Guild Wars 2

Hi Guys,

As you may or may not have noticed, the game will throttle back to either 50 or 30 fps during loading screens, vistas and cut-scenes depending on the version of Microsoft Windows you’re running (7 or 8/8.1).

This is a game mechanic designed to reduce heat in your system however, for some of us who have adequate cooling and the grunt to run the game without issues it can present simply as an annoyance.

I’d like to present a working fix for this issue. Don’t attempt this unless you’re PC savvy and are comfortable with editing the Window’s registry. Incorrect entries may damage your Monitor. You just need to follow these steps:-

• For AMD and Nvidia users make sure your gaming control (Catalyst and Nvidia Control Center) settings have the following selected:- “Wait for Vertical Refresh” should be switched to “off,unless application specifies”.

• In the game ensure you have “Vertical Sync” selected in the graphical options panel.

• Run “regedit” as administrator.

• Head to the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE” folder and expand it.

• Find the “Software” folder and expand this.

• Find the “Microsoft” folder and expand this.

• Find the “Direct Draw” folder and right click on this.

• Select the option “New, DWORD (32-bit) Value” and name it ForceRefreshRate

• Right click on this and select “Modify”, then select “Decimal” Value and enter the number that represent’s your monitor’s refresh rate. For most people it would be 60.
  This number represents the refresh rate of your monitor =60 Hz. Once done click on “Ok”.

• For those users who are running a 64-bit version of Windows you also need to add this to the “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node” section. It’s in this same section that you just edited, just scroll down to you find the “Wow6432Node’” folder.

• Repeat the same steps by finding the “Microsoft” and “DirectDraw” folders.

• Select the option “New, DWORD (32-bit) Value” and name it ForceRefreshRate

• Right click on this and select “Modify”, then select “Decimal” Value and enter the number that represent’s your monitor’s refresh rate. For most people it would be 60.
  This number represents the refresh rate of your monitor =60 Hz. Once done click on “Ok”.

• Exit the registry.

Once you have completed these steps, reboot your PC and then play GW2 without any FPS throttling during loading screens, vistas and cut-scenes.

Enjoy !

I’ve heard about those registry entries but have never tried them – so I don’t know if it works.

Anyway, those key values should be in HEX:

3c = 60 Hz
4b = 75 Hz

Great tutorial, maybe you should add a warning that this affects other programs too, since this is a global setting not just for GW2.