Guild Wars 2

Summary : SLI scaling feels very poor now. What’s happened?
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Asus P8P67 Pro
i7 2600k at 4.4ghz
SLI Gigabyte GTX 970 g1
8GB DDR3 1600mhz
1000W PSU
2x 27" 1440p 120hz monitors
etc etc etc

In game settings are :

2560×1440
96hz
Unlimited /no frame limiter
Animation : High
Antialiasing : None
Environment : High
LOD Distance : Ultra
Reflections : Terrain and Sky
Textures : High
Render Sampling : Supersample
Shadows : High
Shaders : High
Postprocessing : High
Character Model Limit : Medium
Character Model Qualiter : Low
Ambient Occlusion : On
Best Texture Filtering : On
Depth Blur : On
Effect LOD : On
High-Res Character Textures : On
Light Adaption : On

When I started GW2 years ago, I had the same setup as above, sans the graphics cards which were SLI GTX 680s.

There were two spots I would stand to test performance and make adjustments.

-Ligacus Aquilo Waypoint, when you land in front of the portal, facing the Black Citadel

-Fort Marriner Waypoint, standing on the bridge facing the Grand Piazza (after the revamp, the point I used was at the end of the stone bridge just before entering the Piazza, facing the center tree)

Of course the game engine was different back then, some features did not exist. However Reflections (from Terrain & Sky to Full made a significant difference) as well as Render Sampling (from Native to Supersample) and Shadows (from High to Ultra).

Therefore the results of the comparison from GTX 680 to the GPUs used after will be skewed, though there is some merit in the findings.

At the above two mentioned waypoints, and the enabled settings (that were available at the time) the GTX 680s managed to clear 60fps as a minimum frame rate. Occasionally with a mass of people running past the screen this would dip just under.

Fast forward to 2014/2015, using the same hardware and settings above, except with Crossfire r9 290s. The AMD cards managed to do even worse, hovering around 40-50fps in those two teleport locations.

Come forward again to early 2016 using GTX 970 in SLI. Black Citadel is low 60s and Grand Piazza/Lion’s arch at high 70s.

To point out how strange this is. When landing at Black Citadel Ligacus Aquilo, if you move forward a few steps then turn around to your south east(?) facing the fog valley leading to Ligacus Notos, I am still getting no more than 80fps. Yet there’s really not much there, no drawn mobs, no landscape, no extensive backdrop. It’s just a mountain wall, some fog and that’s it.

I also noticed that I cannot peg 96fps in all out door areas. Even ones where I am completely alone and doing no activities, there seems to be some odd fluctuation in the frame rates, between 93 and 96 – often induced by a camera pan. I would expect it to be stuck at 96, given that removing the 96hz cap, sees the cards go well over 100fps.

Then when I encounter a few human players or small battles(or even crossing the Diessa Plateau and facing the windmill), it drops to high 80s out of combat.

GPU usage and CPU % usage seems to be fair, seeing all three push 50-60% at times where required.

I decided to try and make any bottlenecks more GPU oriented and force higher GPU usage by upping the resolution to 4k. While GPU activity increased by almost 25% (no doubt to manage the increased resolution output), frame rates only dropped ten to fifteen fps in most out door areas.

Next I disabled SLI and with a single card, my results were twenty fps less in all scenarios.

Additionally I moved render quality down to Native, and gained no performance in doing so.

Other things I’ve tried :

Using various SLI compatibility bits in Inspector, though none seem to make a difference.
Different SLI render modes (AFR 2 render mode is still the best for performance)
Removed Nvidia’s presetting for Ambient Occlusion
Disabled the following settings :

Ambient Occlusion
Best Texture Filtering
Depth Blur
Effect LOD
High-Res Character Textures
Light Adaption

Reducing quality of all normal settings.

I appreciate that after disabling many features/and lower settings, that some performance was gained, however we’re speaking to five or six frames.

The biggest improvement came from reducing the field of view amount. Moving somewhere to about 25% on the slider versus 60% was in excess of twenty fps.
And of course zooming to first person shaves another five fps at times.

It’s my opinion that SLI is not scalling well, less than 50%.

Admittedly these games are CPU intensive, but unless mistaken, that should not stop the GPU scaling from at least being more saturated. Especially considering that as the resolution rises, the system is more dependent on the GPU.

Players boast about running 1080p at 100+ frames on a single modern performance graphics card, where the CPU is more significant at the reduced resolution.

I toy with the idea of moving to a Skylake or even a Haswell (DC) platform, for MMO gaming. Everywhere I read though, it doesn’t seem like real world performance gets much better.

I am feeling frustrated that something is missing. I am not expecting maximum frames in large battles or PVP, though am disheartened it cannot peg 96fps outdoors in all areas.

I may just have to make a custom resolution around 85hz and then cap the framerate to match. It’ll still feel better than 60, though is disappointing.

Your processor is very outdated if you are expecting to get 80+ fps in all areas. I get 140-260fps in open areas with 970 x2 SLI

Hi Chase,

What settings/resolution are you using?

Goto those locations I listed, particularly Black Citadel and tell me what fps you get.

The fact that this game is cpu bottlenecked means as you get better gpus they’re being used less, since they still need to wait for the cpu to finish its work.

You can disable Reflections and shadows, and put Character limit to Low. These 3 settings are the most cpu ones, so you should try to minimize them.

Also, your SLI might be bottlenecked by pcie speed. When enabled, each gpu is running at 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwith as 3.0 x4. Pcie speed in gw2 matters a lot, I’ve test it, and 3.0 x4 was getting much less performance, specially in non cpu stressful areas, like underwater or open world pve.

The game doesn’t run well running 2 video cards disable SLI and you should see a big improvement in fps.

GW2 engine is horribly optimized. Its strictly cpu limited for the most part. Not only that, but the engine multithreaded and its dx9.

People are way too obsessed with fps.

Once again people seem to read a title and a last sentence, and nothing else.

Cable already addressed these points and nothing presented explains why on the SAME platform with BETTER graphics cards, the game is marginally improved and in some aspects arguably worse.

Aza.2105:

GW2 engine is horribly optimized. Its strictly cpu limited for the most part. Not only that, but the engine multithreaded and its dx9.

Feirlista Xv.1425:

The game doesn’t run well running 2 video cards disable SLI and you should see a big improvement in fps.

Ansau.7326:

The fact that this game is cpu bottlenecked means as you get better gpus they’re being used less, since they still need to wait for the cpu to finish its work.

You can disable Reflections and shadows, and put Character limit to Low. These 3 settings are the most cpu ones, so you should try to minimize them.

Also, your SLI might be bottlenecked by pcie speed. When enabled, each gpu is running at 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwith as 3.0 x4. Pcie speed in gw2 matters a lot, I’ve test it, and 3.0 x4 was getting much less performance, specially in non cpu stressful areas, like underwater or open world pve.

Quit regurgitating knee jerk responses.

Hollywood.2407:

Once again people seem to read a title and a last sentence, and nothing else.

Cable already addressed these points and nothing presented explains why on the SAME platform with BETTER graphics cards, the game is marginally improved and in some aspects arguably worse.

Quit regurgitating knee jerk responses.

We are all waiting your opinion about this matter.

What I’ve said makes perfect sense:
- He’s using settings very cpu taxing, which affect a lot the overall performance and minimize the impact of better gpu setup.
- If the game is cpu bottlenecked, getting a better gpu setup doesn’t improve things. You’re still cpu bottlenecked. SLI doesn’t scale that much because the same reason. As much gpus as you may have, they will still have to wait the cpu to render all his work. And if the computer keeps being cpu bottlenecked, a more powerful gpu setup will have less usage than the previous.
- With his cpu, each gpu is working on pcie 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwidth of 3.0 x4. Gw2 is very sensible about pcie speed.

Hollywood.2407:

Once again people seem to read a title and a last sentence, and nothing else.

Cable already addressed these points and nothing presented explains why on the SAME platform with BETTER graphics cards, the game is marginally improved and in some aspects arguably worse.

Quit regurgitating knee jerk responses.

We are all waiting your opinion about this matter.

What I’ve said makes perfect sense:
- He’s using settings very cpu taxing, which affect a lot the overall performance and minimize the impact of better gpu setup.
- If the game is cpu bottlenecked, getting a better gpu setup doesn’t improve things. You’re still cpu bottlenecked. SLI doesn’t scale that much because the same reason. As much gpus as you may have, they will still have to wait the cpu to render all his work. And if the computer keeps being cpu bottlenecked, a more powerful gpu setup will have less usage than the previous.
- With his cpu, each gpu is working on pcie 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwidth of 3.0 x4. Gw2 is very sensible about pcie speed.

Another story is you’re unable to understand it…

I will explain you why most of what you’ve said is wrong, as you don’t know how gw2 behaves (which isn’t the same to what most games do). First, bringing other games in this matter is clueless, you cannot extrapolate the things that happen there to gw2.

Gw2 has 2 main threads where all the calculations happen. The faster you can render them the better framerate you have. This is a purely cpu thing and the main way to get better performance in gw2 is to have better single core performance. This is specially important in cities and big scale fights, like WvW or world bosses, or the places he did the tests.
About graphics, the game doesn’t need that much gpu power. Using DX9, which is old and doesn’t have all the graphic features you could find in any modern game, any mid-end modern gpu will have enough raw power to handle gw2 at max settings.
But there’s another issue. DX9 doesn’t have multithreading for the gpu rendering thread. Having higher graphic settings will also stress more the cpu.

And here is where we can come to the conclusion that gpu power has little to do in this game, once you have reach the minimum needed, of course. That’s why SLI/Crossfire see so little benefit in this game. Is not they’re not well implemented, it’s because you cannot take advantage of them since they’re no longer the bottleneck.
But even at 4k they’re not a bottleneck. A single GTX 960 or r9 380 can handle this game at 4k at 35-45fps. So a 290Xfire or 970SLI, despite having 2.5-3 times more the gpu power, will see small improvements at best.

Talking about pcie speed: Yes, pcie speed matters in gw2. As the game does so many things in the cpu, they’ve to travel to the gpu to be rendered, so pcie is important. You can test on your own. Pcie 3.0 x16 and x8 are very similar, but you still find some improvement with x16.
Here are some tests I did last year:
- x16 had 110fps underwater, 70’s in empty map, 50’s in more heavy graphic situation and 23-24 in heavy cpu situation.
-x8 had 100 fps underwater, 60’s in empty map, 46 in more heavy graphic situation and 22-23 fps in heavy cpu situation.
- x4 had 77fps underwater, 45’s in empty map, 36 in more graphic situation and 20-21 in heavy cpu situation.
So yeah, my knowledge doesn’t come from forums, but in-game testing.

So now we go to OP tests. Respecting 680 sli, he got worse performance with 290 crossfire and a bit better with 970 sli.
290 xfire worse performance could be related to less polished drivers, or it could be pcie bandwidth related, as hawaii uses xdma xfire. In a game such gw2, where pcie bandwidth is used so much, xdma crossfire is limited, specially in his configuration where he uses 2.0 x8, which has the same bandwidth as 3.0 x4, clearlry not enough for Gw2.
About 970 sli, we go back to the point of cpu bottleneck. A single gx 680 is more than enough for Gw2, even at 1440p, hence 680 sli is overkill, hence 970 sli is ridiculous overkill. The game isn’t gpu intensive enough to push a 970 sli not even at 4k.

On the other side, he is cpu bottlenecked. Changing the resolution doesn’t free the cpu from its work. The cpu has to do the same work in 720p than in 4k, thus he sees so little changes despite the gpu configuration and resolution he uses.
The fact I pointed those settings is because they put a lot of work on the cpu. Regardless the graphic settings, resolution or gpu setup, the cpu will still have to do a lot of work and the game will be cpu bottlenecked. And a lot of work is keeping all cores of a 4690k oced to 4.6GHz to 75-90% of usage. That’s a lot of work, A LOT.
In the end, FoV got him such the biggest improvement. Reducing FoV removes part of the work from the cpu. Gw2 rendrs what you see in your screen. That’s why when you face a blob fight you get crap performance, but if you turn the camera you will get an instant fps boost and yet the fight is still happening on your back.

To conclude, there are multiple reason why SLI/Crossfire do not add meaningful advantages in Gw2:
- If you already have a more than enough gpu power to do the work to a point where the gpu is not the bottleneck, adding more gpu power will have little to no advantages. That’s also the reason why when he uses a single gpu he sees so little framerate drop. Such single gpu has already enough gpu power for this game.
- He is clearly cpu bottlenecked, and probably pcie too. Not only because his single core performance is quite average nowadays with such cpu and overclock, but also because the platform is old and he loses some of the performance here and there: Pcie speed, ram speed, memory latencies…
- The fact he uses very cpu stressful settings makes the benefits of multiple gpu setups even less visible. The cpu work doesn’t disappear, it’s still there despite the resolution or gpu setup used.

Conceding all these facts, the opinions of people in this thread are valid, and there’s no need to be so rude and presumptuous to say nothing but diminishing what others have said.
The changes and introduction of new graphic settings could be another reason. But if we pay more attention, they have only added SMAA, AO and light adaptation. These are not heavy graphic settings, even all together, they don’t affect more than 2-3fps. The other thing they did is to disable High res textures for low end cpu. How a texture setting is disabled by the quality of cpu? Because the understanding of all what I’ve said before. High res textures an put a lot of work in the rendering thread, punishing the cpu.

The problem is in the way you entered this thread and how you have reacted. I can understand all these is just too much for you, but at least make us the favour to stop diminishing others opinion.

For the OP, if you want to get higher framerate the best thing you can do is to move to a newer platform and get the best single core performance you can.