Guild Wars 2

My PC specs:
i7 4790k @ 4.8GHz
GTX 760 (overclocked to 1254mhz)
8GB 1333mhz Ram

So my issue is that when there are many people on the screen like in world boss fights my GPU usage plummets down to around 60% and I get around 15-25fps. The first thought that comes to mind is that my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU, but how could that be possible with i7 4790k and its usage being around 50-60%? Is this the game’s fault, or is there something wrong with my rig?

Your CPU is bottlenecking your GPU. This game is super CPU dependent and only really takes advantage of a couple of cores, so your CPU and GPU usage both make sense.

think the technical architecture of the game design decisions for GW2 has been “get as many copies to run on our potential customers’ office laptops as possible” from the very beginning.

^That is, indeed, correct. Long before launch, the Devs stated they were working to allow the game to run on as many possible configurations of computers as possible.

I suggest turning the sampling rate down to native, for boss fights, instead of super sampling. I have the same CPU and GPU, but I have 2 of that card in SLI, and it does help. The 16 gig ram I have isn’t worth considering in this scenario.

My sampling rate has always been set to native.

Screenshot of your ingame settings?

Try,

• Character limit/quality on med/high

• Effect LOD checked

• Shadows on Med or high

• Reflection on Terrain and Sky

Those are the most CPU taxing settings.

There is not a single way in the world wwhere your cpu is bottle necking your GPU. your GPU is the bottleneck. the I7 4790K is ithin 10% in performance to the new 6600K Skylake that can run 2 × 980GTX without bottlenecking it.

You are going to laugh at me but stop your Overclock. put your cpu on stock then test. Just go with it and if it works i will link you to resources taht can prove OC is not good for your gaming fps

( I am too lazy to go look for them now )

Those are my settings, as you can see when there isn’t much going on the screen my GPU usage is around 99%, but when I start seeing more people it goes down.

Rynier.3629:

There is not a single way in the world wwhere your cpu is bottle necking your GPU. your GPU is the bottleneck.

False. GW2 will most certainly run into CPU issues before running into GPU issues, especially with a lot of people around.

Rynier.3629:

You are going to laugh at me but stop your Overclock. put your cpu on stock then test. Just go with it and if it works i will link you to resources taht can prove OC is not good for your gaming fps

Also completely false, and I’ve love to know the twisted logic behind this statement. If you’re in a CPU-bound situation, OCing your CPU will get you some nice gains in performance.

BloodWave.3075:

Those are my settings, as you can see when there isn’t much going on the screen my GPU usage is around 99%, but when I start seeing more people it goes down.

Seeing as you already have Rivatuner and MSI AB up and running. Use Rivatuner to set the FPS cap to 60. Unless you’re running a 144hz monitor.

Have you also been using it to monitor your GPU temps? I’m starting to lean towards thermal throttling.

Rynier.3629:

There is not a single way in the world wwhere your cpu is bottle necking your GPU. your GPU is the bottleneck.

In a perfect situation, that i7 has plenty of room for a 760 to stretch its legs.

Gw2 is not nearly a perfect situation. It’s limited by DX9 and basing a large portion of its draw calls(meshes) on one core/thread. The best CPUs on the market, as of writing this, will “bottleneck” a decent GPU (Nvidia 770/970 or AMD 280/380 and up).

Rynier.3629:

You are going to laugh at me but stop your Overclock.

i5 4690k OCed to 4.2ghz and an AMD r7 260x OCed to 1180/1675 and no problems here. I run the game on high/ultra(with my above mentioned exceptions) with 60fps in most areas. Overclocking is not always the problem.

Edit: That said, a 4.8ghz OC is very nice! Are you sure it’s absolutely stable though? Gw2 can be very good at pointing out things other games/programs/burn tests will miss. It doesn’t explain the gradual performance degradation though.

MrFayth.3546:

I’m starting to lean towards thermal throttling.

Not the case. My GPU temps are around 72C

Are you sure it’s absolutely stable though?

Seems stable to me. I don’t crash, shutdown or anything like that.

GW2 Game engine is not very well optimized, thus you will find it leeching your CPU/GPU power for baseless and useless background rendering to enhance game mechanics and objects rendering on your current screen. It has nothing to do with your machine and it is on Anet’s game engine. oh I laughed at the 4970K bottlenecking a 760gtx… Laughable… (Sarcasm). Nothing wrong with your PC.

MrFayth.3546:

Screenshot of your ingame settings?

Try,

• Character limit/quality on med/high

• Effect LOD checked

• Shadows on Med or high

• Reflection on Terrain and Sky

Those are the most CPU taxing settings.

Espec Character limit – Character Quality ! They’re the heaviest on cpu.Put those to Low to avoid crashes from happening in WvW/boss events where there’s 100 – 150+ people on your screen.

Fermi.2409:

Rynier.3629:

There is not a single way in the world wwhere your cpu is bottle necking your GPU. your GPU is the bottleneck.

False. GW2 will most certainly run into CPU issues before running into GPU issues, especially with a lot of people around.

Rynier.3629:

You are going to laugh at me but stop your Overclock. put your cpu on stock then test. Just go with it and if it works i will link you to resources taht can prove OC is not good for your gaming fps

Also completely false, and I’ve love to know the twisted logic behind this statement. If you’re in a CPU-bound situation, OCing your CPU will get you some nice gains in performance.

Ok so maybe look at this. 2 reputable becnhing sites showed that the highest overclock DOES NOT REALLY IMPROVE GAMING PERFORMANCE>. I even linked a video that shows pretty much the same thing.

On anand tech see how the 6700K 4.2GHz is the one that out scores the 4.8Ghz speed the most.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9533/intel-i7-6700k-overclocking-4-8-ghz/8

he also did one wit ha 4790K that had similar results.

And I said . That his CPU is not the bottleneck in his PC as some one stated. that cpu will run 3 x sli of his cards without an issue.
I wont post anything on here that I dont know bout. gaming performance for soem odd reason is not improving with an OC on the 4 and 6 series I7s.

Caedmon.6798:

Espec Character limit – Character Quality ! They’re the heaviest on cpu.Put those to Low to avoid crashes from happening in WvW/boss events where there’s 100 – 150+ people on your screen.

yeah, seems something wrong with the highest character texture, my game would just crash with me doing absolutely nothing, i.e. minimize the game and back… BOOM!!! “Windows cannot allocate enough memory to GW2.” WTF?! I can see my machine still got about 4GB of free memory before I minimized.

Rynier.3629:

Ok so maybe look at this. 2 reputable becnhing sites showed that the highest overclock DOES NOT REALLY IMPROVE GAMING PERFORMANCE>. I even linked a video that shows pretty much the same thing.

Another good example of CPU dependent game is Rome Total War 2, you will see a lot of ppl complaining about how the game is killing their CPU while their GPU arent doing much.

Rynier.3629:

Ok so maybe look at this. 2 reputable becnhing sites showed that the highest overclock DOES NOT REALLY IMPROVE GAMING PERFORMANCE>. I even linked a video that shows pretty much the same thing.

On anand tech see how the 6700K 4.2GHz is the one that out scores the 4.8Ghz speed the most.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9533/intel-i7-6700k-overclocking-4-8-ghz/8

Uhm..Did you even read the article? Overclocks did perform worse when using Integrated Graphics. Not exactly sure why but here’s a chart on the Conclusion page of the Anandtech review

And look at the Guru3D review of the 6700k

Improved performance across the board with a 4.8ghz OC, though not as much as I expected in Firestrike

Here’s another from Overclock3D showing higher performance in all aspects.

And I said . That his CPU is not the bottleneck in his PC as some one stated. that cpu will run 3 x sli of his cards without an issue.

Did you read what I posted? In this game the Single Thread Performace of his CPU will bottleneck his GPU. For reasons I outlined above.

Rynier.3629:

I wont post anything on here that I dont know bout.

That ship has sailed.

This is what I am talking about, look at the GPU usage. The spike in the middle is when I teleport to the location and after that, that’s the boss fight. And when it all ends, as people leave it starts climbing up to normal usage, as you can see in the second picture.

The problem with many CPU reviews using games is that they still run the games with all the graphic settings at 11, pretty much forcing most games to be GPU limited and therefore you can’t detect any difference in performance between different CPUs or the same one running at different speeds.

That’s why a proper test for CPUs in games is having them running with a very fast GPU with minimal graphic settings at a lower resolution, to take the GPU contribution out of the mix. But the argument goes “what does that prove, nobody is going to run a game on low at 720p on a GTX 980Ti” so an alternative is using a multi GPU setup. But I see fewer and fewer CPU reviews bother to show game tests with multiple GPUs. On the other hand “what does it prove” if you run a game so it’s always GPU bound regardless on CPU used, in a CPU review?

BloodWave.3075:

This is what I am talking about, look at the GPU usage. The spike in the middle is when I teleport to the location and after that, that’s the boss fight. And when it all ends, as people leave it starts climbing up to normal usage, as you can see in the second picture.

Your GPU utilization% is going to drop when your CPU gets heavy loaded for GW2. That is due to the fact there is 1 thread that controls EVERYTHING for this game and when that one thread is under heavy load (when there is more vector math going on, basically) the GPU must wait for the CPU to catch up.

This happens in WvW, World Bosses, Open areas with LOTS of players, and when lots of players are around you in combat.

It happens with the fastest CPU and it happens with the slowest CPU. Its perfectly normal for this to be happening, and its not going to change unless Anet redesigns the game engine from the ground up (not happening).

MrFayth.3546:

Rynier.3629:

Ok so maybe look at this. 2 reputable becnhing sites showed that the highest overclock DOES NOT REALLY IMPROVE GAMING PERFORMANCE>. I even linked a video that shows pretty much the same thing.

On anand tech see how the 6700K 4.2GHz is the one that out scores the 4.8Ghz speed the most.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9533/intel-i7-6700k-overclocking-4-8-ghz/8

Uhm..Did you even read the article? Overclocks did perform worse when using Integrated Graphics. Not exactly sure why but here’s a chart on the Conclusion page of the Anandtech review

And look at the Guru3D review of the 6700k

Improved performance across the board with a 4.8ghz OC, though not as much as I expected in Firestrike

Here’s another from Overclock3D showing higher performance in all aspects.

And I said . That his CPU is not the bottleneck in his PC as some one stated. that cpu will run 3 x sli of his cards without an issue.

Did you read what I posted? In this game the Single Thread Performace of his CPU will bottleneck his GPU. For reasons I outlined above.

Rynier.3629:

I wont post anything on here that I dont know bout.

That ship has sailed.

So we are at it again. Your own results shows a 0.5% vs 0.4% 4.4 to 4.6 Ghz proving the lower clocks out performed it. I did say game performance. When Firestrike tests physics a Higher clock will make some difference.

The " discrete you point out I saw but the bench clearly shows XXXGAMEXXX on 980 GTX strix. There is Zero chance in the world that integrated graphics scores 70+ Frames in GTa V .

If that is the case Intel would put AMD and Nvidia out of Business

Make sure the gpu is running at pcie 3.0 x16.

Ansau.7326:

Make sure the gpu is running at pcie 3.0 x16.

It is.

Try disabling Reflections, shadows and put Character model limit to medium. Also check Field of View in General Options (full reduces a lot the framerate).

What’s happening is in such crowded situations the cpu is so fulled with tons of calculations than both the cpu and the gpu have to wait them, so they “idle” and the result is lower usage.

To understand, here’s an example:
You need to complete tasks 1, 2, 3… Each task has subtasks. A and B are done in the cpu and C and D in the gpu.
In massive fights, subtask A takes 10s to be finished, while the rest take 5s. You cannot finish task 1 until all subtasks are done, so you end up with the gpu and part of the cpu having free time.
On the other hand, when you see gpu usage at 99% and cpu barely at 40-50%, is because subtasks A and B only need 2-3s to be finished and the gpu doesn’t have time to stop, when subtasks from task 1 are done, the ones from task 2 are ready to be rendered.

In conclusion, the game engine is not designed to support big scale fights with massive amount of people. It doesn’t cut things to render and calculate to have a better performance and some of the parts of the cpu end up being bombarded with the work from tons of players. We need to do it manually by reducing or disabling taxing settings.