able to spend such amount of money later, i should go for some K series I5 and hit 4.5ghz with it.

can’t afford to have i7-3770k. so i get E3-1230v2.
its new, just came out 2nd quarter this year (2012)
http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Intel-Xeon%20E3-1230%20v2.html

don’t mind the lack of internal graphics core, i’ve got bunch of card lying around as backup.

kept no record of how performance gained over i3-2100, but improves alot.
still glad that old z68 board can take E3 with just BIOS update.

This is a simple test go into a city where you get the 25/45 FPS turn all your graphics up with Vsync off (keep shadows to where you always run them) what is your FPS, then set it to best performance again what is your FPS. If you get a big FPS jump then your GPU is the problem if their little to no change your CPU bound so adding anouther card will not help you.

Thanks i will check that.

If you´re lucky enough to have stable 20+ fps even during WvW, then for kittens sake don´t change a THING and just hope it stays that way.

Crossfire of the 7770 is a waste of energy and money. The 128bit wide(small) memory bus alone is a major bottleneck compared to more expensive cards.
Get one of those if you absolutely have too much money to spare and you´ll also automatically avoid all these weird crossfire problems.

Of course GW2 could care less about your GFX card.

You’re getting at least 25 fps in WvW with a dual core? Am I reading that correctly? Seems hard to believe given that zergs are CPU heavy.

It is not hard to believe. GW2 main thread run in 1 core all the other cores just sit and relax while waiting for core 1 to feed them. So yeah a dual core running at 5Ghz would eat a 32 core running at 4ghz
Now talking about this post, don’t waste ur money on a CF system with low end cards, it would probably work for other games but not for Gw2. This game is not graphically heavy, but it uses a lot of memory bandwith. So what u want is a stronger card sell ur 7770 and buy a 7870. Or just save urself money cuz ur 7770 can run this game as good as the 7870, the bottleneck is the CPU, if u buy a stronger card u will most likelly get the same FPS

Instead of Crossfiring two slow cards, sell your current 7770 and buy a single fast GPU.

I have made seme tests today as i see many people having performance problems, even with the best possible hardver available on the market, getting same fps on WvW as other 20-30ish. (with 3times faster cpu and vga
as mine)
During WvW, lions arch runing around whele my fps was changing between 20-40, i was logging the CPU usage, GPU usage memory usage.
The game does not even fulfill the 1GB RAM of videocard. There is lot of free system RAM as well.
The i3 cpus cores are running around 50-60%, while the GPU between 40-70%.
So the CPU is not bottleneck, this is an urban legend , people with oc-d 2×00k cpus clocked to 4.5ghz have same low fps also, experiencing low cpu usage.

This means for me the game has an own artifical slowdown algorithm, which does not let your hardware to be fully used. Maybe it is working as intended, and they are planning to make a wonder patch removing this artificial limiter code, by commenting out the sleep , wait procedures in the gamecode.

On the other hand i decided to upgrade with a 2500k, 7870 combo and gonna test out the variations with my current hardware to see how fps, cpu, gpu usage changes.
Will overclock the i5 also, disabling 2 cores and check the changes.
Have an analog CRT monitor capable of pushing out 1440p also to test with.

There can be difference in processor cache as well, in Rift tripling the processor cache on c2d doubled the fps using the same 3.2 ghz on both c2d processors.

Tbh as i read other’s experiences with top-notch hardware the upgrade won’t change the performance of the game at all.
It seems, currently gw2 just using my i3 cpu + 7770 vga setup at half speed.

At least solo questing goes well smoothly (60fps may as vsnyc is on), though not much of social / mmo aspect in that.

As a crossfire user (dual 7950HDs) I can say the scaling in this game is not that good. If I remember I only saw a net fps gain of around 20% with both cards (settings buried in max). I also refuse to believe that my 4.2 Ghz i5 is not “fast enough” to obtain stable fps on this game.

Either way, if you want crossfire for just GW2 steer clear, it’s buggy and problematic at the best and unusable at the worst. If you do decide to go ahead an dual card, for the love of god download catalyst application profiles!

With Catalyst 12.8 and CAP 2 12.8 my HD 5770 CF is as you’d expect. About the equivalent as the HD 5870 my wife is using. Single card in city 30fps, turn on CF and it jumps to about 48fps. This matches Tomshardware benchmarks for other games using the same cards.

I’m with the idea of also selling your current card and get 1 high end card, HD7970s have come way down in price lately may want to look into 1 of those or even the HD7950. As mentioned before sticking to a single high end card would also prevent you from getting those odd crossfire/sli issues that crop up every so often and your use less power and create less heat as well with a single card.