Guild Wars 2

Hi all. I’ve been having performance problems with GW2 for some time, but today I encountered a problem that has made the game completely unplayable for me.

Until now, my biggest problem with the game was lag. The game would mostly play smoothly, but sometimes, most often during combat, the game would lag or even freeze entirely, before returning to the normal FPS rate a few seconds later. This was sometimes annoying as it led to me dying when I couldn’t react in combat, but I tolerated it. I would also sometimes suffer with visual artifacts. I have disabled Vsync and anti-aliasing, to no effect.

Today, in the middle of play, my game dropped to a constant 2-3 FPS and did not recover. I had not changed any of the settings, either in game or on my computer. I am completely at a loss as to what caused this problem. I have tested my game with Core-Temp and do not believe overheating to be the cause. I noticed that viewing the game while tabbed out in Windows 10 showed me a perfect smooth framerate, but while tabbed in, it remained at 2-3 FPS.

My specs are as follows:

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K @ 3.30GHz
RAM: 8GB
System Type: 64-bit

What is your screen resolution and do you remember your typical fps?

Does changing the game into full screen windowed, or a window change anything?

My screen resolution is 1920×1080. I have been playing in Windowed Fullscreen, I’ll see if playing in fullscreen helps.

Playing in fullscreen appears to improve my performance, but I’m still experiencing artifacts.

i have the same problem every update, sometimes it resolves itself by magic other times i give up and go play other game.. tried every possible fix already (drivers, deleting app data, windowed, run at full priority on task manager etc etc etc) nothing worked so far
the problem only occours in gw2, i play Black Desert wich is waaaay better in graphics and animation and textures, waaay more detailed and even so run smooth on large scale battles in open world there (larger zergs than wvw) and gw2 with his playstation 2 graphics/anim/text runs way worst even in small scale wvw.. totally needs better script or at least a fix for this issue

I seem to get tons of crashes from gw2 every time a new HOT map comes out, and tons of people start playing the game again. Likely has something to do with their servers not being able to handle the higher load of players online.

RAB.7682:

I seem to get tons of crashes from gw2 every time a new HOT map comes out, and tons of people start playing the game again. Likely has something to do with their servers not being able to handle the higher load of players online.

It’s more likely that a client crash is related to local issues on your computer, than the server — which would simply result in the client reporting that it lost communication, and everyone on the server falling off.

Using a 32-bit client is known to have memory management issues that can lead to crashes when there are a large number of active players. Check you are using the 64-bit client.

Also take a look at this thread having similar trouble: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Sudden-FPS-Drop-5/6494149

SlippyCheeze.5483:

RAB.7682:

I seem to get tons of crashes from gw2 every time a new HOT map comes out, and tons of people start playing the game again. Likely has something to do with their servers not being able to handle the higher load of players online.

It’s more likely that a client crash is related to local issues on your computer, than the server — which would simply result in the client reporting that it lost communication, and everyone on the server falling off.

Using a 32-bit client is known to have memory management issues that can lead to crashes when there are a large number of active players. Check you are using the 64-bit client.

It automatically updates to the 64-bit version if possible, so I don’t think that’s the issue. If running a 32-bit system, the only solution would be to get a 64-bit OS and probably more Ram. And that pretty much only helps a computer with exactly 4 gb of ram since 64-bit Windows itself takes up more memory.

Though I’d imagine a computer still running a 32-bit system (and thus <= 4gb of ram) is probably quite dated at this point and I am not sure if people would want to spend the effort on upgrading such a computer or even reinstalling everything and just leaving it as is until it dies. For example, some motherboards may not even support more than 4gb of ram, and then when that happens, you might as well just scrap everything.

That kind of crash by lack of memory are very specific and obvious. Crash.dmp will show a OOM error. On my old computer with only a puny 2 gb , the crashes wouldn’t happen anywhere outside of WvW after a long while. So from experience, I didn’t really think it was worth changing Windows to 64 bit on a low memory system. (And yes, I tried— the crashes will go away but the lag got much worse. So it was deciding between the infrequent crash or an unplayable game.)

tl;dr The real solution is to get a 64-bit OS with more than 4 gb. (Though a 64-bit OS with 4 gb of Ram is possible such as on a laptop I have, I think that’s only a temporary solution and it will only get worse as time goes on.)

I have a 64-bit system with 8gig of RAM, so I don’t think that’s the problem.
Playing in fullscreen, windowed fullscreen, or windowed makes absolutely no difference to my gameplay. I’m still experiencing lag and artifacts. I’ve also tried turning on Win8 compatibility and running the game as an administrator. No difference.

I also had an issue after the last patch where the frame rate would stop briefly when moving the camera passed certain points on various maps. Repeatable on any settings, etc. I performed the Local.dat delete and cache removal and all is back to its normal, smooth self. Yay!

I decided to log into the game, save my settings, then backup my Local.dat to my Documents directory and I wrote a Windows batch file to clean the GW2 cache and replace the Local.dat with my backup every time I launch the game. Here is it is fyi:

REM Clearing Guild Wars 2 cache…
cd temp
for /f “delims=” %i in (‘dir /a:d /s /b gw2cache*’) do rd /s /q "%i"

REM Removing dat file…
cd “C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2”
del Local.dat

REM Replacing dat file with the backed up verison…
cd “C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2”
copy “C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Local.dat” “C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2\”

REM Running the game and exiting…
start "" “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2-64.exe”
—-
Basic steps to use it are (Google to fill in any of your knowledge gaps),
1. Delete all the files in C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2
2. Run the game, change your graphics settings to the way you like, exit the game.
3. Copy your new Local.dat file to C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Local.dat
4. Make a new batch file and paste the above into it.
5. Change MYUSERNAME to your Windows user name.
6. Change the path to the GW2 program in the start "" “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\Gw2-64.exe” line to where GW2 is on your system.
7. Make a shortcut to the batch file on your desktop, right click it, and change the icon to the GW2 icon (browse to where GW2 is installed and pick it).

Windows 10 64Bit Build 1607
AMD Fx-8320 @ 4.2GHz
AMD MSI R9 270 Overclocked
8GB DDR2 2133MHz RAM
SK Hynix HFS250G32TND-N1A2A 250GB SSD
Samsung 20" 1600×900

Using 64Bit client at native resolution. Game looks and runs great!

Do you play any other games? I’m concerned about visual artifacts and the FPS. I’m worried you might have hardware going; likely GPU. You may want to check the fan on the GPU.

Visual artifacts, in the form of white dots shimmering on the edges of 3D objjects when moving the camera are a sign that the RAM on your video card is either overheating or is faulty. Blocky colored artifacts anywhere on the screen can also be caused by faulty video card RAM, they can also be induced by driver issues and faulty system RAM or motherboard chipset issues (on older systems that have a front side bus). A power supply that isn’t able to provide steady voltage or current will also cause issues like visual artifacts, system lockups, and hard reboots.

So, if you have artifacts the first thing to do is blow the dust out of the heatsink/fan of your GPU. Next, make sure it’s seated properly. Next, dial back your CPU over clock to default speed, particularly any motherboard bus speed settings, as they can cause visual artifacts too. If setting the CPU clock speed to normal fixes the issue, then bump it up a bit a time until the issue comes back, then knock it down one level below – that’s the max your system can handle. If you still have visual artifacts, try a different driver version. If the problem still persists, try any other video card in the system. If the replacement video card is OK, then your main one is broken. If the replacement video card also has artifacts, try a clean Windows 7/XP/8/10 install with the correct drivers on a test hard drive (if available. no need to activate Windows for testing). If the fresh Windows install works fine in GW2, then the problem is driver related, but if it too has artifacts then either your power supply or motherboard are the cause of the problem. Most often it is the power supply, especially if it was cheap in the first place and it’s now 3+ years old and has never had the dust blown out of it (even more especially if you are a smoker, because that makes dust stick to the heat sinks and capacitors like crazy and shortens their life considerably).