Guild Wars 2

I’m running an i7-2600k with a GTX 650. If I want to maximize my performance gains in WvW, should I upgrade my CPU or my video card? I’m not sure if WvW is CPU bound or not. Thanks!

Scarlet.1937:

I’m running an i7-2600k with a GTX 650. If I want to maximize my performance gains in WvW, should I upgrade my CPU or my video card? I’m not sure if WvW is CPU bound or not. Thanks!

WvW is CPU bound in situations where there are a bunch of people around. Check your GPU usage during a fight and watch the GPU usage drop as well as your frame rate drop. The CPU can’t feed data fast enough to the GPU to produce enough frames for a smooth FPS.

With that said though, you won’t get too much more FPS, maybe 20% if you move to Haswell, more than what you get right now, so if you have 30, you’ll likely get 33-36. It really isn’t worth upgrading from Sandy Bridge. Overclock your processor and you’ll see better results.

It should also be mentioned that everyone experiences low FPS in large WvW battles, there isn’t a consumer grade computer than can do large WvW battles and make it look good (60 FPS) at the same time.

What type of cooling are you using for that 2600k? Is it already OC’d?
As Ilithis stated you won’t get much of an improvement really if you go to Haswell
There is a patch coming with particle effect sliders and I really hope that this helps some people with fps issues, especially in WvW.