Guild Wars 2

Per the topic title, I’ve heard from some people that it does, and others that it doesn’t. Any official word from A-Net on the topic? I’m about to add a second card and want to hear from someone before I do so.

I run 2 GTX 470’s in SLI with nvidia surround across 3 23" monitors. The only problem I have with the game is the incessant crashing that everyone is complaining about.

Thank you – so the game does utilize both GPUs well? Did you see a performance increase?

Officially SLI isn’t supported in this game. It’s working for some people, others are having problems getting to working too. Just don’t expect any help from Arena Net if you start having problems with the game while SLI is enabled.

Phaze Delta One.2834:

Officially SLI isn’t supported in this game. It’s working for some people, others are having problems getting to working too. Just don’t expect any help from Arena Net if you start having problems with the game while SLI is enabled.

I haven’t gotten help from A-Net on any issues I have, so no loss there.

I have 3x GTX 580s and barely get 20-25 FPS. I consider this odd

BillFreist.1527:

Hello!

SLI works quite well, but we advise players to run Nvidia drivers 304.48 or later for this to run properly.

You can get these drivers here: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy
Also make sure to perform a ‘Clean’ installation .

-Bill

Actually, no it’s not. At least not for people using the high-end Nvidia GPUs.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforce-306-02-beta-drivers-released/

Pretty much SLI is yielding the same or worse performance then using a single GPU. In general the game is running noticeably worse on Nvidia hardware. Hopefully Arena net is working closely with Nvidia to have this taken care of. I have my i5-2500k overclocked to 4.7GHZ and I am still having performance issues.

Nvidia has not added a single driver fix for this game and this goes all the way back prior to start of the BWEs. Both SLI and Crossfire are a hit or miss with people running 2 or more cards. I can barely hit 55fps on my 680 Classified.

Strange as I’m running the game on max with 40+ fps in most areas on a Gtx 285….

BillFreist.1527:

Hello!

SLI works quite well, but we advise players to run Nvidia drivers 304.48 or later for this to run properly.

You can get these drivers here: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy
Also make sure to perform a ‘Clean’ installation .

-Bill

Confirmed, SLi working perfectly. Was testing SLi yesterday & was getting perfect GPU utilization & this is with the settings “TRULY” maxed out. The Betas 306.02 work best. Still getting a turning/shadows issue but SLi is working 100% that’s for sure.

Because I like making video’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdz8WRnc28U

SLI “works”, and provides me with better framerates…. 2 560ti’s here, no overclocking…. but it causes the dreaded hard PC crash with black screen and looping sound.

With SLI, it’s almost guaranteed crash-time for me in less than an hour of normal playing.
Turning off SLI, I still get 40+ FPS most of the time, and don’t hard crash nearly as often.

It’s really disappointing…

Cbuzz.5083:

BillFreist.1527:

Hello!

SLI works quite well, but we advise players to run Nvidia drivers 304.48 or later for this to run properly.

You can get these drivers here: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy
Also make sure to perform a ‘Clean’ installation .

-Bill

Confirmed, SLi working perfectly. Was testing SLi yesterday & was getting perfect GPU utilization & this is with the settings “TRULY” maxed out. The Betas 306.02 work best. Still getting a turning/shadows issue but SLi is working 100% that’s for sure.

Because I like making video’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdz8WRnc28U

Did you check the link I posted? From Nvidia themselves. SLI is still not working as intended in Kepler cards. On my rig the scaling is terrible. Basically it’s like having only one GPU active.

Varna.5162:

Cbuzz.5083:

BillFreist.1527:

Hello!

SLI works quite well, but we advise players to run Nvidia drivers 304.48 or later for this to run properly.

You can get these drivers here: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy
Also make sure to perform a ‘Clean’ installation .

-Bill

Confirmed, SLi working perfectly. Was testing SLi yesterday & was getting perfect GPU utilization & this is with the settings “TRULY” maxed out. The Betas 306.02 work best. Still getting a turning/shadows issue but SLi is working 100% that’s for sure.

Because I like making video’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdz8WRnc28U

Did you check the link I posted? From Nvidia themselves. SLI is still not working as intended in Kepler cards. On my rig the scaling is terrible. Basically it’s like having only one GPU active.

Exactly! Thanks so much for that link, btw… now I finally understand why my terrain keep disappearing in GW2…. it’s the new ambient occlusion which is messing stuff up.

Cheers!

Varna.5162:

Cbuzz.5083:

BillFreist.1527:

Hello!

SLI works quite well, but we advise players to run Nvidia drivers 304.48 or later for this to run properly.

You can get these drivers here: http://www.geforce.com/drivers/beta-legacy
Also make sure to perform a ‘Clean’ installation .

-Bill

Confirmed, SLi working perfectly. Was testing SLi yesterday & was getting perfect GPU utilization & this is with the settings “TRULY” maxed out. The Betas 306.02 work best. Still getting a turning/shadows issue but SLi is working 100% that’s for sure.

Because I like making video’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdz8WRnc28U

Did you check the link I posted? From Nvidia themselves. SLI is still not working as intended in Kepler cards. On my rig the scaling is terrible. Basically it’s like having only one GPU active.

Your link doesn’t say anything about SLi not working as intended in GW2. Your wrong mate, SLi is working & working very well.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforce-306-02-beta-drivers-released/

“August 28th Update: We can confirm that the GeForce 306.02 beta drivers feature a Guild Wars 2 SLI profile that was undocumented in our release notes. As you may be aware, Guild Wars 2 is heavily CPU-bound, and on Kepler GPUs this may result in negative SLI scaling (a lower frame rate when playing with SLI enabled).

At this time we can also confirm that the Ambient Occlusion profile added to the game yesterday can result in certain pieces of terrain becoming transparent. If you experience this issue, simply turn off Ambient Occlusion in the Guild Wars 2 NVIDIA Control Panel profile."

Did you BOTHER to click the link, Cbuzz? There, I copy and pasted the relevant portion for you.

Ravennus.5720:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/nvidia-geforce-306-02-beta-drivers-released/

“August 28th Update: We can confirm that the GeForce 306.02 beta drivers feature a Guild Wars 2 SLI profile that was undocumented in our release notes. As you may be aware, Guild Wars 2 is heavily CPU-bound, and on Kepler GPUs this may result in negative SLI scaling (a lower frame rate when playing with SLI enabled).

At this time we can also confirm that the Ambient Occlusion profile added to the game yesterday can result in certain pieces of terrain becoming transparent. If you experience this issue, simply turn off Ambient Occlusion in the Guild Wars 2 NVIDIA Control Panel profile."

Did you BOTHER to click the link, Cbuzz? There, I copy and pasted the relevant portion for you.

Sure did & they are saying if you’ve got an average cpu your going to get poor SLi scaling. Which is pretty obvious anyway & this doesn’t occur just in GW2. Doesn’t really look like an issue to me? Did you see my youtube video? I’ll say it again, just for you… SLI IS FKING WORKING..

Hope this helps…

Thanks Ravennus.

Believe me, I spent an unhealthy amount of time trying everything I could think of in nvidia inspector and control panel trying to get some better scaling. No luck.

A nvidia rep over at Guru3D suggested a CPU OC but I’m already running at 4.7GHZ…. Can’t really do anymore.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4403079&postcount=442

Cbuzz, what’s your CPU running at? Lots of people are having these issues btw. It’s posted all over the comment section on that link I posted.

Varna.5162:

Thanks Ravennus.

Believe me, I spent an unhealthy amount of time trying everything I could think of in nvidia inspector and control panel trying to get some better scaling. No luck.

A nvidia rep over at Guru3D suggested a CPU OC but I’m already running at 4.7GHZ…. Can’t really do anymore.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=4403079&postcount=442

Cbuzz, what’s your CPU running at? Lots of people are having these issues btw. It’s posted all over the comment section on that link I posted.

5GHz…… Was a pretty straight forward install/play. Did not tweak/touch anything in drivers or Nvinspector.

I’m about to test TRi Sli. See how that goes.

That’s a pretty nice overclock, though gaming applications probably don’t benefit as much going that high. 4.5-4.7GHZ is a nice spot in terms of performance and heat. I’ve taken my i5-2500k as high as 4.9GHZ but it doesn’t make a difference in GW2. SLI usage is still only roughly equivalent to a single GPU.

I get the same performance in the Norm area (though my usage is never above 50/50). Try the Charr area… that harpy event with the mortar fire is really brutal on frame-rate.

Anyhow, you are very fortunate if it is indeed working for you. It’s obvious not for a lot of people, plenty of them with killer CPUs and great OC’s. Who knows, when a proper driver set is released you might notice improvements yourself.

Varna.5162:

That’s a pretty nice overclock, though gaming applications probably don’t benefit as much going that high. 4.5-4.7GHZ is a nice spot in terms of performance and heat. I’ve taken my i5-2500k as high as 4.9GHZ but it doesn’t make a difference in GW2. SLI usage is still only roughly equivalent to a single GPU.

I get the same performance in the Norm area (though my usage is never above 50/50). Try the Charr area… that harpy event with the mortar fire is really brutal on frame-rate.

Anyhow, you are very fortunate if it is indeed working for you. It’s obvious not for a lot of people, plenty of them with killer CPUs and great OC’s. Who knows, when a proper driver set is released you might notice improvements yourself.

I haven’t even left the starting area’s yet heh heh, still new to GW2. I’ll get there eventually.

While I’m not to sure why your not seeing a big improvement with SLi, I can definitely assure you running the game truly maxed out including SuperSampling ect, with a single card my FPS almost half.

Tri Sli confirmed working. Not getting 100% gpu scaling but it’s still working & getting a hefty FPS increase enabling tri SLi.

Pretty decent fps truly maxed @ 2560×1600 with 3 x GTX280 1Gb cards. Vids shortly.

Edit:
TRI SLi Enabled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrnOwogy9vs

TRI SLi Disabled:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJkUj2-rHcE

Nice. The problem seems to be mainly with kepler cards though (that is, everyone except you for whatever reason haha).

I had a 580GTX SLI system before I made the upgrade to 690GTX and that was working just fine during the BWE and stress test.

My GTX 690 scales between 50% to 90% usage on both GPU’s using a 4.5GHz i5, but the FPS is far from perfect. I noticed that turning shadows off reduces the camera fps jitter/dips but looks really bad. fog is a major fps killer and that’s the only time when both my GPU’s are nearly maxed out (and sometimes looking over big landscapes).

I’ve also noticed some SLi-specific bugs in the interface during character creation (the slashy artwork behind words will flicker) and also the player portraits in party frames (flickers and flashes like crazy sometimes.)

The game really looks truly astonishing, but come on, even a $1000 GPU and 4.5GHz CPU struggling to run it?? there has to be some ways for ANet to optimize the engine and offload more work to GPU.

Do those of you who claim to be utilizing SLI run a GPU monitor?

My EVGA Precision Monitor shows 99% usage from one of my 570’s, but 10% usage on the other. I’ve never seen it go above 20% usage on the second card.

Seeing how I get 150 fps in some spots, pretty sure SLI is working for me (dual GTX 670 cards.)

But all my efforts to understand low fps in some areas make me think CPU bottlenecking is a likely answer to low fps. Not only does the GPU show a low load, where one of the CPU cores shows a high load, I also improved fps by 20 fps by fixing an issue today where the cores where not throttling up to 4..2 Ghz on my i7 3770.

I would say the game is GPU limited in some situations, CPU limited in others based on my monitoring tools and observations.

As to why the game seems so CPU limited, I could not say. I work on packet capture software, not 3D games

I see many of you have some issues with the game. Here’s my PC configuration: Q9550 2.83GHZ CPU, 8GB RAM, 64bit WIN7, 2x 470GTX and one GT9800 for Physx – result? A stable gameplay at 60fps+ but there are times when it dropps to 12 or 15… I just live with that and enjoy the game

Does SLI in GW2 “work”?

First and foremost users need to understand when and how SLI/CF might benefit them.

In a “perfect world” if your rig is currently GPU bound (IE: there is not enough GPU performance to render the current image quality/resolution setting) and are getting low FPS with 100% GPU utilization adding an additional GPU will perfectly split the GPU load between the two (or more) GPU’s therefore creating a higher FPS (up to the point where the application becomes CPU bound).

The #1 thing to remember is that we don’t live in a perfect world.

Much like anything else an additional GPU does not give you free 100% more performance, there always is ‘overhead’ involved. The GPU utilization is never perfectly split and the performance gains are never 100%.

So in the ‘real world’ when running GW2 on a single GTX570 with a image quality/resolution to get 100% GPU utilization enabling SLI yields me 60-70% load on both GPU’s.

The #1 thing this provides me is a quieter living room as the GPU fans are not spinning at 100% in attempts to cool my GPU. #2 It provides a performance “cushion” since both GPU’s are not operating at maximum utilization.

FYI: no difference in performance was noted with sub 3xx.xx drivers and the Anet/Nvidia recommended drivers. SLI works just as well on my rig.

Since GW2 is “CPU bound” the single most important performance quality a gaming rig can have is the “single thread performance” of the CPU.

Crossfire works amazingly well with me. I am running two 4890’s and I get almost double the performance with it enabled. Just the other day I forgot to enable CF before playing and I immediately noticed the difference. GW2 is the only game that I get noticeably better performance with it enabled. All other games it is a stuttery mess.