Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I’ve just received my new GPU, a HIS Radeon HD 7870, which replaced my old GTX460. The old card was having a lot of issues with GW2 and other games, crashing my PC on seemingly random occasions etc…

After installing my new GPU, i tried GW2 to see how it works on a modern card, and it ran at 20fps, using my old settings (for the old card). I tried playing with the settings a bit (even tho that makes no sense), downloading other drivers and completely removing and re-installing GW2. Nothing really helped – the game runs horribly, as if i have no GPU at all, with 20fps or so, no matter what settings or drivers i use.

It is not hardware related, since i’ve only changed my GPU and many other games run perfectly fine…

Does the tech-support have any ideas of what to do?

2 cents say your CPU is bottlenecking.

More information about your PC.
Current one you’ve provided is insufficient, might be so many things we could write you a book.
Wild guess? Your PSU is not powerful enough or too old and failing and/or you didnt turn off 2d/3d profiling for GW2 which might be detected wrongly as 2d app thus the drivers are limiting the GPU usage.

Return it. Get a GTX 660+
Few months ago I got an HD 7870. Performance was disappointing with GW2 to say the least. I know the benchmarks tests show great things for the 7870, but each game is diff.
Returned it, got a gtx660. Runs great.

@Cries of Sorrow: It is not, as i said in my OP, the game WAS running much better with the exact same setup except the new GPU.

@mohrad: Not much is relevant, since as i said the game was running fine before, with the occasional crash. Perf-wise it was fine. My PSU is not failing, since it’s 500w decent block, and i have 0 problems with any other game (as said in the OP). I will check about detecting it as 2d/3d. Any tips where exactly that option is?

Tvhatic: Not good news… But i can’t change it at the moment, the vendor i got it from is not that easy to work with, and i can’t get a good price on anything else at the moment anyway. I’ll have to hope it’s a software problem.

[edit] My specs, for information’s sake:

CPU: Intel i5 760
RAM: 8gb DDR3
GPU: NIS HD 7870 IceQX
PSU: 600w something-decent (forgot the brand)
Sound: Xonar DGX
screen,kbd,mouse etc… irrelevant

(don’t go saying "this or that is causing the slowdown, i had the exact same setup before and the game ran fine, it’s a problem related to the GPU and the way GW2 works with it)

Check your Catalyst Control Centre.
Here are my settings for HD6870 with witch i am bottlenecking it a bit, so it wont go madass skyrocket with FPS (easily hits 90FPS out of towns). I like my PC cool’n’quiet.

Edit: Don’t forget it might be driver itself not detecting GW2.exe properly. In which case you might want to add New Profile for it at the CCC panel.
First thing i’d fiddle with would be supersampling and AA inside the game. I remember seeing some posts claiming those 2 are not working well with Ati cards.
Edit2: Here, 10s Google solved similar case http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/938738-guild-wars-2/64383504 Might be a tip to check 3rd party software which might be not in love with your new card.

Settings didn’t help any… Will reinstall my Windows tonight, hopefully a fresh install will help.

Ok, just did a clean install of everything – absolutely no change.

Also, i tried setting EVERYTHING to low in the game, it barely made a change – it kept running at around 20fps. This is SO wrong… wtf?

I believe GW2 was optimized to use mostly CPU. I think it’s rather stupid. But it’s what they did. I recently upgraded to an HD 7950, and I run everything max with usually around 30fps. Still an improvement from my previous integrated 6550D, but rather disappointing since I run games with much better graphics such as Battlefield 3, Far Cru 3, Batman: Arkham City, Tomb Raider, etc, with 50-60+ FPS on their absolute max settings. I have no doubt this is caused by my CPU, but I feel like there should be some way for them to change this or make it player-optional.

You didn’t install the 13.8 beta drivers did you? Didn’t hear good things about them here.

Did you check with GPU-Z that the card recognizes it’s running in a x16 slot?

Other games are other games, coded differently optimized by graphic card companies because they know they will be used to benchmark their cards. GW2 isn’t one of those games.

Ok, i just solved the problem.

In short, it’s a kitten problem that happens by a combination of certain MBs and certain GPUs.

The problem itself is that the GPU runs at PCI-E settings lower than 16×. In my case it was locked at 4x, others report it dropping to 1×. This might not seem like much, but it’s extremely important for the data bandwidth and thus your FPS.

Now, for me the solution came from Blizzards forums (doh), apparently my GPU was acting like kitten with WoW… Yes, ridiculous, a game that old… Anyhow, all i finally did was switch the PCI-E slot on which the card is installed. I can’t say if the other slot is broken, clogged or it’s something else, but that did solve the problem. The card now properly runs at 16x PCI-E, my FPS got boosted to 60 stable on max settings in GW2.

There are other solutions and causes though, so perhaps other people affected by that bug will find these resources useful:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=522

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/53000-good-specs-low-fps/

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5586139538

Glad You’ve posted solution to the issue. Somebody else might really appreciate that in the future.

Well some motherboards have what looks like two x16 slots but only one is actually x16 while the other is only x4. The x16 one is the one usually closest to the CPU but you should check your MB manual to be sure.

Technically both the slots should be 16×...
But yeah, probably a faulty MB :/