Guild Wars 2

I experienced something interesting the other evening that I’d like to share with everyone.

I have recently been getting headaches because my fps (frames per second – displayed to me using FRAPS v3.5.9) in Guild Wars 2 has been dropping so low – in general PvE and in WvW. So I opened Graphics settings and selected “Best Performance” preset. I made a few changes after that (such as switching to “Native” Render Sampling) but nothing drastic. Note: if I select the “Auto-Detect” preset on my PC, GW2 tends to set nearly everything at maximum, so I regard my system as quite capable (see bottom of message for my specs.)

A while later, I was playing on Eternal Battlegrounds and was within Stonemist Castle. Even tho I was in a small corridor with no visible activity (with my GPU rendering a scene that should be quite basic), my fps became very very low (around 10 fps). A moment, I noticed the orange ‘crossed swords’ icon on the map near me and then a mass zerg of enemy invaders rushed into the castle and destroyed us.

My conclusion for this is that fps in GW2 seems to be affected by network lag/congestion. As an avid online gamer since the QuakeWorld days and also as a computer programmer, I do not think that graphical fps and network latency/throughput should be tied together like this in a well designed game engine. My computer’s ability to render me smoothly walking through a basic quiet corridor should not be affected by the presence of enemy foes, especially not when they are not visible to or interacting with me in any way.

You might argue that my fps cannot be high if the network is congested in general play because I need to receive updates from the server to know where other players, NPCs etc have moved to. Well, this is why, back in the days of 33.6kbps modems, QuakeWorld introduced sophisticated prediction algorithms. Admittedly, when the lag/latency got really bad, this would result in players ‘teleporting’ around unpredictably as the algorithms kept getting it wrong and being corrected. But the fps remained high!

Whether the lag/congestion is down to my connection (broadband, but hardly anything great) or down to ArenaNet’s servers is unknown. I guess the only way for me to find out is to upgrade to faster broadband which I might actually do in the near future as I may be moving home soon. I’ll keep you updated if I do.

But maybe the servers themselves are struggling? Perhaps removal of culling has put a heavy load on them? Or perhaps the recent tendancy for people to ‘zerg’ in PvE (e.g. invasion events, champion trains) has exposed an inherent weakness. Maybe both of these things.

Within Hall of Monuments, on maximum detail settings and with vertical sync off, I get 80-100fps!

Anyway, that’s just some food for thought. I don’t want this to be a moaning, complaining thread because I love this game and play it a lot. I just hope we can get to the bottom of the fps issues that a lot of people seem to be having.

Thanks all,
Ben

PS: I have in the past commented that it would be nice if ArenaNet could implement a connection monitor dot like the one seen in Guild Wars 1. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Ping-monitor/first I still think this would be a good idea.

My PC Specs
Processor: Intel Core i7-860 (Lynnfield) @ 2.80GHz (quad core)
RAM: 6GB DDR3 666Mhz (3 x PC3-10700)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Hard Disk 1: Corsair Force 3 SSD (60GB) — Windows 7 and GW2 installed here
Hard Disk 2: Western Digital Caviar (320GB)

Broadband: ADSL, 6307kbps up 1015kbps down (readings from router web control panel) – Sky Broadband Unlimited

Anyone else experienced anything similar or got any comments/criticsms of my argument?

I can tell where the enemy are just looking for the drop in fps as I look around. Inside or out.

Is this the same thing?

I would say so, yeah. In my mind, my fps should really only drop if the scene gets more difficult for the graphics card to render (or the CPU is under really heavy load.)

It could just be two issues occurring at the same time.
A large zerg would cripple your FPS.
A large zerg would also increase the network load to your computer (and from the server) causing skill lag.

So you get lag and poor fps at the same time?

I’m still betting it’s the ArenaNet servers.

My frame rate also drops long before I see any action.
It´s like a zerg radar, actually.

Also, maybe just a coincidence:

When I was in Lions Arch once, I had a DC, but stayed in game for some reason,
resulting in lots of player models around me but a big frame rate increase.

Like from 20 up to 45+

Even though I was disconnected, the load on my system should still be the same, so I wondered about frame rate increase ever since.

It never happened again but because of this experience I wonder if somehow the servers impact the frame rate.

OptimusPrimo.9547:

It could just be two issues occurring at the same time.
A large zerg would cripple your FPS.
A large zerg would also increase the network load to your computer (and from the server) causing skill lag.

So you get lag and poor fps at the same time?

I’m still betting it’s the ArenaNet servers.

Yeah but the thing is that a large zerg shouldn’t cripple my FPS in a well designed game engine if I cannot see it. It shouldn’t really even increase my network load because I have no need to know about the locations of players that I cannot see/interact with but that can be a bit trickier.

Arkanis Drako.5169:

My frame rate also drops long before I see any action.
It´s like a zerg radar, actually.

Also, maybe just a coincidence:

When I was in Lions Arch once, I had a DC, but stayed in game for some reason,
resulting in lots of player models around me but a big frame rate increase.

Like from 20 up to 45+

Even though I was disconnected, the load on my system should still be the same, so I wondered about frame rate increase ever since.

It never happened again but because of this experience I wonder if somehow the servers impact the frame rate.

This is really really interesting. I might try to reproduce this situation myself. Thanks for sharing. :-)

Realize that there’s a delay between the server telling the client “Hey, you need to render a bajillion objects, like now”, and your client producing the models. Take the Fire Elemental for example. At least on my end, my framerate tanks right before the smoke effects begin (anywhere from ~1-3 seconds before), and then it slowly recoups. Same thing might be happening with you that it’s just that slight delay between registering the need to render all the models, and the actual rendering taking effect.

That aside, there’s a huge discrepancy between zones when it comes to strain on your framerate. The Grove or the Black Citadel are much more resource heavy than say, Hoelbrak or Divinity’s Reach (for some reason), so that may factor into the equation as well.

Well that’s the thing. The engine isn’t well designed so by simply having more people on the map causes more and more load on the game’s engine (which doesn’t scale with GPU power).

It’s like spawning 2000 cheese wedges in Skyrim and rolling them all off a mountain. Lag everywhere :|

We’re not too sure if things outside of the culling range are still processed or not.

Edit: I have a feeling I have no idea what you’re talking about in the first post lol.

ExTribble : I hadn’t thought of that – I suppose if a zerg of invaders is nearby, the game could be attempting to pre-render lots of stuff. But from what I remember, there was a good 10 seconds+ before the sudden fps reduction and the invaders appearing on my screen. And remember that almost all my graphics settings were on “Best Performance” so it shouldn’t even need to pre-render most of the player models anyway (because after pre-rendering a small number, it should give up and either show the rest as generic purple models or not show them at all.)

OptimusPrimo : It sounds like you do have an idea of what I’m talking about in my first post. The fundamental idea is that if the graphics card is capable of rendering the scene quickly enough (which I think mine should be, particularly on ‘Best Performance’ settings), network congestion should not prevent a decent frame rate. And I believe that with the current GW2 engine, it is preventing it.

This thread also makes for interesting reading: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Low-FPS-and-nVidia-employee-response/first

My fps has been super low the past few days. Unplayable even. Where as normally I’d get 50-60 fps in queensdale, now i’m lucky to get 20 when nothing’s going on. Changing to best performance does absolutely nothing for my fps. Guildie has reported similar problems.

I have been getting micro stuttering even in empty zones. My connection is fine but I think that it has something to do with the servers.

I managed to fix an issue related to low fps everywhere (I used to have 56-60 fps, then suddenly dropped to constant 28-30 after the scarlet patch). However, I still get the microstuttering and game becomes unplayable in wvw.

I stopped doing wvw since one month already, because it’s truly a nightmare. When our keep got invaded the last time, I was struggling behind a wall to heal: the healing skill glowed for like kitten without healing me and, after this huge lagspike, I found out that my character had got downed and rallied 3 times in the meanwhile. Tried last night if something changed but nothing; when zerg appears it takes me 20s to cast any skill, can’t tag anything at all and can’t even heal myself. Changing graphic settings doesn’t do a thing. I’m fine when roaming and only meet 1-2 enemies.

I just tried to reproduce Arkanis Drako’s disconnect in Lion’s Arch with the following results:

With my graphics settings on a ‘medium’ quality, pulling out my network cable whilst I was standing still in Lion’s Arch made my fps increase from 32-33fps to 36-37fps (before the “you have been disconnected from server” message appeared)

With my graphics settings on a ‘high’ quality, pulling out my network cable whilst I was standing still in Lion’s Arch did not seem to affect my fps (which was around 24-25fps).

There have been issues with Level 3 servers in Frankfurt which might affect all of our experiences. I reset my modem today though (after I rebooted my machine) and my microstuttering was gone.
As to the OP, network congestion would probably not be applicable to use in this situation.
I would think that it is Anet’s servers not being able to handle large zergs. Be it PvE or WvW.
There have been tons of reports of lost packets due to L3 as well as packet loss on Anet’s side. The amount of data being sent and received to the client is not causing congestion, rather it is the servers being slow and not delivering data at an acceptable rate. Of course this is conjecture since I am not in Anet’s data center(but I would love to be!).
Anet is rolling out some apparent performance updates on Tuesday in direct response to the issues with zergs. This will be the 1st of many updates in the next few months.
Lets just hope they get it right.