Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I seem to be having an issue with my GPU.

Currently my system specs are as follows:

i7 920 OC’d @ 4.0 ghz
12GB DD3 Ram
Gigabyte WF 7950 OC’d to 1150 core/1575 memory
650W Corsair PSU
256GB SSD Samsung 830

What seems to be happening is as I’m playing GW2, I notice a huge decrease in FPS. From 80+ down to on average about 30. So I tried to find the problem and then found out that my GPU is downclocking to 500 core during gameplay.

What is causing this?

I can run Uningine Heaven 3.0 and then my GPU will clock back to 1150/1575 without issue and it is stable.

I’ll load GW2 after running Heaven and then the clocks will be at 1150/1575 but then downclock back to 500 after a while.

I’m not sure if a thread has been created on this or not, but I’m hoping someone can help.

Thank you.

You could always check the temperatures while playing the game to see if your card reaches critical values and because of that starts to downclock. Another thing would be to check if there are any energy saving mechanisms in place that might cause that phenomenon that you are experiencing. I sadly don’t have any experience with AMD cards but NVidia has a power management feature in the driver options that can be either set to ‘Adaptive’ or ‘Prefer Maximum Performance’, maybe AMD cards have something similar to that? Aside from that, maybe trying to update the drivers to a newer/older version could help, but as I’ve established before, I have no experience what so ever with AMD cards, so I’m not really qualified to talk about that kind of stuff.

Maybe someone else has some better ideas or overall is just more knowledgeable in that regard, but thats all I can think of right now.

Good luck!

Its probably downclocking becouse its usuage isnt very high. And the usuage probably isnt very high becouse its being held back by your CPU.

Check you ingame usage of your CPU and GPU, and also note your FPS and location/activity. Once you have ntoed those down also try changing your graphics settings to as high as you can go ..supersamplin and all (if u havnt alreayd done so) and see if that makes any difference. Get back to us on that and we can see whats going on

Check both your GPU’s power configuration and your systems power configuration, make sure both are set to the equivalent of “high performance” instead of something like “power saver” or “balanced”.

Also, make sure your BIOS and driver are up to date.

Well, to get geeky….

I’m running the latest version of CCC, 12.10. 12.11 is in beta 8 currently, and I did try that but what ended up happening was I had some horrible flickering on my monitor in a 2d and 3d state so I had to restore my system to a previous restore point (Even after deleting and reinstalling 12.10, downloaded the drivers fresh from the website, no go.)

All bios and drivers are up to date as well. I play BF3 at ultra also and do not experience the same issue.

In regards to the temperatures, my 7950 peaks at about 58*C and my CPU cores under load are around 55*C. The windforce cooling on my 7950 is by far the best aftermarket cooler and I have a Noctua DH14 on my CPU, so heat isn’t an issue.

In regards to what someone said about “and the usage probably isnt very high because its being held back by your CPU.”

Are you saying that my cpu is not up to par? I couldn’t take you seriously if you are, but my apologies if you’re meaning the CPU is so overkill that it’s handling all the processing and leaving nothing for the GPU. I believe it’s the latter. Although, I have a hard time understanding that my GPU decides it’s not doing enough work that it clocks itself to a very low downclock.

If it were some kind of system setting, I’d be having this issue across my entire system but it seems to just be GW2. Even SC2 will stay up to 1150/1575.

I was hoping this was a known bug to feel better about it

Is the GPU usage staying consistently low after it drops for the first time, or does it hit (near-)100% again if you go back to the character select screen or something like that?

Because that screen is one of the few things in the game that probably isn’t choking on the engine’s poor handling of tons of stuff happening at once

If the GPU usage peaks again at the character select screen, the engine’s probably just choking during normal gameplay and can’t tell the GPU what to do fast enough.

Where/when are you actually noticing the dips in FPS to 30 from 80?

GW2 is very CPU-Bound atm. In places like WvWvW with large battles basically all currently available consumer level CPU will start to struggle. A Heavily overclocked 2nd/3rd gen core i5/i7 would still occasionally dip down to to 30fps. (Q4-9 for details)

Try running HwINFO or MSI Afterburner. Setup monitor graphs for FPS, CPU, GPU usage/clock. Line up the graphs and look at what happens when it records dips in FPS. Might give clues as to what is happening.

You can also try AMD Catalyst Overdrive features to set the clock speed etc.

I have had GPU-Z and HwINFO running whenever I’m running the game to see if there’s any clues and no go.

It goes from an 1150/1575 clock down to a 500 core/150 memory clock. At the exact time it happened my GPU was at 67*C with VRM temperatures at 69-70*C. I know this since I was just playing and the screen blacked out and then I noticed the FPS decrease. I even bumped the settings to supersample under render and ultra in shadows. I was getting 85+ and then after it downclocked I’m getting 22ish.

Also, I use MSI Afterburner to OC. It happened a second time just now.

disable AMD PowerTune

GW2 is very CPU intensive rather than GPU intensive. A 920 is more than OK and when they optimise the game more to rely more on GPU hardware your GPU will get more of a workout. My O/C 7850 exhibits the same performance cycle as your 7950. My CPU is a C2Q9550s and is about 70-75% utilised the whole time.

I am indeed saying your CPU maybe the problem .. Your CPU is NOT overkill for GW2. Even 3rd generation i5 and i7’s OC to 4.5ghz will cause slowdown in WvW battles and large PVE events.

Your cpu cooling is fine i agree. And your GPU cooling at its stock settings is also fine. However if you are OC’ing your gpu, try removing the OC. It is possible that GW2 is causing problems with your OC.

Also where exactly ingame are you getting these FPS drops ?

My apologies then for thinking that my CPU was fine.

In regards to where the fps drop is happening, it’s happening at any time. I can be questing with no visible soul around me and then the screen will flash black then revert back to GW2 but at the decreased FPS rate. At this instant I check and my GPU downclocked to 500 core / 150 memory. All temperatures were way under a possible heat issue. I’m going to try to not overclock the card although I did try it last night but this was after I had already overclocked it.

Based on the description of the problem, you either have heat issues or your PSU is taxed . I had very similar problem after a power spike killed my UPS and weakened my PSU. Replaced the PSU and problems went away. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Video-Card-performance-Issues-caused-by-weak-PSU/first#post670547 – greater detail of that problem.

Hmm in that case going by where its happening .. It is highly likely it is NOT your cpu

it does sound like ether a driver issue or possibly a PSU issue.

If removing your OC doesnt work then i next sugest you try different older graphics drivers. Since the screen going black then back again with lower performance and downclock could mean the drivers are crashing then restarting and not identifiing GW2 as a program requiring a higher clock frequency untill you restart GW2.

Hi Caped Crusader.6148

The issue you are describing reminds me of one with Nvidia cards. Both AMD and Nvidia have “adaptive power” modes (I believe AMD’s is named PowerTune). These modes reduces power and underclock the graphics cards when the driver detects very little need for the GPU to be running at full performance. If a game doesn’t use much of the GPU at certain points in a game, there could be fluctuations in the adaptive power driver. It just so happens that there are many players on these forums currently experiencing a bug in the game that for whatever reason seems to drop GPU usage.

If you were experiencing this problem then the Adaptive Power technology could downclock the graphics card and then when your game needs more performance its suddenly not there, in turn then affecting your overall FPS.

The simplest way to prevent this happening on the Nvidia side was to create an Application profile in the graphics driver for guild wars 2 so that when GW2.exe was running the graphics card would run in full performance mode rather than adaptive performance mode.

Perhaps the same can be done for AMD graphics cards also. I know AMD have “Catalyst Application Profiles” so you might want to make sure you have the latest version of those or if you can, manually create an Application Profile for GW2.exe.

Good luck,

Nitro

To give you an idea of temperatures, I played a 30 minute match on Battlefield 3 at maxed everything (Ultra, 8x MSAA, etc.) GPU max temperature was 67*C, CPU temperature was 50*C, core temps were 67, 64, 65, 64. Vcore was at max 1.3V with a 1.28 average. GPU vcore was 1.186V at max. Everything ran smooth and I was getting 60+ fps throughout the whole match. So I’ll rule out PSU and heat.

It’s something to do with GW2 and I believe what Nitro is saying about the game downclocking the card. I’m not familiar with setting a custom profile on CCC though.

Hi Caped Crusader.6148,

I did a quick google search to find out how AMD PowerTune works. I personally have never owned a ATi/AMD Graphics card before so I cannot give you a direct answer to your issue. My search stumbled upon this website: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4061/amds-radeon-hd-6970-radeon-hd-6950/9

The review/guide was written in 2010 so the information provided there may now be out of date, However I hope it does help you.

According to the guide PowerTune cannot be turned completely off, However its Limits for activation can be increased higher than the ATX standard, simply meaning it prevents it activating until it reaches an unreachable limit.

Good Luck

Nitro.

Well after running GW2 at stock levels on my 7950, no dip in FPS ever occurred. So there’s probably some type of driver incompatibility going on between the card and GW2. GW2 isn’t very GPU exhausting, so I’m happy at least knowing that at stock my card will perform. Though I do want that little extra oomph

Hopefully the devs see this issue and can address it.

If removing the OC worked it was likely just a unstable OC. Not all games and stability testing programs will react the same to a OC.

Go back your or OC, turn it down a notch or up the voltage a tad and see how it goes. GL